Bent on celebrating music, not celebs

There’s a new spin at Spin.

The magazine has a new publisher, and though he insists the editorial orientation of the music and pop culture publication is solid and will not be overhauled, he wants to change perceptions about the monthly.

Since the day Bob Guccione Jr. launched Spin in 1985, the magazine has been consistently compared to its older, standard-setting rival Rolling Stone. In recent years it’s also had to stand next to upstarts Vibe (now its sister publication) and flashy Blender, as well as male-oriented Maxim and FHM.

Although those other magazines are increasingly devoted to celebrity and nonmusic matters, new publisher Jacob Hill wants to position Spin as the choice for serious music fans.

“Back when this was being launched it was clearly an alternative to Rolling Stone,” says Hill, who was co-founder and publisher of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine and most recently senior consultant to Budget Living. “Now Rolling Stone is clearly in this larger category and more mainstream and celebrity-oriented along with Blender and Maxim and FHM, and it’s no accident that they often share the same cover subjects. Spin has not moved in that direction, and that’s healthy. No one will pick up a copy of Spin and see Jessica Simpson on the cover.”

In fact, the very things that have plagued the music world in particular and in part pushed the others to broader turf underscore Spin’s strengths, he says.

“The phenomenon of downloading music for free and piracy -- I don’t think that means people are listening to less music,” he says. “People are listening to more music. College radio used to be the exclusive place to hear this cutting-edge music, and now, rightly or wrongly, it’s on the Web, and that makes Spin more valuable. You need an authentic filter.”

Those charged with getting media exposure for music and artists say that for music fans, Spin remains a key source, and for artists, a prized outlet.

“They give a lot of ink to new artists, and there’s credibility in that world for both indie and major-label upstart bands,” says publicist Mitch Schneider, whose L.A.-based company’s clients include David Bowie, Alanis Morissette, A Perfect Circle and Velvet Revolver. “Spin, of the three magazines along with Rolling Stone and Blender, has the edgy look at pop culture.”

Schneider says Rolling Stone’s larger circulation gives it an advantage, plus it’s a biweekly, while Spin publishes monthly.

Hill has no problem with the circulation numbers, reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations as more than 560,000 as of December. In comparison, Rolling Stone’s is 1.3 million and Maxim is 2.5 million, while Blender, arguably the closest in the bunch to Spin in focus, matches the competitor at about 525,000.

Advertising has declined, however, dipping 14% in 2003 from the previous year and this year sliding an additional 8%.

Hill attributes part of that to the music business’ troubles, though he notes that only 10% of Spin’s ads come from record companies. For Hill, that means the goal is to bring more advertisers to his readers, not more readers to the magazine.

“If we wanted to be at 2 million circulation,” he says, “we would not be Spin magazine any more.”

A playlist for the Red Planet

Think you’ll find a radio station where you can hear the Beatles, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bob Marley and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Not on this planet. Maybe on Mars, though.

Those are among the artists whose music s has been played by heads of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spirit mission to start the day for the rover each Martian daybreak.

Call it Mars Morning Radio.

“They’re just songs I think of based on usually trying to relate to the day’s activities,” says Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager.

Some examples have been the Beatles’ “Good Morning, Good Morning” on Spirit’s first Martian morning, “Hail to the Chief” on the day President Bush placed a phone call to the JPL team, and ABBA’s “S.O.S.,” when the team was making its ultimately successful attempt to regain contact with the rover after a loss of communications.

Does any of this really serve a function?

“For the rover? Not at all,” Adler says. “But it helps the team stay awake and motivated. So that helps the rover. We’re the ones who keep it healthy and alive. It’s just a fun thing we do. One day I forgot to play a song for a little while and members of the team started complaining.”

Oddly, Adler hasn’t played many specifically Mars-themed songs, such as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” though both Sammy Hagar’s “Marching to Mars” and Frank Sinatra’s performance of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which mentions the Red Planet) were played while Spirit and it sister, Opportunity, were en route. (A complete playlist can be found at www.atsnn.com/NASAgetsintotheGroove.html?story=34208.)

Maybe with new evidence of water having been on Mars in the past, Adler will be playing “Surfin Safari.”

Cease, desist and get back to work

Get sued by one major record company one week. Get hired by another the next. That’s what’s happened with DJ Danger Mouse, the producer behind “The Grey Album,” which offers mash-up splicings of music for the Beatles’ White Album with vocals from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album.”

The underground phenomenon has resulted in Danger Mouse’s (real name: Brian Burton) being hit with a cease-and-desist order from EMI, which controls the Beatles’ copyrights.

But now he’s been hired by the British division of Warner Bros. Records to remix electronica group Zero 7’s next single, “Somersault.” Burton’s manager, Jeff Antebi, says this is just one of several major-label projects about which Burton has been approached.

And in defense of his client, he also offers a quote he’s just run across from one of the parties EMI represents.

“Music is everybody’s possession,” John Lennon once said. “It’s only publishers who think that people own it.”