While rummaging through my growing list of South African labels on discogs, it occurred to me that there was a certain long-running institution and indeed even important reference whose online presence had managed to elude my radar: Top 40 Music Magazine.
That’s because it is no more. It has ceased to be.
In a previous post I lamented the death of physical music carriers as our music purchasing and listening habits are progressively being overtaken by downloadable MP3 or similar formats (he writes, while listening to some recently-ripped audio tapes). It’s therefore a logical progression to do the same about a music magazine that disappeared from the shelves in April 2002.
Like most printed media, Top Forty (as it was later known) was apparently unable to maintain its readership and advertisers (“the business of news”) in the huge wake left by the impact of the big, bad WWW on the transfer of researched and edited information in the shape of magazines, newspapers, books and any other media made of dead trees and ink. With entire libraries of books available in digital format online or downloadable to your Kindle, it comes as quite a surprise that the internet (which originally was text-only) hadn’t actually saved more forests sooner.
It seems that we’ve only just reached a point that devices with internet access have saturated our lifestyle to the extent where it becomes sheer ludicrous to buy the morning paper on the way to the office because, well, by the time you’ve sat down with your coffee at your desk and booted the computer that newspaper is already out of date.
It’s old news, hardly worth the paper it’s printed on.
