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tbh I'm happy to sit and read what the reviewer has to say about the product
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
To be honest, for print and videos the biggest issue for me is the reviews are often a bit meaningless - a lot of the vids are done by shops who have a vested interest in saying the product is good. What I'd like is a What Car style mag for guitars and amps.
Personally I'm much less interested in equipment reviews, and more interested in playing tips. The 1980's Guitar Player magazines had great content on playing from the top guys, but even if you had that kind of content, could you run a magazine successfully when competing with all kinds of free channel on the net, from people of the calibre of Pete Thorn?
The publishing house I work for is making more money right now than its ever made. All of our magazines are making money across many sectors and we are buying other magazines from other publishing houses, then turning them into profitable concerns too.
The History of the Fender Stratocaster articles that regularly appear are so bland they would not look out of place in Readers Digest.
Other hobbies are available and some of them have specialist magazines. They are aimed at people who are slightly obsessive about their hobby and who (sometimes) obsessively look for "stuff" related to their hobby. If I read Guitarist Magazine, and, at the end, I have learned nothing that I did not already know, and I have learned nothing in particular about the famous Guitar Player being interviewed (ask him about his picks, what gauge are his picks.....that is what a "specialist mag" would do.....) then I will feel like I have just eaten a giant candy floss. And I may not bother next time.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
The best features were Guitar Player in it's heyday, both the extended interviews and the short features on more unusual players ( I still remember the chap who played guitar in a circus band). It was a leap of faith that the reader would be interested in whoever was featured because they were a guitarist with something interesting about them regardless of genre, the market doesn't seem to uphold that anymore.
Feedback
For me at least it's all about the music of yesteryear.
I see young bands who do have guitars but they're strumming away on a jazzmaster as a layer to their sound but don't seem to be focused on the guitar sound like older music.
Maybe I've just not heard the right young bands.
I'd say modern music was more about synth than guitar.
Just don't ask Andy Summers that - he's likely to bite the interviewer's head off!
(That interview did the rounds here late last year. He regarded it as a bland and uninteresting question and was much more interested in discussing ideas. Which I think we'd also like.)
I ended up in a little online chat with Mick Taylor in the comments section of TPS once about Guitarist and how they did lists features as filler and how dull they were, he said they were dull to write.
At least in G and B there is an attempt at original content even if it's about the right kind of screw for Horner scratch plate.
A near £7 a month coffee table publication for white boy blooze purists and boutique gear types.
I also used to dislike the way they would do group tests featuring Gibson LPs and Epi LPs etc, which would almost always involve unfavourable comparisons between the two when it came to the lower priced guitar, rather than judging it on its own merit.
just coincident that I was reading this OP - At the same time I just got an e-mail update from www.premierguitar.com and noticed Tom Wheeler had recently died
- https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/26987-remembering-tom-wheeler?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PGN - 021318&utm_term=PG Weekly
many will know him for some excellent books he wrote on the guitar history and I recall him as editor for Guitar Player in the 80's - Maybe there was some mystic with the USA mags and market place back then compared to our own mags, but I always looked forward to reading them - I still have shed loads of them and have debated selling them - Yet part says I should re-read some again - Fun finding out about products we never saw over here back then - World is now so much smaller so many such items are now available over here in one guise or another
I think there's a ton of guitar based music they could be covering:
I don't actually like a lot of the stuff above (although I really like some of it). I rarely listen to metal or country, and the indie music my 17 year old niece likes is just not very good, imho. But ... it's guitar based music, that might have interesting things happening in it that I might want to learn about, or which might appeal to readers who aren't me.
When I stared buying guitar magazines in around 1988, there was a mix of 'old people' music (Clapton, etc) and new music, e.g. the latest big haired shred guys out of LA. The balance seems much less mixed now.
Matt