For magazine publishing ninjas
Not Such Great News for Music Magazine Publishers
A number of years ago music magazine publishers got together in a spirit of mutual cooperation unusual for this industry and set up a co-op marketing association to music stores—the MMPA.
A number of independent music retailers and some small chains were approached and received magazines under the MMPA’s auspices, but the key chain for many participating music publishers was the national Guitar Center chain.
This month Guitar Center made a new move in magazine management—towards category consolidation.
Remember category consolidation? It was the big thing back in the 1990s. And even before—you remember, back when we as an industry decided we didn’t know how to manage our own business and our wholesalers and distributors went out and brought in the package goods people? They were going to straighten us out.
You don’t need a whole lot of inventory, they decreed. You don’t need these large reading centers, with lots of choice and room to browse. If you go that route, you just spread your sales out along with the associated costs. Cut down on the assortment. You’ll still sell lots of copies: instead of buying the third title in the category, everyone would buy the first, and you’d sell as many copies with less to spend on labor and inventory. Efficiencies would go up. Profits would soar.
This kind of management decrees that a publication that sells more copies might lose shelf space to one that sells less, if it represents a different category. It may ignore points of differentiation between publications in the category.
I wonder if the Guitar Center buyers checked on the history of category consolidation. I wonder if they are aware that most of its early (and recent) proponents and practitioners are now out of business. I wonder if they checked on where all of our industry’s growth has come from over the past two decades. If they haven’t, I can give them a hint—it hasn’t come from more people buying fewer titles. Quite the opposite.
I wish them luck. But I also wish that, when retailers make far-reaching decisions about their magazine program, they would check with a magazine person first.
A number of independent music retailers and some small chains were approached and received magazines under the MMPA’s auspices, but the key chain for many participating music publishers was the national Guitar Center chain.
This month Guitar Center made a new move in magazine management—towards category consolidation.
Remember category consolidation? It was the big thing back in the 1990s. And even before—you remember, back when we as an industry decided we didn’t know how to manage our own business and our wholesalers and distributors went out and brought in the package goods people? They were going to straighten us out.
You don’t need a whole lot of inventory, they decreed. You don’t need these large reading centers, with lots of choice and room to browse. If you go that route, you just spread your sales out along with the associated costs. Cut down on the assortment. You’ll still sell lots of copies: instead of buying the third title in the category, everyone would buy the first, and you’d sell as many copies with less to spend on labor and inventory. Efficiencies would go up. Profits would soar.
This kind of management decrees that a publication that sells more copies might lose shelf space to one that sells less, if it represents a different category. It may ignore points of differentiation between publications in the category.
I wonder if the Guitar Center buyers checked on the history of category consolidation. I wonder if they are aware that most of its early (and recent) proponents and practitioners are now out of business. I wonder if they checked on where all of our industry’s growth has come from over the past two decades. If they haven’t, I can give them a hint—it hasn’t come from more people buying fewer titles. Quite the opposite.
I wish them luck. But I also wish that, when retailers make far-reaching decisions about their magazine program, they would check with a magazine person first.
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© 2012 Created by Linda Ruth.
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