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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 12:14 am 
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Wenner to Sell 49% of Rolling Stone to Singapore’s BandLab

There comes a time when even Jann Wenner needs a little help from his friends.

After a five-decade run full of interviews with pop stars and presidents, the founder of Rolling Stone is selling 49 percent of the iconic magazine to an Asian billionaire’s son. It’s the first time Wenner has admitted an outside investor, a deal that encapsulates the plight of an industry fighting to stay relevant in an online age. Wenner Media LLC also owns Us Weekly and Men’s Journal.

Founded in 1967, Rolling Stone became a fixture of American pop culture, helping launch the careers of writers and creative artists over almost 50 years. But like many of its peers, the magazine has steadily lost advertising and readership to nimbler online alternatives. In 2014, Wenner tasked his son Gus with devising a digital strategy. Now Wenner, who started Rolling Stone from a San Francisco warehouse, plans to relinquish as much of his magazine as possible without ceding control.

“It’s a big moment,” Gus Wenner, the company’s head of digital, said in a phone interview. “There is a great opportunity to take that brand and apply it into new and different areas and markets.”

The new investor is Singapore-based BandLab Technologies, a budding digital music concern founded by the 28-year-old scion of one of Asia’s richest families. Kuok Meng Ru, the third son of Singapore-based agribusiness tycoon Kuok Khoon Hong, graduated from Cambridge University with a mathematics degree and launched BandLab last year as a social network for musicians and fans. The startup is funded by private investors, including Kuok’s father and JamHub Corp., a maker of audio mixers.

BandLab will have no involvement in the editorial side of the magazine. Rather, it will oversee a new Rolling Stone International subsidiary, which will develop live events, merchandising and hospitality. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. BandLab will not have a stake in Wenner Media.

Kuok said the two sides have been in discussions for about 15 months. “What has happened last 49 years has already shown that Rolling Stone is more than a brand to people,” Kuok told Bloomberg News. “It is now our shared responsibility to take it into the future.”

Rolling Stone currently reaches a global audience of 65 million people, according to the company. That includes 22 million domestic digital monthly users, almost 18 million social fans and followers, and nearly 12 million readers of the U.S. print publication. The average monthly unique visitors to its website rose almost 40 percent in the first half of this year from a year earlier. It publishes 12 international editions in countries including Australia, Indonesia and Japan.

“Our strategic partnership is focused on brand extensions into new areas we haven’t quite fully been in the past, such as merchandising, live events, hospitality – they are areas we have dabbled in but never really seriously gone after,” said Wenner. “Meng and his team bring a great deal of understanding, infrastructure, know-how and act in that extraordinarily exciting market of Asia and beyond.”

Cutting-Edge Coverage

The magazine made its mark in the 1970s and 80s with cutting-edge music and political coverage. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Wenner for decades, including publishing first in its pages ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ which later became a book and movie. Its stable of star writers included P.J. O’Rourke, Cameron Crowe and Lester Bangs. And it published in-depth exposes, including the 11,000-word, 1974 story of how heiress Patty Hearst went from kidnapping victim to radicalized guerrilla.

Even past its prime it could break through to the mainstream. A 2010 profile of General Stanley McChrystal that included remarks critical of the Obama Administration led to the general’s resignation. In 2013, the magazine put on its cover the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, prompting outrage over what some saw as the glamorization of terrorism.

Last year, Rolling Stone came under fire for its editorial standards. The magazine published an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. The story turned out to be substantially false and prompted the magazine to request an independent investigation from the Columbia University journalism school. The article is now the subject of several lawsuits, including one from a college employee, though Kuok declined to say if his company would be liable for any potential damages.

For Kuok, Rolling Stone marks the latest of his acquisitions of music assets and brands, underscoring his efforts to build a global music empire. BandLab, his flagship business, is a cloud-based online community that allows artists to create, collaborate and share their music. In 2012, Kuok acquired Swee Lee, a sleepy 70-year-old distributor of guitars in Singapore. Since then, he has turned the company into a modern enterprise, selling merchandise online and offering music lessons. It’s now the biggest distributor of instruments and audio equipment in Southeast Asia.

Other recent acquisitions include Composr, a European iOS and web music-making service, and MONO Creators Inc., the San Francisco-based design studio that creates high-end instrument cases, straps and accessories for musicians.

“We are focused on the consumer and the supply chain of music, and innovative business models around music that exist today,” he said. “We see a lot of synergies. At the end of the day, the end consumer is the same. BandLab’s goal is to be a global music business.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... -s-bandlab

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 12:55 am 
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So does that mean he's going to sell 49% of the Rock Hall to Singapore next?


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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:29 pm 
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Yeah, read this article in WSJ today. In the NY Times it mentioned that RS has a lot legal issues going on as well. I wonder what that pertains to?

Rick A.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:42 pm 
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There was the UVa rape story....

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:56 pm 
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Jay wrote:
There was the UVa rape story....


Oh, that's right Jay. I bet that is what it is. :ohno:

Rick A.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 3:20 pm 
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Does this mean that Rolling Stone will be a 49% better publication?

I doubt it.


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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 5:00 pm 
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Larry wrote:
Does this mean that Rolling Stone will be a 49% better publication?

I doubt it.


Agree Larry; for awhile they were giving us more CD reviews but their cutting back again. What a shame. :ohno:

Rick A.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 5:47 pm 
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I see my offer of an expired Arby's coupon and $1.56 was rejected...

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 1:40 am 
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Invisible Pedestrian wrote:
I see my offer of an expired Arby's coupon and $1.56 was rejected...


You need a good financial adviser IP. You overbid by a lot.


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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 1:57 am 
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LOL at Kuok's quote that "Rolling Stone is more than a brand to people" almost immediately followed by Wenner's "our strategic partnership is focused on brand extensions into new areas"...

:facepalm:


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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 12:16 pm 
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I was wondering why Rolling Stone suddenly started sending me copies of the magazine that I did not pay for. Now I know..artificially boosting subscriber numbers for this sale. I haven't subscribed to this POS rag for many years!

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2016 12:18 pm 
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I have Rolling Stones all over the place. For me the mag has become more about politics than an actual music magazine.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Sat Nov 05, 2016 12:55 am 
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Most recent RS issue (Bruno Mars cover) their are only 4 reviews. Unbelievable, they can't listen to more than 4 CD's. What a joke.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Sat Nov 05, 2016 1:35 am 
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JohnG wrote:
I have Rolling Stones all over the place. For me the mag has become more about politics than an actual music magazine.


:agree: Their political reporting has always been superb. It's been years since the music parts were relevant for me.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:00 pm 
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Quote:
Rolling Stone, Once a Counterculture Bible, Will Be Put Up for Sale
By SYDNEY EMBER
SEPT. 17, 2017

And so, after a half-century reign that propelled him into the realm of the rock stars and celebrities who graced his covers, Mr. Wenner is putting his company’s controlling stake in Rolling Stone up for sale, relinquishing his hold on a publication he has led since its founding.

Mr. Wenner had long tried to remain an independent publisher in a business favoring size and breadth. But he acknowledged in an interview last week that the magazine he had nurtured would face a difficult, uncertain future on its own.

“I love my job, I enjoy it, I’ve enjoyed it for a long time,” said Mr. Wenner, 71. But letting go, he added, was “just the smart thing to do.”

The sale plans were devised by Mr. Wenner’s 27-year-old son, Gus, who has aggressively pared down the assets of Rolling Stone’s parent company, Wenner Media, in response to financial pressures. The Wenners recently sold the company’s other two magazines, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal. And last year, they sold a 49 percent stake in Rolling Stone to BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore.

Both Jann and Gus Wenner, the president and chief operating officer of Wenner Media, said they intended to stay on at Rolling Stone. But they said they also recognized that the decision could ultimately be up to the new owner.

Still, the potential sale of Rolling Stone — on the eve of its 50th anniversary, no less — underscores how inhospitable the media landscape has become as print advertising and circulation have dried up.

“There’s a level of ambition that we can’t achieve alone,” Gus Wenner said last week in an interview at the magazine’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. “So we are being proactive and want to get ahead of the curve.”

“Publishing is a completely different industry than what it was,” he added. “The trends go in one direction, and we are very aware of that.”

The Wenners’ decision is also another clear sign that the days of celebrity editors are coming to a close. Earlier this month, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair and a socialite and star in his own right, announced he planned to leave the magazine after 25 years. Robbie Myers, the longtime editor of Elle, Nancy Gibbs of Time magazine and Cindi Leive of Glamour also said last week that they were stepping down.

Anthony DeCurtis, a veteran music critic and a longtime Rolling Stone contributing editor, said he never thought Jann Wenner would sell Rolling Stone.

“That sense of the magazine editor’s hands on the magazine — that’s what’s going to get lost here,” he said. “I don’t know who’s going to be able to step in and do that anymore.”

Wenner Media has hired bankers to explore its sale, but the process is just beginning. BandLab’s stake in the company could also complicate matters. Neither Jann nor Gus Wenner would name any potential buyers, but one possible suitor is American Media Inc., the magazine publisher led by David J. Pecker that has already taken Us Weekly and Men’s Journal off Wenner Media’s hands.

The Wenners said that they expected a range of opportunities, and Jann Wenner said he hoped to find a buyer that understood Rolling Stone’s mission and that had “lots of money.”

Gus Wenner, 27, the president and chief operating officer of Wenner Media. Credit Andrew White for The New York Times
“Rolling Stone has played such a role in the history of our times, socially and politically and culturally,” he said. “We want to retain that position.”

Jann Wenner tried his hand at other magazines over the decades, including the outdoor lifestyle magazine Outside and Family Life. But it was Rolling Stone that helped guide, and define, a generation.

“Who lives through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and cannot be somehow wistful at this moment?” said Terry McDonell, a former top editor at Rolling Stone who also ran other Wenner magazines.

Rolling Stone filled its pages with pieces than ran in the thousands of words by standard bearers of the counterculture, including Hunter S. Thompson — whose “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was published in the magazine in two parts — and Tom Wolfe. It started the career of the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who for many years delivered electrifying cover images, including an iconic photograph in 1981 of a naked John Lennon curled in a fetal position with Yoko Ono.

Music coverage in all of its forms — news, interviews, reviews — was the core of Rolling Stone, but its influence also stretched into pop culture, entertainment and politics. A bastion of liberal ideology, the magazine became a required stop for Democratic presidential candidates — Mr. Wenner has personally interviewed several, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — and it has pulled no punches in its appraisal of Republicans. In 2006, Rolling Stone suggested George W. Bush was the “worst president in history.” More recently, the magazine featured Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, on its cover with the headline, “Why Can’t He Be Our President?”

The magazine also published widely acclaimed political stories, including one in 2009 on Goldman Sachs by the writer Matt Taibbi, who famously described the company as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” The next year, the magazine ran a piece with the headline, “The Runaway General,” that ended the career of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

But that was perhaps the last Rolling Stone cover piece that gained significant journalistic acclaim. And the magazine’s reputation as a tastemaker for the music world had long since eroded, as Mr. Wenner clung to the past with covers that featured artists from his generation, even as younger artists emerged. Artists like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan have continued to secure cover spots in recent years.

Rolling Stone suffered a devastating blow to its reputation when it retracted a debunked 2014 article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. A damning report on the story by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism cited fundamental journalistic failures. The article prompted three libel lawsuits against Rolling Stone, one of which led to a highly publicized trial last year that culminated with a federal jury awarding the plaintiff $3 million in damages.

Rolling Stone’s botched story in 2014 about an unproven gang rape at the University of Virginia badly bruised the magazine’s journalistic reputation.
The financial picture had also been bleak. In 2001, Jann Wenner sold a 50 percent stake in Us Weekly to the Walt Disney Company for $40 million, then borrowed $300 million five years later to buy back the stake. The deal saddled the company with debt for more than a decade, preventing it from investing as much as it might have in its magazines.

At the same time, Rolling Stone’s print advertising revenue and newsstand sales fell. And as readers increasingly embraced the web for their news and entertainment, Mr. Wenner remained skeptical, with a stubbornness that hamstrung his company.

Wenner Media was already a small magazine publisher. But the sale of Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, which together brought in roughly three-quarters of Wenner Media’s revenue, has left it further diminished.

Regardless, the sale of Rolling Stone would be Jann Wenner’s denouement, capping his unlikely rise from dope-smoking Berkeley dropout to silver-haired media mogul. An admirer of John Lennon and publishing mavens like William Randolph Hearst, Mr. Wenner — who invested $7,500 of borrowed money to start Rolling Stone along with his mentor, Ralph J. Gleason — was at turns idealist and desperado, crafting his magazine into a guide for the counterculture epoch while also gallivanting with superstars. He once boasted that he had turned down a $500 million offer for Rolling Stone, more than he could ever dream of getting for the magazine today. (BandLab invested $40 million to acquire its 49-percent stake in the magazine last year.)

Though he said he still cared deeply about Rolling Stone, Mr. Wenner has placed the magazine’s fate firmly in Gus’s hands, and he appears content to let someone else determine its path forward.

“I think it’s time for young people to run it,” he said.

Sitting in his second-floor office surrounded by a collection of rock ’n’ roll artifacts, Gus Wenner expressed hope that a new owner would provide the resources Rolling Stone needed to evolve and survive.

“It’s what we need to do as a business,” he said. “It’s what we need to do to grow the brand.”

Then, as only someone who had spent his life around rock ’n’ roll could, he gestured confidently to a tome of Bob Dylan lyrics on his desk. “If you’re not busy being born,” Mr. Wenner said, “then you’re busy dying.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/busi ... -sale.html

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:17 pm 
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The article I posted earlier that appears to have been removed seemed to indicated he is now selling 100%.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:33 pm 
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Geff R. wrote:
The article I posted earlier that appears to have been removed seemed to indicated he is now selling 100%.

It must have been removed in 1967, since Wenner has been a 100% sellout since the magazine's founding.

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:42 pm 
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All I know is that I got one of those "lifetime subscriptions" as an Xmas gift many years back and they better keep sending them until 2054!

Of course, my RS subscription could potentially outlive me, but...

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:55 pm 
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Dr. Chris Evil wrote:
All I know is that I got one of those "lifetime subscriptions" as an Xmas gift many years back and they better keep sending them until 2054!

Of course, my RS subscription could potentially outlive me, but...



You can will it to me! :ohyes: :lol:

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 7:33 pm 
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does this mean wenner will have to sell the rock and roll hall of fame too?

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 7:47 pm 
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As I've said before, almost my entire interest in RS is their superb world affairs reporting. I hope that doesn't decline, as I'm sub'd though either 2019 or 2021( don't remember which)

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 Post subject: Jann Wenner to sell Rolling Stone magazine
PostPosted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 3:33 am 
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