Billboard shrinks

By Emmanuel Legrand

There was a time when Billboard represented the ultimate reference in the music business.

It wasn’t a hit until it was in Billboard’s charts. It wasn’t a worthy story until it got the Billboard treatment.

If there was one trade publication that did merit to be called ‘the Bible’ it was Billboard. You read the magazine religiously. You needed you weekly doses of gospel. You became part of a cult. You were devoted to the colours in the logo.

And you weren’t part of the business if you weren’t in Billboard.

If you wrote for Billboard, you had made it. You were at the uppermost end of the trade. People in the biz at the highest level would take your calls at any time of the day and the night. PRs would stalk you for a story about the acts or the executives they were representing. You got invited to the best gigs and after-parties. You were part of the music biz establishment.

Some happy ones in our journalistic profession did have a stint – yours truly included – at Billboard and for many of us it remains the best gig in the world.

Of course, it sometimes meant you had to work under crazy deadlines for people based in New York who would call you to check facts in the middle of the night.

Of course it meant to sometimes work for some not-so benevolent tyrants who wanted things their way or the highway.

But the rewards were high, and the gratification to work for such a biblical institution meant the world to those in the cathedral. You knew you were read by the most influential people in the biz – and you had influence.

But that was then.

That was when there weren’t many other sources of information to figure out what was going on in the music biz.

That was when a weekly printed magazine, even reaching the other side of the world two weeks after print, was still relevant to read.

That was when the business had some form of coherence, pre-digital disruption.

In today’s world, Billboard’s reach and influence has suffered the same fate as the industry it covers. The brand is still strong, but its reach (in print, at least) has shrunk, by the effects of the simple mathematical formula that each time companies merge or close down, subscriptions go through the window.

Even online, despite the creation of two platforms, .com (consumer) and .biz (B2B), its impact is fading in the loud white noise of the internet. There are so many more sources to get your information from, especially when it comes to music.

And its charts, that for years ruled the world, have lost some significance and are challenged by new entrants, such as BigChampagne’s ‘Ultimate Charts’.

For the past few years, Billboard has been very much A&R driven (at least in its print version), in some sort of a obsessive drive to compete and catch up with all the glossy music magazines by putting artists on the cover, preferably good looking. Let’s call it the Rolling Stone syndrome (its current editor comes from there, and its new publisher has a background in consumer, not trade press).

As a result, the business side seems to almost be an afterthought and is getting less and less thoroughly covered, and since many of the magazine’s “veteran” writers have left, the publication has lost a sense of history and is capable of putting news in its context.

It has to be noted that in the 1990s, when the magazine was edited by the late Timothy White, who himself came from RS and who had had serious issues with the magazine’s founder and publisher Jann Wenner, Billboard held on to its mission to be the business paper of reference for the industry. Of course, we all remember some of Tim White’s over-long and over-written “White Papers” often focusing on irritating artists (Don Henley, Alanis Morrissette, to name but a few).

But he was a man of passion who understood the business and he would challenge his troupes to provide the best stories before anyone did. (Yes, he did also edict a memo instructing his journalists NOT to attend press conferences and report from them or face the sack on the grounds that Billboard reporters had to get the stories first… As a result Billboard ended up missing out on a few important stories. Another Tim White rule was that you could only publish in the magazine pics of people that had been interviewed directly by a Billboard reporter. Needles to say these rules were dropped after his untimely death.)

During White’s tenure, Billboard status as a global publication grew, not only in its reach but in its coverage, with a network of about 40 correspondents around the world, coordinated out of London, the magazine’s biggest outpost. Under the guidance of Adam White in the 1990s, and with the support of Tim White and then-publisher Howard Lander, Billboard had a mission to really reflect the world of music in its global diversity.

I had the privilege to follow Adam in the job, and it very soon became evident, in the wake of multiple changes in editorial leadership at the magazine, that “global” was more and more and more of an afterthought (even though the head of the London office was bestowed with the pompous title of ‘Global editor’ for Global probably meant the world outside of the US…), almost a nuisance, taking widely treasured real estate in the magazine away from US-driven stories. It created a lot of frustration among non-US writers and editors.

Last week, Billboard has gone one step further in its global = USA vision by simply scrapping altogether its London operations, letting go by January 1 all its UK staff.

It is sad, firstly because some good people will lose their jobs in the process. But also because it says so much about the state of the business, as labels who used to provide Billboard with the bulk of its ad dollars have almost completely stopped advertising in the mag. As I had to close down not one but two magazines in the past decade (Billboard’s sister publication in Europe Music & Media, and music publishing quarterly Impact) due to the rarefaction of ad revenues, I know how difficult the business is.

The idea that Billboard will no longer be represented in the world’s second largest music market (not in size but in creative terms) and will significantly reduce its international coverage is painful to those who think the music business deserves a global publication.

But is it surprising? Not really.

There is only one reason for that – cutting costs. Since it was acquired a year ago from Nielsen by a private equity group, the magazine, and other publications like The Hollywood Reporter, have been re-tooled (editorially for the best in the case of THR). But mostly the job of the new owners has been to get rid of fat wherever they could, outsourcing many of the admin operations, but also cutting into editorial resources, where little fat was left.

How far will the trimming go? Billboard’s editorial team in Los Angeles has been reduced to a minimum, and more people in New York are said to be under threat (unrelated to the fact that editor Craig Marks is leaving to join a start-up company after just a year in the job).

How long will it take before the print edition will be confined to the history of trade press? At this stage of the evolution of the music market, it is an option that cannot be ruled out. And if this happens, it will definitely mark the end of an era. But let's hope we won't get there.
As Woody Allen once said, "More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
That could quite nicely sum up Billboard's future...