Paste’s pay-what-you-want experiment pays off
While Radiohead itself is being cheeky about how much dough they’ve piled up over their latest album, Paste magazine’s similar pay-what-you like experiment has definitely paid off. Editor-in-chief Josh Jackson maintains that they added 30,000 new subscriptions thanks to this gambit. I’ll have more details in my year-end round-up for music scribing but for now, you gotta be impressed with numbers like those, especially when they’re dropping most everywhere else. Yet another lesson the music industry has to teach the print industry?
Comments
More doesn’t necessarily equal better in this case, since the physical costs of paper and postage are set to increase dramatically.
Comment by blackmailismylife — December 11, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
I think this will pay off in the long run. Paste Magazine is such a good magazine, I think a high percentage of first time subrscribers will renew at the full price in following years.
Comment by instantalarma from Knoxville — December 12, 2007 @ 10:34 am
I used to love Paste, used to subscribe when it first came out. Now that it is a monthly magazine, they have moved a bit more mainstream. Really, I used to love going through and just looking up and listening to the artists that I’d not heard of. Now, they’re putting Kanye West on the cover and doing reviews on Mandy Moore. How long before they are another Rolling Stone?
Comment by bonniebelle — December 12, 2007 @ 11:28 am
not long
Comment by Ken from Michigan — May 17, 2008 @ 9:06 pm