[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting Show. I am Brian Morrissey. Spin is in a position that many legacy media brands are in.
I mean, Spin Magazine was once a defining voice in music journalism, part tastemaker, part cultural barometer, and these days it's something a little bit different. I mean, it doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
In fact, I think the Spin brand may be more valuable now than it was in the not so distant past when it was a glossy magazine.
It's just that its value is expressed differently, and I think this is something that a lot of media brands, they're in this situation right now.
For Spin, that means it's being expressed through its growing TikTok and Instagram distribution, more so on the business side and its licensing deals, its branded events with Spin Sessions, and it even has a record label.
I mean, these brands do not go away, like, they still have enduring value. I joke, and only partially joke, that this is the classier side of the harvesting phase that many legacy media brands are in right now.
And sometimes the brands are harvested for their IP value.
I mean, you have something like Newsweek, which is, you know, really nicely profitable, but a large part of their business is completely different than what Newsweek used to be.
People do not rely on Newsweek for a summation of, and viewpoints on the week's news as much anymore. You know, it's expressed more often in its accolades business.
You look at Forbes, and they're the king of this, right? Like, the, the value that is still wrung out of Forbes is substantial.
And, you know, a lot of people will criticize it and say that maybe Forbes has gone too far, but, like, they're a survivor. And sometimes, you know, these brands are, are...
They're harvested for their, their SEO juice at the end of the day. And I think the choice is, you know, kind of like, are you gonna, like, change, or are you gonna go down, right?
And I think the better, the better choice is to keep going, because I look at it as, like, also that many of these legacy media brands that were born in the analog era end up having far more enduring value than the digital brands that were supposed to replace them.
I mean, Spin is a better business than Pitchfork, right? And you can't avoid that.
So in this episode, I talked to Jimmy Hutchison, the CEO of Spin and the managing partner at Next Management Partners, the investment firm that acquired Spin from Billboard owner Valance in early 2020, right before the pandemic.
Great timing. We talk about that. And we get into what it means to rejuvenate a legacy media brand in an environment that's defined by algorithms and IP harvesting.
Jimmy lays out how Spin went from, you know, what he calls an orphaned asset to what it's become now, which is, like, a multi-platform business built around this enduring brand equity.
And we also discuss what makes a brand harvestable, the difference between being hip and being cool, and why journalism is still the center of it, even as these brands move into different phases.
Let me know what you think about the episode. My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. If you like the Rebooting Show, please leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to it. Now onto my conversation with Jimmy.
[upbeat music] Jimmy, welcome to the Rebooting Show. Thanks a lot for doing this. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right.
So I wanted to have you on to talk about, about Spin, because I, I spend, uh, I wouldn't say a lot of time, but a fair bit of time, you know, talking to people about, you know, brands that have a ton of value, media brands that have a ton of value, and, and then figuring out what the path ahead.
And there's different, there's different paths you can take for every brand, and I just think it's good to get into use cases. And so I wanted to talk to you about Spin. Yeah.
So going back, January 2020, great time, right? Oh, yeah. Like, I remember I was, I was traveling in Japan, and, like, people were freaking out about something that was going on in, in, like, China.
I was like, "What are you guys doing? What are these masks?" Anyway, you [laughs] your company purchased Spin at that time.
What, what attracted you to the brand first and foremost, outside of probably having an affinity for it from, from the '80s and '90s? Yeah.
Well, generally the, the brand was always just a cherished brand that people just fell in love with because it, it helped write, to a lot of people, the story of their youth and how they connected with certain artists.
And my company is called Next Management Partners, and we're a media investment firm. We bought it from-- We bought Spin from Billboard- Yeah... in January 2020. Valance, right? Were they Valance then? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Correct. So when I first saw it, I'm like, oh my gosh, I have such fond memories of Spin, and I-- it, it's not that Billboard did anything wrong with Spin.
It just became kind of an orphaned asset within a larger media organization, and I knew there was a fan base of people who felt very nostalgic about it. But then
the former editor, really good guy, he had, like, Billie Eilish on a cover and had... Like, he was really, like, making a push to bring Spin into the next era.
So I-- The word I always like to use with Spin, it, it, it needed to be rejuvenated a little more. And, and what attracted me to it was the, the coverage, the irreverence, the, the artists, the...
You know, there was just a period of time where, where Spin really made a big impact in culture, and I wanted to sort of see that again. And I also thought, why doesn't Spin have a TikTok?
There's no TikTok for Spin, and this is in 2020. So now five years later, we have almost as many followers on TikTok for Spin as Rolling Stone does.
So, you know, that's always theYou know, you, you, you move on to new platforms, you discover who your audience is. You know, we're a creator on TikTok, and I just saw so much opportunity.
I saw something that was so, you know, the, the storytelling Spin did, all of that. Like, there are just so many things I saw I could do with something like Spin.
It was just, you know, I'm smiling, like, ear to ear thinking about it.
Like, even when we purchased the company, like, the Billboard's like, "You know, we have this storage locker and it's over, like, in Jersey somewhere, and, you know, you're gonna have to go over..."
And I'm like, "Oh, I can't wait. What's gonna be in that storage locker?" It's like- Yes... gonna be all kinds of goodies from old magazines and old vinyl and all. Like, it was so cool. Yeah.
It's like that show on where they go and get the storage lockers, they bid on, whatever that's called on, uh- Oh, yeah... History Channel or something. But now I have to come in and be the dark cloud, Jimmy.
That's my role. Yeah. Sure. We all have roles to play, right?
I have to do a thing with my iron rules of media, but one of the ones is that, you know, the shinier, the shinier, the cooler the assets, the worse the business.
And the, and the more, like, grimy and grotesque, like, the asset, the more valuable. [laughs] You know?
But generally, and particularly when you get into culture and e- entertainment, you know, a lot of these assets are very challenged in a modern media environment that is completely different from when, when Live Aid took place, obviously.
Sure. Yeah. No, thanks for bringing that up. I mean, I would put- [laughs] You're like, "Oh, my God, I've never, I've never thought about that." No, I actually have. I think the shiny bright object- Yeah...
is Vice, and that would be a perfect case study in that for without a doubt. I was just, you know, giving my personal passion for Spin and the vibe- No, I get it. But what you, but you gotta look at it- Yeah...
as like, what I'm, I'm trying to get is you gotta look at it as like a har- you know, in the hardcore business lens, too. You can't just be attracted to the vinyl and the memories of the youth and whatnot.
Where did you see that the business, obviously the brand still has resonance, particularly among, I don't know, probably people my age, too, but I guess, like, obviously with TikTok, even a, a younger tu- too.
And it has a lot of IP. And so we see a lot of these, quote unquote- Mm-hmm... legacy assets, I don't mean that in a pejorative way, that still have a tremendous amount of brand value, right? It's different- Totally...
but it's, it's a different type of value than it had in the late '80s. Oh, yeah. Well, I'll say this, I'll work backwards on your question. Yeah. In four years we've 17X'd the revenue of Spin, we turned Spin profitable.
Instagram had 40,000 follower- followers, we now have 800,000. There was no TikTok, we have a huge TikTok. We've hit all the metrics. We have T-shirts in Urban Outfitters. We have a TV and film deal with 101 Studios.
We have a TV show on the air. We have a record label with Randy Jackson. We've-- They-- Like, point after point after point- Yeah...
is Spin's back in a big way and more relevant than ever, and we still have that nostalgic audience, which is kind of me. But there's a lot of kids discovering who Spin is because we're curating new music.
Spin was always good at artist discovery. Spin was the first to write about Olivia Rodrigo. So yeah, I definitely go to what's the business of Spin, without a doubt.
I was kind of joking halfway that, like, Vice was more that shiny object that really isn't that great. Right. That's, that was self-inflicted by the Vice folks. Yeah.
Spin was more of that second of your points, which was the kind of not so shiny, grimy thing that, like, someone needs to resurrect this. Right.
I just saw it as based on the kind of deal we did with Billboard, I'm like, "Oh, well, there's a lot of upside to this," and I was right.
But the upside, I guess what I'm trying to get is, like, where the upside is, right? 'Cause it's more in the brand than the IP, and I wanna get into, like, how- Yeah... you're making, you know, money off of that.
Because it-- the playbook needs to be different than- Sure... when it was, you know, a magazine, right? Oh, yeah. Like, I know you guys have brought back the magazine, but Spin is not a magazine.
It is a brand, and it is expressed in a bunch of different ways. Some of that can be in merchandise, some of that can be in using IP to, to create, you know, I don't know, streaming content. Some of that can be- Yeah...
having events obviously, or activations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the, that's, that's, that's media to me, you know- Yeah... these days.
And I would just say this on the Spin Vice, 'cause that's, like, an interesting one.
I think to me, just from an outsider, like, one of the big differences is, and maybe it's my sort of age, but, like, I see Spin having had a different type of brand equity that built up over a long time, whereas Vice's-- Vice had a lot of B2B brand equity that was built over time.
I was-- Sometimes I thought, like, no offense to the Vice people, I guess since it's mostly past I can, I can say things.
But [laughs] to me it was, like, always, like, a brand manager's conception of what young people are like. Yeah. I think you're right.
Which is, is, is to say that it wasn't completely authentic to, to, to, to its roots in, in, in whatever, in Montreal, in, like, you know, the, the, the early '90s. Yeah. I think that's a fair statement.
No offense to the Vice people. But yeah, I think- [laughs] Shane's all upset, right? [laughs] Yeah. Right? He doesn't care at this point.
[laughs] But long story short, I, I feel like Spin, you know, I think what made it successful in the past is not what is making it successful now and into the future, and that's the point I think you're making.
So- Yeah... for example, Spin was always known, even in the '90s, for putting on Spin sessions and events. How did we 17X the revenue, become profit? We moved really hard into events.
Unfortunately, that moving hard was two months before COVID. But we figured it out. Eventually everyone came back. We were doing a little live streaming, a little this, a little that.
But events have been really good to us. We've, you know, the-- we, we curate showcases. We do events at South by Southwest. We have-A sponsorship revenue stream.
We have ticketing that we do where we're putting on our own shows as basically promoters, and we pivoted that way and I think that that's been unique.
The licensing side, you're right, it's, it's kind of har- I don't wanna say harvesting, like negative, but we've taken- Harvesting exists on a spectrum. It does.
Let's just go with harvest- There's harvesting of IP and there's harvesting, like, on the, like, SEO glue factory. I have to, like, create some sort of matrix on this. You should.
But, like, there's the SEO glue [chuckles] glue factory, which no offense to anyone running that playbook, it is a playbook, and as I said, a lot of the more grotesque areas of media are the more [chuckles] lucrative, so no shade on the SEO glue factory.
Yeah. Yeah. But then there's, then there's harvesting the IP, which you can sort of spin as leveraging the IP or whatever if we're, if we're gonna put a much more positive spin on it. And I, I th- I Yeah...
I think you guys fall- Positive spin [chuckles] You, yeah, so to speak. [chuckles] You guys fall from m- my sort of outside perspective more on that side of, you know, the harvesting spectrum.
Yeah, the not glue factory, more- The leveraging... yeah, the premium- Yes, that's what I'm saying. [chuckles] Yeah.
I think one of our first licensing deal w- is the T-shirts in Urban Outfitters and, and, like, it fit because you go into Urban Outfitters, there are shirts that say Nirvana, and some of the kids think it's a clothing line called Nirvana.
[chuckles] And then i- and the funny thing is Spin was the first to put Nirvana on a magazine cover. Spin helped- I know... discover Nirvana. So I'm sitting there going, "Well, that fits. That's authentic.
You've got a Spin shirt that says Spin New York City 1985 next to a, a Nirvana shirt." So that deal made sense to me.
When 101 Studios came to us, which they produce Yellowstone, they produce Lioness, like they're, they're the largest programmer of content on Paramount Plus.
They produce everything with Taylor Sheridan, you know, that's... They are, like, kind of one of the kings of streaming in TV. And we're like going, "Wow, these are one of the biggest stream...
one of the biggest production companies in Hollywood. That's a partnership."
And they came to us because we have 40 years of content and they wanna turn our content into TV shows, and they're doing a doc about a major record label.
They're working on a doc-- They're working on lots of docs, let's just say.
And long story short, I thought, "Okay, those guys are at the top of their game, and the storytelling they're doing fits with Spin's storytelling."
So those are two examples I think of not being a glue factory and being that more au- Yeah... authentic way to kind of harvest the brand a bit. And then also at the core of Spin is great journalism.
We brought the founder of Spin, Bob Guccione Jr. back, and it was somewhat interesting to see, like, people go, "Well, wait, why did no one ever bring him back?" And then other people are like, "Oh, Bob again."
And that's how I knew I had the right guy- [chuckles]... because he's a character, and if you've ever met Bob, he's got this amazing British accent. He's got an opinion about everything.
It-- But he's what made Spin special. And I'm not saying Bob's updating TikTok for us every day. He's not.
[chuckles] But that editorial seed that allows me to be able to go out and do a deal with Urban Outfitters or 101 Studios, that's kind of because of Bob's leadership and his creativity and the people he brings in, like our lieutenant editors, as I call them, and all the, the creative director.
Just everything that Bob kind of brings around him is what makes Spin special. And when you have a founder at any company, they're gonna put the specialness back into it.
And I think the previous owners of Spin never wanted to take that chance, and a l- a lot of them, and I'm not saying, like, the editors and all the... but I'm talking, like, the owners who had owned all the equity.
They were probably a little more risk-averse, and they were- Yeah... thinking of it more through the lens of, like, "Well, here's what's current, here's what's..." I'm like, it doesn't matter what's current.
What matters is being special and being, like, have that journalism seed there, and then you can go out and do all those deals. Otherwise, you're going down the glue factory route- Right... like you said, Brian.
And I-- Yeah, I think that's like the... And it's a really hard balance, I feel like, to strike and, and that's why I, I talk about that matrix because, you know, keeping a brand relevant is really difficult, right?
And so, you know, what, what Spin stood for in the late '80s is gonna be different in 2025, right? And you have to s- both stay true to what made Spin special, like you said, but at the same time,
y- you, y- i- it's not a growth strategy on TikTok to be doing... I mean, maybe there's a nostalgia thing with, like, Kurt Cobain.
I mean, there's, sadly there's, like, kids that there's zoomers out there who are like, "Oh yeah, I love Nirvana. Like, my parents used to play it, like, when I was a kid," and I'm like, "Oh my God."
[chuckles] But, you know, what do you see, what does Spin, you know, stand for culturally in 2025 that makes it, you know, both relevant to people who are closer to my age, but also relevant to people who are on TikTok?
Great question. It's, it's to me a very clear answer. It's music discovery, and we say, "Discover music, discover yourself." You can discover music on Spotify because the algorithm's pretty darn good.
Amazon Music- Yeah... Apple Music, shout out to all the platforms. Basically- Shout out to the algorithms... you don't need Spin. Shout out to the algorithms. Uh, you don't need Spin to tell you what to go listen to.
What you want Spin for is to add some depth and some texture to what you're listening to. And when a 40-something-year-old comes up to me and says, "Spin, you know, I was a huge..."
This is some, this has been a literal conversation. This friend was like, "I'm such an R.E.M fan. You don't understand how much I like R.E.M." Spin wrote the story of R.E.M.- Yeah...
which wrote the story of my childhood as a teenager.
So there's that guy, and then the current, like, what is it doing now, it's like there's a new artist that no one's heard ofAnd a third party is saying that artist is interesting besides an algorithm and besides their own social media accounts.
Olivia Rodrigo could go out all day long and say, "I'm Olivia Rodrigo," before she was Olivia Rodrigo, but no one cares until other people start saying they like you- Mm-hmm... until the algorithm starts finding you.
And it-- So music discovery to me means that you're like Spins a creator, Spins a tastemaker, and Spins pointing you to artists that you haven't heard of and telling you why they're important.
I think that's one big role for Spin, and then you discover maybe a little bit more of who you are by listening to certain kinds of music and this guy that...
Like, the music discovery, it, it sounds like kind of artistic super right brain, but music's a big part of culture, and if you're pointing people to new artists and you turn them onto an artist they love, they're gonna keep following you on Instagram and all these other places.
And then I guess the other part too is journalism's, like, having a rough go, especially in the news vertical.
If you can be authentic and, and also be somewhat irreverent and not take yourself too seriously, like snobby whatever, people like that.
I mean, there was a point where Spin was kind of considered a little bit of a snootier music outlet. There was a South Park episode that Spin was featured in.
Like, we're in, like, a whole episode of South Park where there's a Spin journalist with a Spin hat and Lorde is performing at this concert, and there's this like...
I won't go into the whole setup here, but basically Spin was made fun of in South Park for taking itself too seriously, which we did for a while. It was before I owned it.
I'm all about Bob's vision on the creative side, and that is about irreverence and fun and not being political.
So music discovery, you know, discover music, dis- discover yourself, being a journalism outlet, but not being too serious.
And then I think being a place where people can kind of escape, and you can escape in all kinds of ways.
It's not like you need Spin to escape, but the world's, you know, going through what it's going through, and I think when you, when you find an outlet that I think you see as like there's nostalgia, but they're also on the cusp of like, "Oh, here's this new artist.
Here's why they're important," I think that's kind of fun and it's nice to get out of your, you know, serious, you know, newsfeed, et cetera. So yeah, there's a couple examples. I hope that answered your question.
Yeah, I think so. I, I wanna drill down a little bit on, on the first part, and, and that, that's about music discovery, right?
'Cause I kinda get that, like, role formerly, but, like, you know, the reality is how people discover music now is completely different.
It might not be the best for, you know, but the reality is how people discover music is completely different. They're not necessarily going to websites to see what a music journalist is recommending, right? Correct.
I think personalities are... There's Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop. Would you call him a music journalist? Would you call him a creator? He's something.
He's a personality-driven guy who's-- He, he calls himself the internet's busiest music nerd. Okay.
That is probably kind of like, I don't wanna say that's how Spin, if it had started in post-YouTube, how it would've started, but maybe it would've been Bob- Probably...
uploading himself to YouTube and creating a personality around Bob and then birthing Spin, right? Yeah. That's p- that-- And now Anthony Fantano has-- It's Anthony.
Now it's The Needle Drop, and then he launched the website. So there is kind of this- Yeah...
I don't wanna say it's a large audience, but there's people that follow journalists in music like Anthony Fantano from The Needle Drop.
The flip side to that is they're, it's not a big audience, and there's probably not a lot of them.
So I guess the role that music discovery plays is you have to tell people why something's important to them, as in an artist or a sound or like you're a arbitrator of taste that's going- Yeah...
"Hey, this is why this is cool." And there's a bigger audience for that. I think that's, in other parts of culture, that's like Complex is, was good, like sneakers and fashion and all these other, you know.
There, there are like, there's a whole ecosystem with Complex. With Spin, it's more niche because it is just music.
But I guess that's, I guess the role that I see is that it's people that follow tastemakers and then the masses follow the people who follow the tastemakers. Yeah.
Like I was shocked one day when I walked into my old office in Venice and I started telling my friend about this amazing magazine in Australia called Monster Children.
And this guy that I was telling this to was like a total ta- And I w- I couldn't believe I had discovered Monster Children before he did, and I told him about it, and to this day, he still reads Monster Children.
Like, there's not a big audience for that, but, uh, the reason I think that co- I don't know their financials or anything going on with them, but tastemaker outlets like that become popular because they're ahead of the curve, and brands wanna be ahead of the curve, and they look to Spin for that- Yeah...
a little bit. We work with huge brands, and they, they wanna tap into Spin's nostalgia, and they wanna tap into maybe learning what's next in music culture. Okay. But so for, like, the audience,
look, I mean, the majority of people are fine with algorithms.
I might, like, not like it, and, like, I might think that, like, there should be more human curation in, in media, and maybe I'm biased because I'm an editor probably.
But the, the reality is good enough is good enough for, particularly at scale, for most people. But that doesn't mean that it's all people, right?
And I think that there's still-And particularly as AI begins to intermediate
so many aspects of our lives, that I do feel like there is gonna be a layer, and it might be, it might be smaller, but it might be more valued of great taste and, and, and human curation.
Like we did a episode on, on taste on People Vs. Algorithms, this other podcast I do. And- Yeah...
I do, and maybe this is wish casting in some ways [chuckles], but I do feel, I, I do hope that that human curation has, has a role to play, particularly among people who don't wanna just follow blindly what is put in front of them by, you know, these, these AI algorithms.
Yeah, I think that generally the-- I guess I can go into kind of a use case.
If you find an artist that you're, you like that you've been served up in Spotify, or you see an artist visually on TikTok in your, in your feed that was served up to you, recommended just out of the blue, you start listening to them a bunch, and then you go, "Where did they...
Where are they from? What inspired their music? What, what, what's the backstory, the why behind it?" It's, it's for folks who are sorta curious. I'm not saying that that's a big audience.
You're right, most people just serve up whatever the, the algorithm... I'm talking about listening. Because you're right, the streaming services pretty much dominate that.
So I guess the human element is-- Well, it, the broader question is probably how do you monetize being a tastemaker? And it's historically there's, there-- This is coming from Bob Guccione Jr.
He, he, he will say there's hip and there's cool, and hip would be Monster Children, cool would be Spin. Okay.
You can't really make a lot of money being hip, because once you start making a lot of money being hip, nobody stays with you.
You can't monetize hip any longer because you're too-- You've now taken money from, like, the man. Yeah. Like, you've commercialized. Once you commercialize hip- Like Supreme. Right [chuckles]. Yeah. Exactly.
I mean, Supreme, Supreme I think, was Supreme ever hip? I feel like they were, they were hip, and then- They were, and then it became everywhere... private equity, like literally private equity [chuckles] bought them.
Okay, there you go. There you go. Pri- private equity or someone else. Like, we all have those friends who are hip, and then once there's, once so- hip is commercialized, it then becomes- Right...
cool, and then the masses somewhat see it. And I'm not saying that... Sometimes I think Spin starts to fall in a little more hip than cool. It probably depends on the year and what we're doing.
But ge- generally, the making money by being a tastemaker, there, there's a fine line there of that hip and cool. And yeah. Yeah. What do you make of the demise of something like Pitchfork? Whoa.
So much I could say here. I feel like Pitchfork, without a doubt, is one of those brands that's, it's one of the most respected names in music. And I think it became a less than desirable
business than the leadership at Condé Nast would have wanted versus all the other titles. They're, they're stuck somewhat like Spin inside of Billboard. The- Mm-hmm...
it's kinda, Pitchfork is an orphaned asset that's somewhat undervalued inside of a portfolio like that. Yeah. Now it's been rolled into GQ. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.
I think that in the right hands you could restore the brand back to its glory days. There's people from Spin that have gone and worked at Pitchfork, and then people that have left Pitchfork and come to Spin.
I mean, it's, it, you know, the festival was canceled, I guess, in Chicago. They do a big festival every year. I think that Pitchfork, there's a lot of traffic, or there was at one point.
It was, in, in terms of just gross traffic, it was probably one of the top in terms of like a Comscore raw traffic number. But how many people are really getting that stuff on a dot com anymore, right?
It's like everyone's on TikTok, everyone's on Instagram. Kids are sending Snapchats to each other. It's n- it's not, I don't know that Pitchfork di- like, they didn't move the way that Spin did.
We, we've been more like a speedboat with, you know, resources behind us. Pitchfork has been more, they're in, they're like a cruise ship, and it's like, "Oh, we can't turn. We're gonna hit an iceberg." Yeah.
And I- That's why it's interesting, a lot of these brands I think would be better off, like, being cut loose and being like, you know, feral and on their own- Yeah...
versus being part of, of a larger portfolio where they're, they're neglected. And, you know, we've seen that.
Like, I think that there's a lot of value to unlock in, in many of these brands, and they're actually being, like, held back. Well, and I think, I think if you unlock the value, then you're acquired by a bigger company.
Yeah. That can work. But they kind of like, they've were swallowed I think a long time ago by Condé Nast. And then so now it's time for- Mm-hmm...
that to sort of move into different hands maybe, and then someone else to kind of build it back up, and then a different type of owner to maybe own it. Yeah.
How would you differentia- differentiate, and then I'm gonna get into a lot more details about the playbook, but how would you differentiate the playbook that you're running versus like what, what, that Jay Penske is doing with, with Rolling Stone?
Which is, you know, was always the sort of, to me, the, the, the number one in the category. They were the biggest in the category, and they've gone through all, all kinds of tumult there.
But I'd, I'd love your perspective on it. Yeah. Well, the, there's no doubt that Rolling Stone and Spin have always been head-to-head for decades.
It's been, it's like Pepsi and Coke, and people often think of us in the same light. I think the main difference- Are you Pepsi or are you Coke?Good question. No one's asked that Dr. Pepper? Yeah. [laughs] Get going.
Man, a good question. Anyway, I, I feel like the playbook at Pinsky with Rolling Stone versus my playbook, well, for one, we don't do a lot of political coverage at Spin.
As I mentioned earlier, we're more about the fun and, like, the irreverence. And I think Rolling Stone has done a, it's a lot of political coverage. There's people that read them for the political side- Yeah...
of what they do. Quite frankly, there's just better alternatives for news than Rolling Stone. I'm not being political about it at all.
Like, if, if you wanna read about that type of political coverage, there's just- Yeah... a lot of competition in news. Also news is- And you get all the downside without the upset. Yeah, exactly. And who wants to...
These days, who wants to be in news? It, it's the trustworthy scores of news media are through the floor. You couldn't be any worse.
Like, I saw a report the other day, I'm not, I'm not picking on them, but it was a report about where NPR is getting their funding, and then they traced all the stories that NPR had been doing based on these foundations who had given them their funding, and it was like, whoa, this is, whoa, shocking.
Now, maybe there were journalists already working on that, but there's like after 10 different stories come out that are directly tied to, like, Bill Gates- Yeah... and others, you go, "Hmm, there's a pattern here."
So that means that news media is not near as trustworthy as it, as it used to be, and there's pr- there are trustworthy people at NPR, there's trustworthy people at every big news outlet.
But the point back to Pinsky and Rolling Stone is that touching news is like, ugh, like you said, there's a, there's... It's just downside.
The second part with what Pinsky is doing versus what we're doing is that they're a bit more what I would call, like, corporate media, and it's we're about the independent artists.
Like, on the cover of Rolling Stone, you'll see someone like Drake. On the cover of Spin, you'll see Killer Mike and Run the Jewels. Like, we're just- Yeah...
we're cooler, we're younger, we're, I think, a little bit more with what's happening.
And there are specific writers and people at Rolling Stone that are also that, that don't cover the news, and they're good people, and they're good writers, and great.
But generally speaking, the Rolling Stone brand is like, I'm walking through, I don't know, LAX, like, there's a Rolling Stone store in LAX. It's like bubblegum pop kinda stuff like, oh- Yeah...
Blackpink's on the cover of Rolling Stone. And- Well, they're opening, they're opening a casino in Vegas. Yeah, exactly. And I, and they should make a lot of money with that.
I just think the way you do with Spin, you do, like, like the indie kinda cool thing, and then Rolling Stone opens a casino. Exactly. Right. [laughs] Yeah, that's- And, and my playbook's als- like, I don't...
I'm not trying to, like, harvest my organs at Spin, like, like sell off every little thing.
[laughs] Like, I'm, I'm trying to make strategic decisions about where to license the name and be really careful and not alienate our fan base, young or old. Yeah.
So, so give me a breakdown of what the business is, and as specific as, as you'll get. Right? Like, I mean, it's not an advertising business, right?
You're not, you're, you're not primarily making money by getting people on a website just to, to put programmatic and/or direct sold ads in front of them.
I'm sure that's part of the business, but- Yeah, that's some of it. Yeah, I'd say I'd break it down into maybe call it four buckets. Sure. What you said, the legacy media piece, website- And print too.
You're back in print... ads. We're back in print. Let's just, that's one, but that's- Yeah... you know. Is branded content is two. Licensing- Okay.
So a, so a, a brand will come to you and you'll create, you'll create content. You'll... It's a studio business or an agency business. Correct. Okay. Yeah. That's the second.
The third would be the licensing, which I've highlighted around Urban Outfitters, TV, film.
Like, I, I put all of the brand extensions where Spin doesn't operate those extensions, but we lend our name and do the marketing. Mm-hmm. Those would be what I call, like, licensing. Yep.
And then the fourth is events, which have been big, which is ticketing, sponsorships, you know, a, a much like what a concert promoter would do, but with a little bit more curation. Hmm. So how do those four areas rank?
I'd say branded content is at the top, then events, then licensing, then media. Um, it's funny- Okay. So that's-... back in the old days-... that's a major [laughs], that's a major change. Yeah. Yeah.
Back in the old days, media would've been at the top. I think it's... The, the most exciting and the fastest-growing is licensing, because I think the brand is back in a big way- Yeah...
and people are very responsive to what we're doing. The, the big part with licensing is it's, you have to do things different. It's like we... For example, have you ever heard of Techstars? Yeah.
It's a, a tech incubator. Yeah. Well, we saw Techstars Music, and we're going, "Well, wait, we should have a incubator for Spin. Let's launch Spin Labs."
So we launched Spin Labs with a venture capital group, and we've been investing in music tech startups much the way that Techstars Music was doing. Techstars Music is now no more.
They've stopped as of, like, six months ago, but we're growing Spin Labs. Yeah. We're making new investments. It's going great.
So that to me is like most people, I think, in my position just kind of go out and they're like, "Hand me money. License my brand." It's like- Come on... it doesn't work like that now. This is media. I mean, come on.
This [laughs] Yeah. You have to work your butt off. We're out looking for the companies. It, it could be a ticketing company. It could be a, a, a...
There's a company trying to help peopleWith how they get onto the Billboard charts. There's, you know, some AI companies. I mean, really interesting companies doing things that Spin doesn't do, and what do they need?
They need access to the artists, they need capital, and then they need marketing help, and that's what we offer them. And there's been some really exciting companies that have been a part of Spin Labs. Okay.
Yeah, so like how do those deals-- like are, are you doing more than just, you know, getting a payment for the use of the brand? 'Cause I think one of the things with licensing is it looks great on a spreadsheet. Great.
And that's the good part and it's the bad part, right? Because, you know, I, I sometimes facetiously joke, but I'm actually dead serious.
It's like when, you know, when Forbes put its name, its brand on like some kind of like shopping center in suburban Manila, like you can get into the suburban Manila shopping center pretty quickly when you file a spreadsheet [chuckles].
Yeah. That's- I'm not telling you how to run your business, Jimmy... that's private equity If that's [laughs] No, we're not doing that. Yeah, I think we wanna be hands-on with the partners. We wanna know who they are.
I think when we're talking licensing, it, it first starts with what is authentic and somewhat organic, and what makes sense for us. But specifically, there's two ways we think about it.
One is joint ventures, where we're setting up an entity, there's, you know, revenue shares, money's flowing in, money's flowing out. And then there's just straight licensing, which is a royalty.
And it really just depends on the business because even though I call our deal, our TV film deal licensing, I mean- Yeah... yeah, but we're developing- It, it's on a spectrum... content. Yeah, every deal is custom.
Like if you're selling T-shirts i- in-- and I don't know how this deal works, but if you're selling, you know, T-shirts, right, in Abercrombie, like you don't-- it's not like you're gonna make the T-shirt or so- I mean, you'll be involved in design and things of that nature, but I mean, this is their business, right?
Like- Yeah. Yeah... it would be, it, it would stand to me to be more like pure licensing versus a Spin Labs, where you guys bring way more to the table.
I don't mean this like one is more important than the other, I'm just saying the dynamics, it would stand to reason would, would be different in, in whether you're selling T-shirts or whether you're, you're standing up a, an, an incubator.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think incubator, straight up joint venture, somewhat more hands-on, a, a T-shirt license with our logo is, you know, that's not as heavy of a lift, but there's more marketing involved.
I'd say the, the, the big theme here with all of these is how do you manage the IP that you own? The IP is the covers of Spin, the IP is the written articles that are turned into TV shows or films.
I think I see it in my life, you know, I have an investment firm called Next Management Partners, and we invest in media deals, but it's investing really in IP. You saw, gosh, what was it the other day?
I s- Village Roadshow is up for sale, which is like all the Matrix films. And their ask, and I don't know if they'll get it, is seven or eight times revenue.
Well, that's a library of content where you can create derivatives of The Matrix. There's Oceans 11, 12, 13. There's this incredible library, and this is like the high end of the IP play. Mm-hmm.
Seven, eight times revenue. And then you had something like, I think Roku bought This Old House, like the old Bob Vila shows, and they paid like four times revenue. There's catalogs.
There, there, there's an argument to be made that in certain media companies, the value is the IP library and the name, and then what you do with that.
So I also look at it from when I license- I think in most media companies, right? Like, I mean, I, I mean- Yeah...
like if you ha- It's like good problem to have, like, you know, because-- Like let's put it this way, like when, when you look at like sort of digital media assets, those that were born in the digital media era and became, you know, very big in, with traffic, right?
In that. Like if you look at the- Yeah...
the underlying value of those assets versus a really good asset that came out of the, the magazine era, usually the magazine-- usually there's more value left in, in the magazine brands because they have more IP.
The brands are stronger. A lo- digital media created a lot of flimsy brands. You know- It did...
people might have mourned on Twitter for like a day or two, but, you know, most, most of those brands didn't really have necessarily a reason to continue to exist, as, as harsh as that is. No, you're right.
I think there were some fly-by-night brands that built up-- What is that saying? Like the faster you rise, the, the harder you fall. And they built up kind of overnight. It's Jimmy Cliff, I think. Yeah.
[laughs] I, it, it- The philosopher Jimmy Cliff, I, I believe [laughs] Yeah, seriously. I feel like the, those brands that I, I don't wanna name many names, but yeah, they,
they were blogs when blogging was a thing, and then they became like destination sites. And now you look back and go, "Man, those were like a flash in the pan," right? Yeah.
And, and then, and those get shipped off to the SEO glue factory. They, they get- Yeah...
strip mined for their SEO value in, in many cases, and, you know, some people might get squeamish about that, but, you know, that's just, that's just how this-- that's the cycle of life, you know? Yeah, exactly.
And but like when you have real IP value, you can, you, you can and should run a different playbook. So I think- Mm-hmm... that is the interesting. So what is-- You've mentioned journalism, right?
Like and, you know, a lot of times when a brandIs, is in the sort of harvesting stage, right? That, that stuff is, is sort of goes by the wayside, right?
And, and, and in many cases, it's not a morality play, it's just because it doesn't necessarily mattel- matter for the playbook that the-- that they're running, you know? Yeah. I mean, just to be clinical about it.
Why, why is journalism important for the playbook that you're running? It's really what made Spin special in the beginning and what allows us to run the rest of the business.
If you harvest off all the, what I'll call journalism, the storytelling, it's storytelling. If you harvest that off and it's not managed properly, you can't do all the other things that you wanna do with the brand.
The reason those pl- some of these playbooks we're thinking about have called to like cut everything, cut corners, cut journalists, et cetera, it's because sometimes there's private equity owners that may not understand all of this.
But yeah, you have to take a risk and have actual journalists doing the work, and those journalists have to be storytellers who understand social a little bit, understand how if they're gonna write something, how are we gonna promote it on Instagram?
Like, why does that make sense on Instagram? 'Cause the audience is going to find out about it in Instagram Stories. They're not gonna go on a.com. Like they do. Yeah, yeah, some people do. But
I think generally the, the, the reason journalism has become... it's even more important is because there's so much bad stuff out there. Yeah.
And when you go and read some of the legacy issues of Spin, like I remember reading a story that Spin did on Kate Moss. 'Cause you know, Spin was never just music, music, music.
It's what has made the music coverage better is not being just music. Like we had- Mm-hmm... a story on Kate Moss. We had, like you mentioned, the Live Aid story where we did an investigation.
Like it made the rest of the coverage more f- more full and more deep. That Kate Moss story pops off the page. Well, there's some problems now.
The problem is, one, people don't really read much anymore, like in terms of the masses. [laughs] Who has time to read? Like, they are on their TikTok dealing with scroll, scroll, scroll.
Like, I don't wanna sound like... It's just the truth. Like, I've got young kids. Like they're, like the, the point is they're not out there reading an article about Kate Moss.
So a journalist today has to play a lot of different roles, and the, the most pure role they can play is that they're a good storyteller and they're truthful. Yeah.
And we're not doing- we're not gonna go back into the news topic again, but I, I just feel like the role journalism's playing is to tell, to know what, what, what the definition of a great story is, to be truthful, and then to know how to promote your work beyond just like you have this like- Yeah...
rubber stamp. Like, "The magazine's coming out tomorrow and I gotta turn in my story." It's like, no, it's a lot more dynamic than that. Yeah. The, the extreme of that was learn how to write for SEO.
How do you write for the algorithm? Like sure, that's back to the glue factory a little bit. Yeah.
But I still think even on the biggest, most premium sites, uh, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, whatever, th- those writers are... They have to know how to input content into the CMS and tag- Yeah...
and this and that. There's best practices. But that, the reason I feel like it's important is that that's what gives the brand power.
That i- that is your, that's your product, and if you're going to run a playbook that calls for slash this, slash that, slash this, you have to be thinking about what really makes your brand special, and that's probably the journalism and the storytelling and media.
Right. I think the hard part is you invest, it costs money to do journalism, right? And you're, you're often in these models making money in shoulder activities, I guess they would call them.
Like, you know, like they're not, it's not directly. So like, you know that you need to invest in the core asset, but the way you're, you're making money is downstream of that. Yeah. It can be...
You're, you can be making money in events. I mean, I used to deal with this on the B2B side. It's like all our revenue was in events, but we were like hiring reporters. It's like, well, why would you be doing that?
Look at the spreadsheet. The money is in events. You should be investing in the events, not in this like writing stories to put like, like banner ads next to them. That, you're losing money on that.
So how do you, how do you...
'Cause I think that is somewhere where when you get into a pure PE playbook, that's when the asset gets, the core value of the asset gets under-invested in and the harvesting just takes over itself and then it's like a snake eating its tail.
Yeah. Good point. That's true. I will say this, in the case of any outlet that say is heavily making lots of money on events, y- your events don't really work if you aren't- Right...
co- doing the coverage of the industry. In some ways it, that, I would argue that those events that you're speaking of weren't as successful as they would've been without the reporters you were hiring. Yeah. Yeah.
You- You know it like notionally, right? But if you're just- Yeah... doing a pure sort of spreadsheet approach and you're looking at like, you know, leveraging the business, I think sometimes that leads to...
And we've all seen it.
When these, when a lot of brands have moved over to a different phase of their life, right, they, a lot of times the people who are operating these assets starve the, the journalism content, whatever gave it value in the first place because the, the way that the value is being extracted is downstream of that.
So it's like sort of- Yeah... you know, and I understand it. It's very tempting. It just takes a little bit of a long-term view because nobody's, not many people in this business are Mother Teresa exactly.
I mean, you have to make money.
And so, but at the same time-You know, you have to resist, to me, and, and again, depending on the playbook you're running, but it behooves you to resist strip mining an asset for whatever value y-you can get out of it at that moment.
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, it's... Those reporters that you're speaking of, it's, it's, it's kind of a marketing cost. It's, it's buzz.
You're building buzz for the brand and credibility for people to wanna buy tickets- Right... to the event. They're not buying tickets to the event because you put up a sign and you rent out the Ritz Carlton ballroom.
Like, they're doing it because there are reporters covering a niche. Yeah. And y-you have subject matter experts who will be there. So it's a marketing cost. I, I don't wanna be that- Yeah...
shrewd in saying that, but if I'm thinking private equity, yeah. No, for sure. Buzz and marketing. No, it is a marketing cost. But like, so w-what is... And then we can wrap it up.
But like explain the event strategy that you have. I mean, is it more around, you know, these Spin sessions, or are you looking to get into like a bigger- Yeah, looking to get- Like festival, like that kind of world.
Yeah. I mean, I could see a Spin festival. Sure. Oh, yeah. We are. The festival business is under a lot of pressure lately and, you know, you have to have something really special.
I think what's working in that world now is like the more high-end festival type curation. There's, you know, there, there's a lot of examples that are working better on the high end. Think like- What's like high-end?
Like Coachella or something not the- Like a, like a Fish in Mexico, and it's 5 to 10 grand. Oh, okay. That's not Coachella. Your hotel, your ticket. Your flyaway Fish trip. Your- Oh, God...
sixth man cruise, like the 311 cruise. It's not, it's not, it's not for me. And it's- But like that's fine. Well, there's an emo- Fish is divisive. [laughs] Yeah, they are, but they're not that divisive.
I mean- I feel like you're a Fish person-... Champagne... or you're really, they're, they're not for you. Yeah.
I mean, well, I, I will say this, that besides those vacation flyaway luxury type deal, the, the cruises, like there's an emo cruise. Like the founder of Emo's Not Dead, which is a really fun Instagram account.
[laughs] He started a cruise and it's like Dashboard Confessional and they, like all these kind of- That's awesome...
mid-tier emo bands and they sell out every year and they make some money, and tho-those are kind of fun. I'm not saying that we're doing any of those.
We might be planning some of those, but the s- the, the events we've been doing have been usually adjacent to festivals. So s- we do events at South by Southwest and at Art Basel, and we'll, we'll, we'll...
And we have these kind of pop-up events next to other big events. And then we're getting into probably doing some of our own, like flag in the ground. This is like our big yearly mega Spin type event and/or festival.
There's some plans in the works. There's some partners that we're talking to. That is, I think, the path because there's an appetite for it.
I could see, just like Pitchfork used to have a festival, there could be a Spin festival. There could be a Spin conference. It's fun to dream about those kind of things.
I think it all does start again with what makes it special, what makes it different, why are people showing up? We don't need to just throw our name on some festival. We really wanna make things different and- Yeah...
be authentic about it and not just let things fly out the door. And I'm, you know, we're... It's like measure twice, cut once. Like we- Yeah... wanna be careful and yeah, so those are, that's kind of the event side.
But I think for now we like these Spin sessions, like the, a festival adjacent parties. I think that's good for our brand. And then we're finding like- So what is the form- what is the format?
What's the event format for like a Spin session? So it'll be, for example, at, at Art Basel, so we rent a house and we have a big lineup of DJs because Miami is such a DJ culture. And- Oh, yeah... DJs come and play.
If you live in Miami long enough, you know a DJ within- Yeah... like a month. Yeah. The, well, a lot of fly in, a lot of people fly in- Yeah. [laughs]... from overseas into Art Basel.
But yeah, gen-generally speaking, we're, it's two revenue streams. It's ticketing and sponsorships, and we're, it's a curated guest list. It's celebrities coming by. It's dinner. Right.
It's a whole kind of event within... It's, it's, it's with tastemakers and then there's sponsors. But it's smaller. It's not, it's not like the Nylon. Yeah. The, we're talking like a couple hundred.
I went to that one year. Brian, Brian, Brian invited me to the N- Nylon. It's not, I'm a little- Oh, nice... too old for that, but- Yeah.
N- you know, they're, they're just successful or they- But no, it's a good example. I mean, look, like Bustle- Yeah... has, has a, has a ton of challenges in front of them. I mean, I wouldn't want that job.
But like- Yeah, that'd be tough... you know- Yeah... with what they've done with Nylon, that's the path.
That's a great example of a, a cultural magazine brand that has a different value in the marketplace than it once did, and it still exists. Yeah. You know?
But like what they, what they deliver to their partners a lot of times is the lift that they're getting in earned media and through influencers on different channels. Like they are...
I, I kinda call them as like a cultural general, a, a cultural general contractor in some ways, in that they're- I like that... able to, you know, curate a really big event at a place like Coachella or Art Basel.
They have the cachet to get the talent that has a real heat with, with an audience that is frankly, you know, stronger than what Nylon the brand even has, right? Yeah. That's just the reality.
But Nylon also has the ties, you know, through Bustle with, with the, the brands, and so they can, they can sort of act as bringing it all together. Yeah. No, it's, it's a good example.
I think Bustle probably just owns too many brands, and they have a lot going on there, and I think- Yeah... I know the Bustle guys. I know the previous owner of Nylon. You know, I, I think
what, what Spin is doing is like Nylon, but we're doing it more curated, and we're a little bit more... Like, I think at their Coachella party, they have thousands of people there, and we're doing a more specific- Right.
Yeah... guest list, and we're doing something a little more- Yeah... niche than what Nylon- The Nylon party was not, was not that curated. I was there. It wasn't too curated. Yeah. And I, I think that we're...
I mean, in a way, I could see Nylon going the direction of like, okay, now we're gonna do like more curated.
Like Spin, we may go like the Nylon direction, like more mass party, but still make it quality, and that's my concern. I don't wanna- Right... I don't wanna just open the floodgates and then it becomes this thing.
But also Spin was never like an elitist brand either. I'm, when I'm saying curated, I'm not trying to say it's just like jet setter people. It's like, it's just, it's tastemakers and- I get it...
people like that, and I, I think Spin's gonna probably move more and more into that Nylon direction. Okay. That's great. Well, if you ever do like a Pearl Jam cruise, like I'm, I'm on it. Like, you know? Okay. Of course.
[laughs] Pearl Jam's great. Yeah. I love it. R.E.M. cruise, 100%. If you can get- Yeah. You're in... if you can get them to, you know, do a cruise together, that would be amazing. I would be on that too. That'd be good.
Michael Stipe on your podcast to get a cabin for you and Michael- Yeah, we'll do a podcast... to do a podcast together and- I'll go on the Oasis cruise too. There you go.
I'm, and I'm not a cruise person, so [laughs] Me either. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Jimmy- Yeah... thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, this was great. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. [outro music]