“Future has saved music magazines Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog following the sudden demise of owners Team Rock just days before Christmas.
The publisher has also taken on the Blues online channel, part of the Team Rock website, and the Golden Gods events operation linked to Metal Hammer magazine.
The £800,000 deal has been struck with administrators FRP Advisory who were called in after Team Rock collapsed on 20 December, resulting in 80 staff being made redundant.
Future sold the titles to Team Rock for £10.2m in 2013.”
My loo reading is safe!
Baron Harkonnen says
Now that`s what I call good news. I subscribe to Prog magazine, hopefully it will be back in circulation soon.
Martin S says
I’m a Prog subscriber too. Sounds like the editor has been making positive comments on Facebook and so there is now cause for optimism.
Great piece of business by the new owners by the looks of things. (Sold it a few years back for 10 million and have got it back for less than 1 million.)
Dogbyte says
“It further reinforces our creation of a leading global specialist media platform with data at its heart, which we are monetising through diversified revenue streams.”
In other words they’re going to move it online and stick it behind a paywall whilst using the existing subscriber list to try to sell other Future products.
TrypF says
I’ve read somewhere today that Team Rock failed because they ignored the print editions and poured money into the online content, with very limited success. I’d wager there are still a lot of people like me who’d rather buy a print edition of Classic Rock than download it. Anyway, good to see something being done – let’s hope Fraser gets his job back (if he wants it, of course).
Bargepole says
Likewise with the radio station – axed a decent DAB service in favour of online only and then eventually a presenter free service.
molesworth says
This decade long rush to get online at the expense of print has been catastrophic. Nothing like the ad revenue they expected ever materialised – or ever will – and the horse has long since bolted from the paywall idea. Very few will pay for online content. There’s too much of it there for free.
Add to that the difficulty in reading long pieces online compared with print which makes paywalls even less attractive and you have an industry that sacrificed what was working to replace it with something that wouldn’t.
The upshot is less quality journalism across the board in whatever genre because a lot if it being done on the cheap because publishers can no longer afford to pay for the good stuff. And that was one of the downfalls of Prog for me – I stopped buying it not because I wasn’t interested in what they were covering, nor even because if the hefty cover price, but because too much of the writing wasn’t that great and there wasn’t enough depth in a lot of the interviews – trying to cover too many things at once.
All of that said, I do hope everything works out for the people who worked there and at the other titles because their hearts were in the right place.
timtunes says
Yes, I heard from a source that their digital strategy was their downfall…but how to make a success there???
I did find the way it interacted with FB clunky with multiple log-ins that often ended up without the article so one gave up. I’d like to know if the tie-in album & magazine promos worked for them – would seem a good way of monetizing the audience.
Kid Dynamite says
I think it was already behind a paywall, wasn’t it? You can probably work out how well that panned out for them.
Rigid Digit says
Thats not a bad bit of business there.
Flog it off for £10.2m and buy it back for £800k
£9.4m for doing f*** all – that is the sort of job I want
Bartleby says
It will have been a competitive auction. Albeit one with a somewhat reduced timeframe. All likely bidders will have been contacted. And all unlikely ones will have quickly found out who was handling the administration and registered their interest. The winner is usually that party that offers the most certainty, speed and cash, often in that order.
LesterTheNightfly says
I’m a Classic Rock subscriber and the latest edition arrived today.
Nothing in the editorial or news pages about them going into administration.
Fraser does a nice four page live report from the Anderson,Rabin and Wakeman American tour
Uncle Wheaty says
That is good news.
I subscribed as an online only person in August so looking forward to getting some content at last.