Billboard Türkiye

» see billboard.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My first years with a broadband line at home in Turkey ran from 2006 to 2010, and in all of them I bought no music at all. Nobody I knew was buying music. That is the exact window in which an American music trade magazine decided Turkey was worth a licensed local edition.

Billboard Türkiye launched in November 2006 out of Istanbul, Turkish language, under agreement with the American Billboard, with Meltem Fıratlı as editor and chart measurement from Nielsen Music Control. It ran the usual mix of new releases and artist profiles, and its one genuinely institutional contribution was a chart. Türkiye Top 20 was recognized as the official Turkish chart for songs in languages other than Turkish, compiled weekly, printed in the magazine and published on billboard.com.tr every Monday.

It also had a radio slot. "Billboard Radio" read the chart out on 87.7 Rokket FM in Istanbul, which is a reminder of how small the whole apparatus was: the official national chart for foreign music in a country of seventy million existed on one FM frequency in one city and in the pages of a magazine with a license from New York. In September 2009 the chart stopped being compiled weekly and became monthly. Eleven months later the magazine was gone.

~ the case file ~

~ what a licensed edition actually was ~

A local Billboard was not a translation. The deal gave a domestic publisher the brand and the authority of the charts, and the publisher supplied the market knowledge and the advertising sales. A Billboard press release of 10 April 2007 was headed "Billboard Launches in Russia, Building on Blueprint of Turkey Edition", so for a moment Istanbul was the template rather than the afterthought.

By 2010 the magazine was being published inside Doğuş Yayın Grubu, whose stable on the same website footer included National Geographic Türkiye and CNBC-e Business. That is a group with experience of running licensed titles, so inexperience is not the explanation. The footer on the last captured homepage reads simply "© 2010 Doğuş Yayın Grubu".

~ the diagnosis somebody wrote down ~

On 14 August 2010 Mehmet Tez published a piece on Hafif Müzik titled "Türkiye'de müzik yayıncılığı neden bitti?", which is "why did music publishing in Turkey end?". No other publication appears to have marked the closure at all, so his first sentence has to serve as the notice: last year Roll said goodbye, and now Billboard dergisi sessiz sedasız kapandı, which means it closed quietly, without a sound. He adds that everyone in the business had been expecting it.

Tez had edited Rolling Stone's Turkish edition until it closed about eighteen months earlier, so the article is partly self-criticism, and his list of causes is specific enough to be useful sixteen years later. Management could feel publishing moving to the web and to phones, he says, and found changing habits harder than repeating old ones, so internet publishing came to mean pasting the print edition online rather than making something for the people who were actually there. Advertising was then sold as a bundle across five titles at once, which turned a reader profile from an asset into an irrelevance and pushed each magazine's identity to the back. Promotion budgets went on free gifts instead of on better writing and photography. As for the readers, Tez says they bought the poster of the artist they already loved and not the magazine wrapped around it.

~ issue 1008 ~

The site organized itself by issue directory, numbered year and month, and the last one the Internet Archive ever caught is 1008. August 2010. On 6 September 2010 billboard.com.tr still redirected there and served a working magazine site. By 25 December 2010 that address was serving a page from nic.tr explaining that the domain had been suspended by the Turkish registry for financial or administrative reasons. Billboard still runs a Turkey Songs chart from New York today, weekly, for Turkish-language songs, and that is the half of the job Istanbul never got.

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