OT Virtual Instruments Mag Online Now
2008-12-18 by GAmoore@aol.com
www.VirtualInstrumentsMag.com Dear Subscribers, Virtual Instruments magazine is a success. Since launching in mid-2005 it’s become an important resource to thousands of very serious musicians all over the world working in this exciting new musical medium. Literally hundreds of you have written and continue to write to tell us how much you enjoy the magazine, how you read it cover to cover, and how you continue to refer to back issues all the time. Frankly, we’re proud to have earned not only your respect but also the advertising support of all the best companies in our industry. This has been very much a team effort, including the best, most knowledgeable, most experienced writers around, and the best art director, Lucky Westfall, who’s responsible for VI’s magnificent look. We were going along fine for 17 issues, with a rapidly growing subscription base, excellent newsstand sales throughout the US and Canada, healthy ad bookings...and then the economy turned. BOOM! The entire print publishing industry - not just us! - was hit hard as advertisers pulled back sharply from print advertising in favor of the internet. This has been a slow trend over the past few years, but the conditions in the world are speeding it up like crazy. Being highly focused we felt it right away, hence the lapse in publication you ’re all well aware of. After several false starts getting the next issue out the door, it finally became apparent that no matter how hard we wished, the business model of “low-volume magazine supported by advertising” is no longer viable. So we were faced with three choices. 1. Knock the whole thing on the head. 2. Several hundred of you already pay the US subscription price to download PDF files of the print magazine, and your renewal rate is extremely high (indicating that you’re happy). Sticking PDFs up there wouldn’t be a very thrilling option compared to having a print magazine, but it would have been okay. 3. Why not take the opportunity to reinvent the whole idea of a digital magazine! Lemonade from lemons. More than just allowing us to continue publishing, this means we can actually put out a better product! Now I’m genuinely excited. The more I started thinking about the possibilities, the more giddy I became. What makes more sense for a magazine about music software? And most of you don ’t just have high speed internet connections, you’re online all day long. You’ll still be able to download PDFs of all our issues and print them or selected articles out, but now our writers can actually show you what we’re talking about with audio and video examples. This is the best of all worlds: the same look, high quality editorial content, and especially the credibility you’ve come to expect from us, combined with the best of what the digital medium has to offer. We’ll be able to present more articles, since issues don’t have to stop at the 68th page. And we can add content all the time, so you don’t have to wait two months for the next issue to get delivered when something new and exciting happens. Plus we’re saving a huge amount of paper; remember, entire civilizations have collapsed because they cut down all their trees. *** After making the decision we brought Mr. Peter Buick on board to head our digital team and program our online interface. He’s done a fantastic job in a very short amount of time, I think, and we invite you to go to our home page and check it out: www.VirtualInstrumentsMag.com That’s a demo of the interface, with the first issue of the re-booted magazine scheduled for release before the NAMM Show in January. Please inspect the demo, and use the integrated “chat” feature on the From The Editor page to give us your feedback. You’ll be able to use this feature to ask questions of writers and comment on all our articles in the actual magazine. And this is just the beginning. We’ve also integrated an RSS feed that you can read for all the latest news and articles, and very shortly we’ll have a dedicated iPhone/smartphone version of the magazine that you can read wherever you are. Yeah baby. *** All the readers we’ve talked to so far are very positive about this new direction. But of course in order to curl up on the couch with the magazine on paper you’ll need to download the PDF version and print it out yourself. Or you can load it into, say, your iPod Touch, iPhone, or Amazon Kindle, or just read the magazine on a laptop anywhere you have internet access. We have a lot of features ideas in the works that I haven’t mentioned here. It ’s highly likely that most if not all magazines will end up going digital sooner than later, so we’re happy to be at the front of the curve. As our way of thanking you for being a loyal subscriber we’re adding six months to your subscription plus credit for the time your sub was active while we weren’t publishing. We’re working on a solution for those of you who are international print subscribers. And those of you who are download subscribers already will be chuffed. So please do let us hear from you. We need to know what you’d like to see. Virtual Instruments is dead. Long live VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS! ************** One site keeps you connected to all your email: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Try it now. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp& icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000025) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]