Blender

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

~ the last words ~

Blender arrived in August 1994 as a magazine you put in a CD-ROM drive. Regina Joseph was the founding editor-in-chief and brought in Jason Pearson and David Cherry as co-founders. Felix Dennis of Dennis Publishing published it. It was covered as a novelty at the time by Billboard and the New York Times, both of them trying to explain to readers what a magazine with moving pictures in it was supposed to be.

This was before graphical browsers were something ordinary people had. A disc was genuinely the best available way to get video and sound onto a home computer, and the music press was the natural first customer because a music review is much better with the music attached. The CD editions also carried what were among the earliest forms of digital advertising, with Calvin Klein and Nike buying space on a format that had no rate card yet.

Fifteen discs went out. A web version launched in 1996, and the final CD-ROM issue was published in June 1997 as issue 14, at which point Wired covered the shift with the observation that the disc was now the slow way to do this. Fifteen digital issues in under three years, and then the format was over.

None of this crossed my path. I got online in 1998 on a modem in Turkey, a year after the last disc shipped, and the CD-ROM magazine was a format that had lived and finished entirely inside the American media industry before I had an internet connection at all. The discs I owned were shovelware compilations and game demos off a magazine cover, which is a different thing wearing the same plastic.

~ the record ~

~ the disc years ~

The interesting part of the CD era is that nobody knew what the grammar was. Print had a hundred years of settled convention for how a page works. A disc had none, so the people making these things were inventing the idea of a clickable table of contents and an audio clip embedded in a review at the same time as they were inventing the sales pitch for putting an ad next to it.

Almost all of that work got thrown away, because the web arrived and made it obsolete inside three years. The conventions survived; the specific magazines did not. Blender is one of the few from that class with a proper record of what it did, mostly because Dennis was a large enough publisher that the trade press wrote it down.

~ the paper years ~

Dennis brought the name back in June 2001 as a print music magazine out of New York, billing itself as the ultimate guide to pop culture. It was loud and unserious in a way that made the older music press uncomfortable, and it worked: in June 2006 the Chicago Tribune put it eighth in a ranking of the fifty best magazines and called it the cool kid at the school of rock magazines.

An Indian edition launched in May 2008 through a joint venture between Dennis and Media Transasia, aimed at men aged eighteen to thirty-four. That is roughly the last expansion the title managed before the market it depended on stopped functioning.

~ the last issue ~

Quadrangle Group bought Dennis Publishing's US titles in 2007 and put them into a new subsidiary, Alpha Media Group. Eighteen months later the advertising market for print music magazines was gone. Alpha closed Blender on 26 March 2009, cutting about thirty jobs, and the April 2009 issue was the last one printed.

It was not alone that year. Vibe went down within months, and the trade coverage of the period treated the two as one story about a category that advertisers had finished with. Blender had already outlived its own format once, in 1997, and got a second run out of the name; the second ending did not come with the same option.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »