Rolling Stone offers paid archive online
TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: Guess which magazine could find new riches if fans will pay to see old pictures from the cover of the Rolling Stone? Starting today, the archives of Rolling Stone, dating back to 1967, will be available online. As Marketplace’s Caitlan Carroll reports, you can go back and re-live the past, but it’ll cost you.
Caitlan Carroll: Want to read every Rolling Stone article written about Bob Dylan since the 1960s? Well for $30, you get access to all of that, plus a copy of the print magazine for a year.
Steven Schwartz is with Wenner Media, the magazine’s parent company. He says this is the first time the public can access the full archives online.
Steven Schwartz: So it’s not like we had offered this all up for free and we’re putting it behind a pay wall. This is brand new.
It may be new to Rolling Stone, but:
Ken Wilbur: It’s definitely the direction that the entire industry is moving in.
Ken Wilbur teaches marketing at Duke University. He says as big newspapers start charging online readers, specialty magazines like Rolling Stone can cash in, too.
Wilbur: When you have a niche audience sometimes you can actually charge those guys more because there are fewer substitutes for your product.
I mean where else will you find decades of Hunter S. Thompson’s ramblings?
I’m Caitlan Carroll for Marketplace.
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