When we heard that London-based free dance mag One Week To Live was launching a new website we didn’t realise that they had also decided to stop putting out their weekly print publication altogether, with immediate effect.

Even in the 100th (and final) issue that’s on the streets at the moment, the message is far from clear. So what happened? And what does it say about the continuing changing face of the dance media?

With our growing TV, Radio and digital news and download offerings, we’re obviously enthusiastically pushing ahead into this new era here at Ministry of Sound, so we were keen to hear what George Crones, publisher of OWTL, had to say about his own reasons for changing tack.

It’s a particularly important issue, as back in the late 90s dance music had plenty of magazines covering it and its many sub-genres. But then, one-by-one they started to close down, or were offloaded by the big publishing houses to far smaller companies. The mainstream press used this as one justification to claim ‘dance music is dead’, whereas others said the rise of the internet was simply making print titles, particularly those about music, obsolete.

Then came OWTL, available totally free and very much in the spirit of the age. A bold new take on the whole ‘nobody wants to pay for content anymore’ issue. So does it’s sudden closure and move to becoming a web-based operation mean that even that idea for a magazine is unworkable?

George: “The magazine format is not finished, but I do think the future of all dance media (i.e. not just dance press) is online. The way we consume media has changed. More and more people are using the internet as their primary, and sometimes only, means of finding out about, consuming, purchasing and interacting with media. This is the case with music – particularly electronic and urban music, where you have a younger, more technically-savvy audience.
One Week To Live was the largest dance music magazine in the UK and we distributed more copies in a month than all the other dance press combined. We were able to grow largely because we were a free title that came out every week. Right now readers can get up-to-the-minute information online for free, so it is harder than ever to convince them to hand over their money for a magazine that is out of date before it hits the shelves. Though it is not something they normally talk about, the paid-for UK dance titles have been steadily losing circulation for years. That trend can’t go on and be sustainable, so at a certain point they will have to go digital as well. But it won’t just be us and other dance magazines. I think in the not-too-distant future there will also be more online media start-ups that cover dance music and that can only be a good thing.”

We’ve had at good look at the new website and it doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking. The idea of bringing out a whole magazine’s-worth of content every Monday also seems like a very print-based idea, that doesn’t fit with the way the internet is heading. So we asked George what the online OWTL will offer that the magazine didn’t?

“Initially the content will be quite similar. Being online means we can make our entire archive available and we are in the process of uploading all past content right now (though it is taking a while!). As you can imagine, with 100 issues under our belt already, there is a lot of great content for people to enjoy. And, just like the magazine, it will all be free.
In the very near future, we are planning on introducing more features that take advantage of the digital format. In the coming months, we intend to introduce more multimedia and interactive features – a blog, several Podcasts, music downloads, and audio and video content – all of which complements our existing written content. We have some limited community features already, such as a user comments and a forum, which we would like to expand and we will also be working towards some areas with user-generated content.”

It will be interesting to see how OWTL manages the shift to digital, particularly as their existing audience will need to go and re-find them with very little warning. For now, it doesn’t feel like their digital offering is really taking advantage of the best of the internet, but then it’s a learning curve for everyone as new technologies spring up virtually every day at the moment. We certainly wish them luck in this brave new world.

It’s a shame that the free print mag is gone, but I’m not sure we’ve seen the end of that sort of thing in dance music just yet.

Let us know how you find out your news about clubbing, music and DJs these days, and what you’d like to see us doing.

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