There was nothing better than to visit my local consumer news agency and finding my specially ordered copy of Computer Music Magazine had arrived, with its CD Rom full of crappy loops, questionable demo versions and even free soft synths and drum machines. Days of wonder...

EM was cool, but Future Music (UK) was where it was at, each month a CD of new samples and clips from the gear being reviewed in the mag.

"It's all ads" he says on a KZfaq channel, on a platform that absolutely chokes me with ads. 😅

Cool vid. Nick Bat from Sonic State has said something to the effect of "if we don't feature a review of a new, popular product that means something". Presumably that the product isn't good enough to be positive about it. As Sonic State's gear reviews are generally very positive as well. I could imagine a similar mechanism being in place back then in printed magazines. Besides not wanting to bite the hand that fed them.

Nostalgia overload just in the first four seconds! Mackie Baby Hui Lexicon MPX 550 *KRK Monitors Access Virus C Terratec EWS MIC8 Akai DPS24 Waldorf D-Coder TC Helicon VoiceOne Mackie Control *Korg Triton Studio Yamaha S80 Korg Karma *Yamaha AW16G *Rode NT4

Keyboard Mag! I liked Jim Aiken's reviews and articles the best. I always thought he was fair. I still see him occasionally in the Reason forum on Facebook...which is really cool. I salivated over those magazines. I wanted sooooo much and could afford so little. But I did learn a lot and they made buying a MIDIverb or a Roland JV-880 mean so much more because I FINALLY got to own a piece. It was an unhealthy obsession but it was a lot of fun and I mostly stayed out of debt. Paid for my Ensoniq EPS with cash and I felt the pain of every $20 bill leaving my hand. It took forever to save for that thing!

All magazines were like that. My friend wrote for off road magazines and he was told never say anything bad about any of our advertisers during your reviews

Wonderful overview, and what a flashback to see so many of those ads! I’m 55 this year, and what you have raised is very much spot On!

That centerfold though... nice knobs @@

I see where you are coming from, but I think something else has changed that puts the role that the magazines played in a different light. During the 80’s through the early 00’s there were often pro level music stores that stocked and displayed MOST of the gear found in the magazines. These stores were often staffed with people who prided themselves on being knowledgeable about the gear and its capabilities. I think we saw the magazines as the first place to learn about what was available or coming soon, and then we had a place to go and put our hands on the actual equipment and listen with our own ears. I myself sold synths samplers and digital recording systems for several years and I took it very seriously. I always appreciated the store that sold me my first used synth (an Octave Cat) and later let me play around with the Juno 106 they kept on the floor (until I had saved enough to put down a deposit on it). So later, when I became a person selling synths and software, I tried to be genuinely helpful getting people what they needed to do the job. These days, I live in a very large city but even here the music stores seem to be stocking less and less pro gear and the people in the stores are rarely able to offer detailed information about it. Inevitable I guess as the business has just changed so much due to mail order and the internet. So maybe it was just me, but I never expected magazines to be unbiased, they listed out features and gave us a heads up about what was around the corner, but I think I saw them for the promotion driven publications they were and for me, the decision to buy was made from testing it out in the store or even renting one to play around with. Loved the video and I’m looking forward to exploring more of your content. 😀

I loved getting the CDs from Computer Music and Future music. They did video interviews with Bonobo and Four Tet before they got big. They had to record the DAW by putting the camera up to the screen lol.

Great video, brought back a bunch of memories! I worked briefly at one of the magazines you mention back in the early 1990's. I was the ad salesman, and I'd gotten the job via my then-girlfriend-now-wife, who was the assistant editor at the time. There definitely was tension between selling ads and giving advertisers favorable editorial treatment, but I will say that the editor in chief at the time was probably the most ethical person I've ever worked with in all my years. He absolutely wouldn't tolerate "advertorial" content, and even if I sold the inner front cover page at the card (list price) rate, he wasn't going to say nice things about a piece of gear that he or his reviewers thought sucked. That's the main reason you'd rarely see reviews with less than 4 or 3.5 stars; if it was a bad review, we'd give the manufacturer a heads-up to see if we'd missed something, made a mistake, or if it was something they could address, but if not, we'd usually just not run the review. That was part of the tension: we didn't want to create ill will with a company that might advertise even if we chose not to cover their products.

Those ads gave you dreams of excitement,those ads were worthy of 79 pages to seek out new wonders...the guitar mags were the same....drool,drool!

The Zoom ad at 2:08 is perfectly correct - I've used a Zoom 1608 for years and it has always worked perfectly. No PCs in my studio!

So happy this landed in my feed, thank you!

Great video! Always happy to see new stuff from you

This video is so wonderful! There’s the nostalgia alone, but also much more. I appreciate your perspective, research, presentation, and sense of humor.

Dang dude you did the research calc on this, even if it was "only" one year. Indicative of the entire magazine industry honestly, subscriptions/purchases were a fraction of ad revenue so it's always a game of keeping them happy. Superb editing, including hitting us with the Dave Smith at the end. 😢🙏

I was just thinking about you and here you are releasing a new video! Very cool! Although I'm a big fan of magazines, I'm very aware they're all more or less just bundled advertisements. The occasional tutorial is great. Therefor I still like Computer Music Magazines the most. I also love how it comes with sample videos and tutorials and let's not forget the access to all their plugins.

Awesome video! I was reading Keyboard, EM, and Sound on. Sound from the 80s to somewhere in the 2000s. Definitely transparently advertising-driven but I enjoyed them. Lots of good tutorial-type content even if there was an ad for the product next to it.

Loving this channel. Very nicely produced. Another point in this discussion about these publications; the reason why only certain brands became iconic and are so expensive. Neuman, api, etc

This was my life! Thank you for doing this!

That Cubase SX ad ❤️❤️❤️ excellent video and speaks volumes on how lucky we are to have KZfaq and creators to do all this hard work for us 🤘🏼

Great video - the nostalgia makes me wish I could go back and time and start the music journey over again with what I know now.

hardcore throwback to being in highscool and reading these at my local Barnes and Noble and then jacking the DVDs so I could watch the masterclass videos haha, never really noticed the stuff about the ads because at the time I was more worried about seeing what other producers were doing and using

This video was awesome, your presentation of the history in it was awesome, and I am now a new subscriber to your channel because of this video and its content!

Good to have your videos back... nostalgia is always a two-edged sword. What I will say is: even today, many (most, a lot, more than you think) videos suffer from biases. But god bless Sound On Sound!

This was a great video to watch. And very well put together and documented.

PS- Great vid. Amazingly original ideas as ever. Love the channel. Keep it uuuuuup !

Really great video! I was hooked the whole way. Hope everything is cool in your world :D

Always good to see content by you, man!

Great piece. I still flip through my old copies of Music Tech once in a while.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Great to see something new from you Noir. I always tune into your channel when I see something come up. What you are saying about the old magazines is so true. Back in the days I used to get these magazines, look at the address where the nearest stores were, or if I was going to be in that area while gigging, and take a trip to the store and spend the afternoon trying out the gear and asking the store salesman on his opinion. I didn't know what I was doing so as I had just got my publishing signing money I bought a lot of things that I didn't need and some that I never used as I only used what I could understand. I just used a ( don't laugh) Yamaha DJX and Sony Playstation MTV Music Generator recording into a Fostex DMT8VL. I basically bought about £15,000 worth of equipment and only used £1500 worth, if that. The value dropped drastically on the secondhand market too so my getting my money back was impossible on resale at the time. Fortunately one of my projects did very well on vinyl so I did make back most of the money on my last vinyl project at the end of 2000 but to this day if I buy any of those magazines I take whatever they say in reviews with a pinch of salt and now with experience when I go to a store I play whatever I'm interested in for months before I actually buy it and by the time I bring it to my studioI I already know how to use it and am confident that it's worth it.

Love this. Recently found a few old copies of Electronic Musician from the early 90’s at a local thrift store in my area and they’ve been fun/hilarious to thumb through

I enjoyed listening to it. Well done. Great flow.

Not sure how I only just now found your channel… glad I did! I’m an old-school mag guy myself and had the Tascam 8 track tape recorder before digital even lol… still playing and still recording. But like you, it always amazed me that we NEVER saw a review that was “negative” and always ended with a low key sales pitch. The mags definitely was gatekeeping central, but yeah… we all knew it… and we paid for it monthly regardless lol … how can you beat 180 pages worth of gear you would never own? 😂. Great vid! 👍🏻👍🏻

Fantastic trip down memory lane and an interesting question asked 🙂

I love pieces like this, keep it up. I read a ton of these mags and I think you are right, they were never negative. As far the ads go though these were like a trip to a music store that had tons of gear, I didn’t have a big music store near me so it was cool to see that ads too.

Fantastic video, great points! I was also an Electronic Musician subscriber in the early 00s, and Recording magazine - I was young then, in middle school - high school (very impressionable). I've been so concerned with the inaccuracy of authoritatively-worded statements by self-proclaimed production and engineering experts online these days that I didn't even consider how the opinions and reviews that I was reading (from the so-called "professionals") in the era previous don't seem to have any superior credibility - as you point out, its almost as if we should assume that negative opinions would be omitted. Fascinating.

This really cool and fun to learn about, love your music and subscribed to your channel

Nice video! Wow, I didn't realize how much Ableton 1 looked like Ableton of today. And I was recently getting nostalgic for old mags too, but I'd kinda forgotten how ad-heavy they were.

We had Keyboards as well in Germany and I was a monthly subscriber up until 2006. They did add CD's with sound examples which was super handy. Ended up buying 2 of the editorialized synths: a CS1x and Microwave XTK - both which have not stayed in my setup but were totally living up to their expectations from reading their articles

I’d love to read that review of Sonic Foundry’s Acid as that’s the DAW I learned on. How cool. All good points made in the video!

Fascinating. Love this.

What a fantastic video mate 🤩👍 retro mags, I’m so glad they exist. I guess in 20 years it’ll be retro KZfaq 😂

I used to own almost every issue of EM, Keyboard, Electronic Music Maker, Music Technology, and Sound on Sound. These were both a cause and short term fix for my synth acquisition dreams! Interviews with synthesizer artists were especially good, and even when I didn't listen to their music, I was interested in their methodology and what they had to say. I mostly read all the reviews to see how many parameters I could tweak on machines I wouldn't be able to afford for another few years at least. I could only imagine the sounds! The thing that made me keep the mags for so long were the more technical articles, which were like a periodical update to my electronic music book library.

My friend still writes for Future Music has done for around 20 odd years, does the artist interviews and retrospectives. I never trusted their gear reviews and only used Sound on Sound for recommedations. I still have almost the the same setup for 25 years the only new piece of gear I own is a Polyend Tracker Mini and a cheap 24 channel mixer the rest is from the 90s/00s. Small simple and a good understanding of each item.

Great content as always fam!!!

Excellent video really enjoyed this one!

I used to get Futuremusic, computer music, Dj mag and (sometimes) mix mag. All of them came with free cds or cd roms. Those were the days!

Awesome video man really enjoyed it. Magazines are crazy ad books you’re right.

Good video. These were the days of 48th st... NY's music row...A classic block of music stores... Manny's, Sam Ash... If you saw it in those magazines, you could actually see it (...and buy it...) in those great shops. Truly the good ol' days.

The amount of times I'd walk into a barnes and noble, picked up a few music software magazines, sat quietly in a chair and read them while quietly slipping the cover CDs into my jacket pocket... Terribly sorry B&N but I appreciate the samples

Great video!

Reminds me of how I loved reading gaming magazines in the early 00s. Because the medium was static - only text and low res screenshots, the writers had to be really creative with their writing, much more so than on an online article nowadays, let alone a KZfaq video script 😢 those were magical times

Loving this video...and I'm not even done with it!

I can tell you that KEYBOARD during the 90's was a lifeline for those of us who had little money but wanted to keep up with things. The *technical* columns and articles were gold; so much so that I have a cache of scans from the articles I saved from that era. Still good advice on technique, arranging, and composing in there. Some of the in-depth analysis of tracks and albums is still paying off for me.

I made this comment on Weaver Beats' reaction to this video, but I thought it might be welcome here as well. I used to work in magazines. When it comes to ad:editorial ratio, a free magazine generally will have a 50 : 50 split. Paid-for magazines with universal appeal (People, Time, etc) will usually be like 40 : 60, more specialized ones like these will be closer to the 50 : 50. The difference between magazines and digital is that with every page you publish, your costs go way up. You not only need to pay someone to create that content, but you have to actually pay for the paper it is on. The harsh fact is positivity just sells better. People want to know what they should buy more than what they shouldn't. The more ethical mags will just not cover something, rather than give a dishonest positive review. Not publishing a review at all pisses off an advertiser a lot less than publishing a hit piece. All of this adds up to there being very little incentive to publish something critical. But no, reviews aren't just ads, it's just that the reviews that get published need to fit into a certain box.

I love being old and having the meories of how impacting these old mags were. Also DJ mags and general music mags too! Free tape on the front.... oh yeah, livin' the dream. 😁

This takes me back, in old England i used to spend a small fortune on Sound on sound ,keyboard magazine. Electronics and music maker , Studio and recording world , and perhaps a few more, most British magazines had a cassette demo and later CD with the reviewed sound gear on ,for a listen, anyone remember Dave Bristow the Yamaha gear demonstrator ,happy days , when the Pro gear would cost your the price of nice car or a good deposit on a house :} the music revolution with computers was at a lightning speed ,in my life time gone from old Black and white TV to super wide screen monitors

This was SPOT ON!! Great memories and indeed it was ads ads ads ads…. But to your point they were education, lol exactly correct you had to depend on descriptive adjectives to compare the sound of various products in your mind. I have hundreds of these magazines in my basement

3:26 - yooooo that Radikal Technologies controller!! I drooled over that for like 6 years and finally got one (2007 I think). Ended up selling it a couple months later lol...but honestly it really was as cool as it looked; I just had no idea what I was doing and it was way over my head

As someone who didn't subscribe to these mags at the time and knew very little about audio equipment until much later, I've found myself reading reviews of vintage gear from the Sound on Sound online archive quite frequently. At least for that publication (during the 80's-mid 90's), there is fairly unfiltered criticism, regarding the deficiencies of a given piece of equipment- I wonder if this phenomenon of pandering to the advertisers was specific to certain publications and periods of time. By the 2000's, the internet was a thing, so maybe this was a phenomenon which occurred as a result of that. I definitely remember magazines including more ads, as the writing was beginning to show on the wall.

I remember this era like it was yesterday... I had lots of these mags and recognize a lot of them here. The ads were exciting to see too though, only in these mags did you see any of this stuff unless you had a large music store you could go to.

Hey, this video i so wellmade! Thanks for that. Also you do you record your voice, it's quite pleasant without any sibilances.

Thanks. Really good.

I love your channel

....and speaking of nostalgia, I miss the days when you used to wear sunglasses in a darkened room 😎😂

Cool video. Thanks!

Funny, this made me remember I've been keeping a few EM mags, and a Polyphony issue, all from the '80s. I've kept them because of articles like "The Feel Factor in Music" or actual circuit diagrams of something I wanted to make. But, yea, the gear adds were fun to dream about.

1985. I was assistant editor on Electronic Soundmaker magazine here in the UK. Once a month we spent a weekend in the home studio of one of our contributors and made what was effectively an hour long podcast, including clips of all the gear we reviewed in the magazine, and music from the bands we interviewed. This was put on an actual cassette tape sellotaped to the front of the magazine. It was a great idea, except the tapes dragged the mags off the shelves in the shops. Ah, the good old days! :)

Keyboard magazine had the flexi disk I remember being blown away with the Kawai K5 demo 🥹

I just wanted you to know that I _really_ appreciated the _Soylent Green_ allusion. As someone old enough to have worn a Member's Only jacket, seeing scenes of the good old days definitely gave me an Edgar G. Robinson kind of feeling.

At 14.40 ! 😂😂 You say “but I was’nt there”. At this moment old folks like me who have lived a fully GASsed life ,burst into laughter , because we were there devouring each new edition of the magazine . Lusting after the unobtainable ,confronted our responsibilities which inevitably meant we just did’nt have the disposable income….until we did and got made redundant, often from technology related jobs. Human technical knowledge is so perishable and time limited. Inevitably many of us succumbed and satisfied the build up of GAS that these magazines fuelled .In my case when made redundant I splashed out on the kit in the heavily featured Music Store from the mags. I have no regrets[and still have the kit] , you just realise that’s the features of your particular Chunk of the time Continuum . Great KZfaq content Noir ! Love your attitude.

Right on, right on!!! BTW G.A.S. was huge back then starting back in the 80’s with MIDI. 😮

I will never forget when my ex- had simultaneous subscriptions to two magazines in a similar genre, but one published by the Consumer Reports people and one by regular magazine people, and by like the third issue I suddenly realized there was absolutely nothing negative in the regular magazine and nearly everything in the Consumer Reports-style magazine had negatives discussed, even things they loved. I am pretty sure I realized I could no longer stand to read regular magazines after then.

Very interesting. I bought my first music mag ,"One..two..Testing" in the UK in 1982! I was 14 and read it from start to finish 100 times. You're probably right about it and bias and backhanders were common I'm sure.

At my local Books a Million, there are tons of music magazines, including Computer Music, Future Music, Guitar World, and many more.

Great video

i have read computer music and future music for 20 years and i have never seen them give less then a 7 for any reviews

I’m still buying mags today. There something special about getting the physical mag I hope they don’t disppear completely.

When the world was simple and you received a CD rom full of free stuff with each issue. 😊

What’s a trip, is that rewire support was only discontinued as of the release of live 11 in 2020. I was still using it back then as a virtual I/O for Renoise as an audio output channel option

Great idea great content as. Usual

YEEEEEESSSSSSS! FINALLY! I've been saying this for ten years! However... Electronic Musician and sister magazines were e-zines. had some subscriptions through Amazon.

I vaguely recall an answer to a reader's letter in either Computer Music or Future Music where they said they didn't bother reviewing the crap stuff, as pages were limited, and a bad review wouldn't help you to find the great thing you didn't know you needed, just to avoid one thing that's a bit sup-par. They might also have said that the money being spent on R&D made it less likely that a big tech company is going to release a total turkey (but not impossible).

That was GREAT ...Thank you ..!!!

I still have old keyboard magazines as far back as 1986! Those were the days -EM, future music, Mix ect.. Its SO easy now! Back then I felt so powerless sometimes looking at all the expensive gear ( And there was no internet, no youtube yet) But now any good DAW on a basic laptop is really all you need. Although GAS continues still! Haha

Don't forget about the product brochures (Roland) we used to order along with our magazines 😜👍

Great concept for a video! Those center folds: Nice rack (mount)!

Good talk, Noir! 😎👍 I think by todays information overload standards the old advertisement laden magazines might seem not so attractive but back in the day (I'm talking 1970's for me 😊) we were in a comparable information desert when it came to gear information so music gear magazines were treasured, IF we could even find them and then afford to subscribe! 😅

Also shoutout to scratch mag ! I think also back in the day the barrier was higher for companies too so they were unlikely to make half baked products.

The title for your video is both accurate and appropriate. The payola game was bigger than you can imagine. Editorial integrity was an expense the owners took every chance to avoid. To even insinuate that trade magazines in the 80's and 90's were a form of journalism is delusional thinking.

I actually read a quote by a former tech journalist at some point, although I think that was somebody who wrote about computer gear, who said it straight out, that bad reviews means potentially losing those companies as advertisers, and thus, all reviews became more positive than they perhaps should have been. I wish I remember who said it, but I don't think it's very surprising. Printing full colour magazines is expensive, and without advertisers, it wouldn't really have been possible, at least not without charging a fortune.

Damned I remember that Bart Simpson cover of Keyboard. Bought the AW4416 on specs and reviews. Somebody forgot to mention the learning curve. Steep as the Eiger North Face and forboding as well. Spend 6 K on it. Used it to record a few CDs. But I never liked it. It never clicked. But having said that the biggest problem were not the reviews (most gear back then was okay, so that was reflected in the reviews) but the lack of information back then. KZfaq (hug) was in fact the gamechanger. It's not subject to gatekeeping, it's open to all, so now we indeed see and hear gear and even as gear is slashed (AudioPilz) it still gives it a vibe no magazine ever could. But the biggest benefit are the endless tutorials.

These magazines were nothing but glorified advertising platforms whose sole role was to persuade the world's bedroom musicians to keep buying more and more gear. The equipment companies kept the magazines in business with an endless stream of expensive full page adverts and kept the reviewers 'on side' by giving them an endless stream of free equipment to review. It was a plainly obvious scam to me at the time, but hundreds of thousands of would-be musicians around the world fell for it over and over again. Great video!

still got a pair of the KRK V6 series 1s. they're still dope.

Thank you

A 60/40 ads-to-editorial ratio is industry standard for magazines. I know it seems like a lot, but ads pay for everything in the mags!