Colophon 2011

Songlines

Songlines

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James Anderson-Hanney (Advertisement Manager) james@songlines.co.uk

Songlines Publishing Ltd

Discover a World of Music

Songlines magazine covers the world's most exciting music from traditional and popular to contemporary and fusion, featuring artists from all around the globe.

London, UK

Unit F5, Shepherds Studios, Rockley Road, W14 0DA

Email: info@songlines.co.uk

• Category: Music
• Periodicity: 8 x / year
• Language: English
• Format: 220 x 297 mm
• Circulation: 18,000
• Price: £ 4.15
• Web: http://www.songlines.co.uk

Founded in 1999

Exclusive Interview

Exploring the world through it's music

What is your magazine about?
Ben Serbutt: Songlines magazine covers the world's most exciting music from traditional and popular to contemporary and fusion, featuring artists from all around the globe, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from Miriam Makeba to Mariza, from Gilberto Gil to Gogol Bordello.

Who’s behind the project? Tell us about the founders, their backgrounds and their motivations!
Songlines began in 1999 as a quarterly published by Gramophone magazine. Simon Broughton – also co-editor of the Rough Guide to World Music and documentary director of music films – has been editor since the beginning. The magazine became independent of its former owners in 2002, relaunched in a larger format and its profile has grown steadily since then. The publisher is Paul Geoghegan and the other directors are Mark Ellingham (founder of Rough Guides), Chris Pollard (former publisher of Gramophone) and Lyn Hughes (Publisher of Wanderlust travel magazine). It’s a team of professionals from the media and different aspects of the publishing industry. Alongside them there is a great team of freelance writers who know about the music and are good at conveying its appeal and importance to a wider audience.

How do you produce one issue? How much time do you spend on it? How big is your team?
With blood sweat and tears in a tiny team of 5 full-timers, 2 part-timers and a lot of contributors. As well as the 8 issues a year, we do all the marketing, advertising, website, podcasts, CDs and anything else that comes up.

What have been the important steps in the life of your magazine?
The relaunch in 2002 in a larger format with a new team and new identity was a huge step. The mag was restructured from the ground up, divided into sections, given a new masthead and introduced to a wider audience. Since then we’ve redesigned in 2006 and watched circulation steadily grow. It’s also become the first port of call for people in the media looking at music stories around the world. In May this year we started Songlines Music Travel offering tailor-made trips to hear great music around the world.

What are the key ingredients for the success of your magazine?
We walk a fine line between maintaining our existing subscriber base and drawing in new readers that might hate the term ‘world music’, but will love some of the Ukranian punk or Ghanian hip-hop we cover. Therefore we have a range of stories that cover the more ethnomusicologist side of the spectrum right through to the mainstream and/or western collaborators like Damon Albarn or Ry Cooder. Music around the world is a reflection of the way of life wherever it’s made and, in that sense, it’s a window on what’s going on in the world.

What are the difficulties you are confronted with? What would be “the” thing to help the magazine to improve?
One of our larger problems is regularly money. Our total photo budget per issue is around £250, so we beg or borrow (but never steal) images from everywhere we can. This mostly means the record companies supply them, but even if they are used elsewhere, world music gets so little coverage in the mainstream press that we can get away with it.

Bigger budgets would, of course, help so we could pay our writers better, pay for more and better pictures and finance some travel trips so we’re not reliant on record companies and festivals to subsidise costs.

Where do you want the magazine to be in five years?
Paul Geoghegan, publisher: Surviving the downward turn in publishing and becoming more popular internationally as a niche title, while introducing a larger online presence – even perhaps an online world music shop.

Tell us about your audience! Who are the readers of your magazine?
Simon Broughton, editor: As you can imagine, Songlines readers are as diverse as the music we cover! Our reader profile in each issue reflects the range in readers age, sex, ethnicity and career. But basically they are all people with a curiosity about music and the world.

Is remaining independent important to you? Is it part of the strategy?
Simon Broughton, editor: I’d say that remaining independent is a big part of retaining our credibility. And being able to make out own decisions has directly benefitted our profile and success.

What’s your relationship with advertisement? Does it influence your content? Do you care about advertising-driven-editorials?
Simon Broughton, editor: I prefer to avoid advertising-driven editorials and on the whole we do.

Do you think that magazine readers still need to watch TV?
Simon Broughton, editor: TV is still a great medium for popular culture and news, but it’s unfortunately less and less the medium for the music we’re involved in. It’s a shame because world music is actually very televisual and the stories behind the music are strong. But commissioners these days are predominantly interested in celebrities not issues.

What is your relationship with your printer? Does he play a main role in your development?
Ben Serbutt, art director: Not so far. While we have improved our production systems with them, they don’t often suggest new ideas or avenues to explore.

Which magazines influence you most? What are you looking for in other magazines?
Ben Serbutt, art director: I consume a vast quantity of magazines, always looking for new ideas to adapt to our style or to inspire us to think of new ways of interacting with the reader. I’m always looking at better designers to have something to aspire to.
Some recent favourites include Dumbo feather, pass it on (an Australian title about inspiring people and inspiration, without being trite); The Word (purely as it knows its audience more clearly than any other UK title, but has perhaps the most awful design on the newsstand) and US Wired (again it knows it’s audience and has the perfect tone for them, both editorially and design-wise, as well as brilliantly pushing boundaries in print and design).

What do you think of your issue 01, when you look back at it?
Simon Broughton, editor: It looks very much like an academic title for a very small niche audience in the traditional ‘world music’ sense. We’ve moved a long way on from it and are happily now celebrating our 50th issue.

What question did you never ask in your magazine but would have liked to?
Simon Broughton, editor: Why is Cuban food so much worse than Cuban music and Thai food so much better than Thai music?

How many magazines do you buy / get / read each month? Do you qualify yourself as a maniac?
Ben Serbutt, art director: I refer to myself as a magazine junkie. I have no idea how many mags I now own, but it would be in the hundreds – from interiors title Vogue Living to skate mags like Monster Children, from ethical issues mag New Consumer to Monocle.

E-mail interview from “August 2008”. © Colophon2007.com – Mike Koedinger

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