The Death of the Fanzine?

This is an article about how the fanzine is dying out over time. I think this is mainly because of all the well produced magazines, online magazines and blogs that are around now and much more accessible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7908705.stm

The Golden Age was to last until the mid-1990s, when fanzine editors gradually started logging on to the digital age and instead published their musings in the cheaper, less-time consuming and apparently more interactive formats offered by the internet.

Prof Atton said: "When the web first started to have an impact on amateur publishing in the mid-90s, very few people actually wanted to do it.

"Some tried it and moved back again, while a few stuck with it and it completely changed what they were doing.

"But I would actually argue that the level of interaction the reader has with a print publication is more serious than people have with a blog or internet site.

"It takes so much more thought and effort to actually write an article and contribute it to a fanzine or to write a letter to an editor than it does to type a four-line response to a blog post - the level of debate online is often the equivalent of a bar room discussion that focuses on the minutia.

"A lot of people are still turned off by moving to the web, where fanzines lose many of the characteristics that made them so appealing."

The sale of fanzines, which often cost a few pence and had tiny print runs when they originally appeared, is now more likely to be done on auction sites like eBay than it is outside gigs or in local record shops, with nostalgic collectors willing to pay four-figures sums for copies of pioneering titles like punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue.

And Prof Atton said that the web, with its blogs, tweets and social networks, is now the undisputed king of amateur music commentary.

But small bands of hardcore fans continue to lovingly write, edit and print in their bedrooms - even if sophisticated desktop publishing software has often replaced the cut and paste days of Pritt Sticks, scissors and electric typewriters and the once-omnipresent flexi discs have been ditched in favour of shiny CD-Rs.

Some current music fanzines continue to emerge from nascent musical scenes and genres, like the grime and dubstep-focused Woofah.

Others, like the long-running Bucketfull of Brains, largely concentrate on traditional but currently "unfashionable" rock genres that are unlikely to be widely covered elsewhere.

For many devotees, fanzines have the same appeal over internet blogs as vinyl records do over MP3s - they prefer something they can actually hold.

But Prof Atton, who will be giving a public lecture on the history of fanzines on 9 March, admitted he now largely views fanzines as historical artefacts rather than as the cutting-edge cultural phenomenon they once were.

He added: "The National Library sees fanzines as part of the cultural heritage of this country but 30 years ago if you had handed them a copy of Sniffin' Glue it would have gone straight in the bin, and that comes from the massive change in how popular culture is covered."