[sdiy] Audio (and synth) DIY printed magazine idea

[Richard Wentk]

At 08:34 06/01/2004 -0800, Barry Klein wrote:
>1. Concentrate on the advertising income (or lack of it?).  Lots of material
>to write about...
>Maybe model "TapeOP" magazine and approach his advertisers.
>2. Include a CD each issue with sounds of the circuits and/or reader
>submissions.
>
>Barry
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>[mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of
>synth at charlielamm.com
>Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 8:11 AM
>To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>Subject: [sdiy] Audio (and synth) DIY printed magazine idea
>
>
>I come from a family of non-fiction writers and we are constantly bouncing
>ideas off each other for books and magazines that might do a little better
>than break-even (sometime break-even is OK too).
>
>My latest idea is to have a magazine called something like "Audio DIY".
>It would be in English, and come out monthly or bimonthly, and hopefully
>sell to an International audience.
>
>It would cover what I see to be the 4 "thrusts" of the audio DIY biz as I
>see it on the web and usenet
>
>--Synth DIY
>--Stomp DIY
>--Amp DIY
>--Software DIY (Reaktor, Nord modular, roll your own plug ins, etc)

It's an interesting idea, but I can't see it being viable in print form. My 
guess is that there is simply no way that there's anywhere close to 30,000 
people in the world who have a practical interest in this kind of DIY. The 
80s DIY heyday was based on a lot of people with DIY electronics interest 
building synth hardware like Powertrans and Elektor Formants. But I think 
for many the interest was in *electronics* rather than *musical 
electronics.* The equivalent people today are modding and overclocking 
their PCs instead of building cackling egg timers and digital roulette 
wheels. And the more intelligent ones are contributing to various 
open-source development projects and/or shareware. Only a tiny minority are 
interested in music technology for its own sake, and most of those will 
have products for sale/download already. Given that most of these are 
cottage industries it might not be realistic to expect the same kind of ad 
income that big name mags like FM and SOS can get from big names like 
Yamaha, Korg, Roland, etc.

I think if you followed the same route as FM, CM, SOS and so on and added a 
new twist of some sort, you might have more of a chance. I suspect there is 
a gap between the utter beginner and the total synth nerd (a la SOS's 
neverending programming series) which isn't being covered and could be 
filled successfully. E.g. there's a huge Max/MSP community, and the Max/MSP 
forum doesn't do a perfect job of promoting user interests. Likewise with 
Reaktor, where people are producing great patches, but there's relatively 
little discussion about how and why.

But the emphasis then would be more on using gear and building studios than 
hard/soft DIY. Certainly the level of experience on this list is probably 
only going to be of interest to a few hundred people worldwide at most. 
Maybe a thousand at a push, but I'd be extremely surprised if it was 
significantly more than that.

Richard