Sad news. No, make that inexcusable news!!

[Doerfler]

Just became aware of this myself.

 

thanks for the detailed post, Steve. Hopefully everything will fall into place as you see it.

[Biggles]

I have not bought any Future publication for over 25 years.

 

I used to write for a competitor who did not have one single good word to say about the ethos of Future or the content of its mags.

 

The mags I did buy then had rubbish content that was long on glossy images yet short on accurate content.

 

Not missed anything by not buying any of their mags.

 

Their apparent attitude is hence of no surprise to this old guy.

[Stephen Fortner]

Future likes listicles and similar formats, seemingly wanting to be the BuzzFeed of music gear. For a modern monetize-the-internet mentality, that makes sense. Jon and I want to be The New Yorker, or perhaps The Atlantic, in this landscape. Manufacturers small and large have told me that while they love any positive gear coverage, there's really nowhere they can tell a real story and appeal to musicians who aspire to be like the artists who use their products. So I think there's room for both. That's all I'll say about that on this thread, which is about archiving.

[Joe Muscara]

I had PDFs of issues from 2010 through 2015 but I'm having trouble finding them right now.

 

I have found them. Regarding what Steve Fortner has said, at worst case these could be used to create the search archive for these issues with the actual issues being scans if that's the way things need to be. OTOH, if it's okay to host them as part of the project, I'm more than happy to share them. I only wish I had the ones from 2016 and 2017, but IIRC they may have stopped hosting them the way they had and I couldn't determine if PDFs were available anymore so I gave up.

 

So, what you guys are saying is if there was some place to host it and someone could get permisson from Future Music, it might be possible to save/archive Keyboard mag's content?

Ja.

[Paolo Di Nicolantonio]

In case anyone doesn't know already... there's a gentleman in the UK who does the scanning with British magazines called mu:zines and it's such an excellent resource...

 

http://www.muzines.co.uk

 

hopefully someone in the US can/will do the same for Keyboard and other US magazines ? It's definitely a lot of work to scan everything - that is - after acquiring the necessary IP permissions, I would think.... with all the issues of Keyboards over the course of forty years, a huge task for someone with the time and resources available.

 

Also, in case anyone doesn't know already, for older magazines such as RE/P, dB Magazine, Studio Sound etc., there's this also excellent resource from American Radio History (click "Technical/Engineering", then "Audio & Sound"):

 

https://www.americanradiohistory.com

[MAJUSCULE]

Future likes listicles and similar formats, seemingly wanting to be the BuzzFeed of music gear. For a modern monetize-the-internet mentality, that makes sense. Jon and I want to be The New Yorker, or perhaps The Atlantic, in this landscape. Manufacturers small and large have told me that while they love any positive gear coverage, there's really nowhere they can tell a real story and appeal to musicians who aspire to be like the artists who use their products. So I think there's room for both. That's all I'll say about that on this thread, which is about archiving.

 

I don't want to derail further other than to say that I love where your heads are at and enthusiastically support the development of such a venture.

[cassdad]

So, I did find some Keyboard Mag articles using this: Wayback Machine: wayback.com Just a possibility.

[jerrythek]

What an f'ing shame. But after the losses on that site every time they redid it, I'm not surprised. The various owners over the years never seemed to get the web.

 

Truth. Across various redesigns a lot of my columns got dinked, with additional content links broken and such. But with so little staff it was a task that I couldn't in good conscious basically ask Jon Regen to work on, even though he offered. I'd love to see it restored. But that involves not only scanning printed magazines, but also creating links to other content, including images/pdfs and audio content. Many printed columns had associated audio examples on SoundCloud. So the task goes beyond scanning.

 

Jerry

[jerrythek]

This is all quite true. But I have to say that I am the anomaly: Since Future took over EM and continued my column (much to my amazement and delight, being one of the only holdovers to make the cut - of which I do exhibit some survivor's guilt) they have left me completely alone to choose my subjects and how I treat them. No doubt I'm just not important enough in their overworked weeks to worry about, but the result is I continue to provide exactly the same level of quality that I have always striven for. But that accounts for 2 pages a month.

 

I would love to see SF and Jon work on a new musician-driven project.

 

Jerry

 

 

 

Future likes listicles and similar formats, seemingly wanting to be the BuzzFeed of music gear. For a modern monetize-the-internet mentality, that makes sense. Jon and I want to be The New Yorker, or perhaps The Atlantic, in this landscape. Manufacturers small and large have told me that while they love any positive gear coverage, there's really nowhere they can tell a real story and appeal to musicians who aspire to be like the artists who use their products. So I think there's room for both. That's all I'll say about that on this thread, which is about archiving.

[jerrythek]

So, I did find some Keyboard Mag articles using this: Wayback Machine: wayback.com Just a possibility.

 

As did I, but many of my columns only bring up the text without any of the graphics. I could not find any of my long-form interviews as I listed earlier. If anyone does, let me know.

 

Jerry

[Dr Mike Metlay]

I still have my fairly large collection of Keyboard and Electronic Musician mags that I am trying to find a home for, and neither the time nor the resources to scan the issues myself. I do have one offer to purchase them which I believe has been made in good faith, but the buyer is in the UK and is worried about shipping costs (as am I).

 

If he is unable to complete the deal, would someone else like to get his or her hands on these before I have to dump them? I think it would be wonderful to have a backup deal in place for when the isolation period is over, and my wife thinks it would be wonderful to get the six-foot high column of magazine and banker boxes out of our living room. (They were moved there in anticipation of being picked up locally, the first of several deals that fell through due to perfectly valid circumstances, and have been there ever since - going on five months now. Boy, am I in the doghouse...)

[AnotherScott]

I don't have every issue but pretty close (missing the first few years for the most part).

I think I have all of the early years except for the very first issue.

[Joe Muscara]

What an f'ing shame. But after the losses on that site every time they redid it, I'm not surprised. The various owners over the years never seemed to get the web.

 

Truth. Across various redesigns a lot of my columns got dinked, with additional content links broken and such. But with so little staff it was a task that I couldn't in good conscious basically ask Jon Regen to work on, even though he offered. I'd love to see it restored. But that involves not only scanning printed magazines, but also creating links to other content, including images/pdfs and audio content. Many printed columns had associated audio examples on SoundCloud. So the task goes beyond scanning.

 

I was bummed when I recently found out that a lot of the older SoundCloud tracks had been removed from the account. I know that's a totally different thing, but I didn't know they would do that.

[Magman]

Waves hello as the interested party in the UKð

 

I am a major contributor to www.muzines.co.uk and one of the reasons for trying to get the magazines from Dr. Mike Metlay is that we would very much like to add Keyboard mag to the collection on mu:zines, but this is a decision that will be down to Ben, the site owner. The key issue though is permissions, mu:zines is very conscious of respecting people"s copyright so works to get permission before publishing anything.

 

I"m not afraid of scanning, as a collector of magazines my scan queue is always in the 1000"s, so adding keyboard mag is not a worry, though obviously time is a major constraint. I have over 16,000 magazines in my house, but I am a single guy so don"t get nagged about my piles of magazines ð. We also normally scan to high 300dpi tif"s then convert to other formats as required.

 

Will keep an interested ear on these discussions.

 

Regards

 

Mike

[slg1013]

I believe I have hard copies of all issues going back to the early 1980s although a few may have sustained some water damage and may not be the best source for scanning. I'd be happy to help however possible.

 

Steve

[BRW]

 

I am a major contributor to www.muzines.co.uk and one of the reasons for trying to get the magazines from Dr. Mike Metlay is that we would very much like to add Keyboard mag to the collection on mu:zines

 

This would be a fantastic idea!! And thanks very much for your work on mu:zines, it"s a very nice resource. And yeah, 300dpi if at all possible.

 

Offtopic, but it would also be a massive treat if someone would scan all the Roland Users Group mags and all the Korg"s ProView mags as well. There is some fantastic stuff and artist interviews in those. Yamaha"s After Touch has been fully scanned (not by them) and can be downloaded, I believe.

[muzines]

Hi guys,

 

Good to see this discussion here (and thanks for the shout out, Paolo!)

 

Yes, if you weren't aware mu:zines is a non-commercial, labour of love, crowdsourced project to scan, archive and republish UK music tech magazines from the 70s-2000s, including early Sound On Sound, Electronics & Music Maker, Music Technology, and many others. The content is important and deserves to be made available and accessible before it gets lost forever - which is why I've undertaken to do it.

 

Like many people, I was also dismayed when Keyboard mag folded, and hoped for a community project to collect and archive them. At that time it was impractical for mu:zines (ie, me) to do much about it - I already have quite a lot of my plate handling the 1000+ UK issues we are covering.

 

However, in the intervening years, no Keyboard archive project happened, or even looked like it was likely. Also, we started to take on some extra, non-UK publications where there was an opportunity and good reason - for instance we got the permissions from Paia to archive Polyphony, and in just a few weeks completed a full Polyphony archive (as PDFs - we're still working through fully OCR'ing the issues). We also plan to do the same with Synapse, in conjunction with Doug Lynner.

 

Myself and Mike (Magman) have been having discussions about Keyboard off and on for the last few years. And in fact, on my to do list for later this year as a first tentative step was to reach out and contact Keyboard's former editors and owners to see whether they would be open to us doing something similar for Keyboard, and to figure out whether it was feasible, and in what form.

 

(Realistically, I'm not going to be able to OCR and tag everything immaculately in the way I'm doing for the UK mags, as I'm just one guy and it would take the rest of my lifetime to do it - but I'm certainly open to collecting, curating and archiving the issues on mu:zines and am also open to other suggestions as to how to keep this content alive.)

 

Some of the magazines mu:zines covers include former Future-owned publications, and when I contacted Future Publishing some years back they had no problems with us archiving the content, but they had no assets from these old magaziness left and couldn't be of any further help. (Bear in mind at this time these publications were all 20-30 years old, and I wasn't going near considering properties that were still actively being published eg Future Music, for obvious reasons.) I've no idea what Future's attitude would be for the Keyboard content, or even how much they own. Stephen Fortner's post illustrates that this might be a problem, at least for the more recent issues. Older ones may be less of a problem, as they have less commercial value to the publisher. But as you can expect, sometimes these things can be tricky...

 

Note: In most cases, the ownership of the article content tends to (at least in the UK, I'm not as familiar with the way it's handled in the US) revert to the individual authors after a set publication window, so there's often not so much of a problem with publisher permissions, by and large (at least that's my experience, so far). I've not done too much research into US publications to date as, like I say, it's been a bit outside of our remit so far.

 

We're in touch with many of the former publishers, editors and contributors for the magzine content we are archiving and to date everyone I'm in contact with has been impressed and overwhelmingly supportive of what we're doing.

 

For more details about us and how we handle archive content, you can read:-

http://www.muzines.co.uk/about

http://www.muzines.co.uk/terms

http://www.muzines.co.uk/faq

 

Mike (Magman) was the interested party regarding the Keyboard issues - he already has a small collection, but we would be looking to complete the collection, either by acquiring the issues between us, and/or accepting scans from helpful contributors, which has generally worked quite well. The wider the workload spread, the more can be achieved in a small amount of time. In this manner we've been able to nearly complete collections of all the publications we're currently handling.

 

As we are (minimally) donation-supported, we have a very small budget to purchase content, and obviously US issues complicate things in regard to shipping and so on, which is why it's a bit of an extra headache (having people willing to scan their issues would be even more important in this case). It's another reason I've been a bit reticent to commit to starting a Keyboard archive at this time, or even announce any intentions to do so.

 

But who else is going to do it?

 

Maybe it would be enough to scan whatever issues people have to the Internet Archive in a sporadic and unmoderated manner - which would be better than nothing - but less satisfactory if no one is trying to actively fill gaps and curate the collection... But really I think the importance of the publication and content is worthy of better handling than that - and that's certainly the impression I get reading the above posts.

 

In any case - I'm willing to help do *something*, if something can be done.

 

ben@mu:zines

[Doerfler]

ben@mu:zines

 

thanks, Ben , for taking the time to join MPN and shout out to us.

[muzines]

Offtopic, but it would also be a massive treat if someone would scan all the Roland Users Group mags and all the Korg"s ProView mags as well. There is some fantastic stuff and artist interviews in those. Yamaha"s After Touch has been fully scanned (not by them) and can be downloaded, I believe.

 

I forgot to come back to this - I don't want to derail this thread away from Keyboard, but I'll just address this briefly:

 

In Roland's case at least, the original publication was called "Roland Newslink", (at least here in the UK) and was printed as inserts into various magazines of the time, usually quarterly. In issues where they were included, I am processing these as article content in the usual way, but I do have a feature request in my issue tracker to find a way to break these out, so you could for example browse "Roland Newslink" as a separate publication. Some of this content was really good, and as a vintage Roland fan, I was keen on including it.

 

I'm not sure offhand if Roland Newslink evolved into the Roland Users Group publication, or if that was something different - it's on my to research list - and I certainly have a pile of Newslinks and other RUG/PowerOn separate issues already scanned here, and it would be good content to archive, but I haven't yet figured out the best way to handle it - thanks for the suggestion. I'll take another look at my notes and if not add it to the (neverending!) list of things to look at. As it was largely Roland marketing material, it seems unlikely there would be much objection to hosting it, but if I get to that point, I'll certainly contact Roland and see, and/or whoever was responsible for the Roland Users Group publication if it was someone other than Roland.

 

Korg ProView I'm less sure about, as I don't personally have any issues. As you say, there is already a good archive of Aftertouch, and it's great that people are working together to archive this stuff and make it accessible, as long as it's done in the right spirit. And as I say on the site, I'm always open to ideas, suggestions, improvements and so on, so feel free to contact me via the site if necessary... And if somebody else has a bunch of these issues and fancies curating a collection and scanning for hosting with us, get in touch!

 

Thanks!

[Analogaddict]

I have a bunch of issues from mostly the mid 1980s until early 1990s. If anybody"s interested I can start scanning. I"m in the middle of rearranging my entire career so it"s not going to happen quickly but I"d do it if it is of interest to anybody.

[Stephen Fortner]

While we're talking about breaking links to content, here was something that happened during the NewBay regime, well before Future was considering buying us. We used a video host called Brightcove as, at one point, the mandate being to try to funnel folks to our pages if they wanted to see our videos (over editors' objections and instead of building a YouTube audience as part of our long tail). We got sent a couple of takedown requests. Probably somebody in some video was playing a copyrighted riff. Management's response was to get nervous and shut down the entire video delivery system, just in case there were videos among the thousands we'd done that might elicit takedown requests in the future. So videos that might have been part of a product review disappeared. Stuff like our 2006 clinic where Chester Thompson lugged his B3 to the Keyboard offices to show us how you really play "Squib Cakes" â gone. My studio visit with George Duke in 2013 â poof. And this was across Keyboard, EM, Guitar Player, and Bass Player magazines. I have boxes of drives and memory cards and DV tapes I've yet to unpack, and I hope to find some raw footage or rough edits. I bring this up to illustrate the mentality of large media companies when it comes to their readers, whom they consider their product, not their customers. (One of our group publishers, whom I'll call M.T. Promiser, once said in an all-hands meeting, "The reader can drop dead for all I care. We serve the advertiser.")

 

This figures into why I'm looking forward to preserving content, whether past or yet-to-be-created, under the independence, stewardship, and general give-a-shitness of MPN!

[Joe Muscara]

While we're talking about breaking links to content, here was something that happened during the NewBay regime, well before Future was considering buying us. We used a video host called Brightcove as, at one point, the mandate being to try to funnel folks to our pages if they wanted to see our videos (over editors' objections and instead of building a YouTube audience as part of our long tail). We got sent a couple of takedown requests. Probably somebody in some video was playing a copyrighted riff. Management's response was to get nervous and shut down the entire video delivery system, just in case there were videos among the thousands we'd done that might elicit takedown requests in the future. So videos that might have been part of a product review disappeared. Stuff like our 2006 clinic where Chester Thompson lugged his B3 to the Keyboard offices to show us how you really play "Squib Cakes" â gone. My studio visit with George Duke in 2013 â poof.

ð¢ð­

 

Thanks for the facts on the disappearance of those. Does that also include the Booker T "How you really play Green Onions" and Benmont Tench "We can barely hear him but it's still worth it" videos? I don't recall when those came out relative to what you mention.

[Dave Weiser]

Whew this is a bittersweet thread. So sorry to hear about the loss of so much great content.

 

Please let us know if there's anything we longtime fans and readers can do to help.

 

Much love to everyone who worked at Keyboard Mag! You fed my head and inspired me to give up everything for a career in the dark underworld of keyboard programming!

[Doerfler]

"Google" keyboard magazine now and you will get this

 

https://www.musicradar.com/keyboardmag

[MAJUSCULE]

Ok, so looks like there is some content preserved. Not all of the examples carried over but there are some playing figures. It annoys me that all articles are now simply authored by Keyboard Magazine, rather than crediting their original authors.

[Doerfler]

. It annoys me that all articles are now simply authored by Keyboard Magazine, rather than crediting their original authors.

 

I picked up on that immediately also.

[Stephen Fortner]

I'm glad they're currently leading with the top keyboard licks story that Jon Regen compiled and I edited for our 40th anniversary issue, which we published in October 2015. (In 1975 the magazine started out bi-monthly, so the first issue was Sept-Oct '75.) But the layout is frightful and I too am creeped out by the deletion of the original bylines. I don't know about Future's policies specifically, but I can tell you that large publishers in general have been shying away from "personality" writers and editors like the Andertons and Milanos and Doerschuks of yore. (n.b. those guys are all still around and, ahem, we've got Anderton) They don't want contributors to build personal brands they can then take with them, or use to negotiate their next raise. Guess who's getting all the YouTube views and such? People who've built personal brands anyway and bypassed the whole paradigm.

[muzines]

Hey guys,

 

Just checking back in here on this as it's been a while. The last time this was being discussed it seemed that Stephen Fortner and the Keyboard gang were looking at making plans for a Keyboard archive of some description, so I sort of left that alone to see how that would shake out.

 

Obviously it's been a crappy year, but I'm just checking back in to see whether there has been any progress on this, or if any plans are underway, or if there is any news on this?

 

We are pursuing our own personal collection of Keyboard issues in the meantime, but scanning them or any archive work is obviously a no-go at this time, and we certainly don't want to duplicate any effort on this if work is ongoing on this already.

 

Thanks!

[cjfox]

I'm one of those guys with a crate of 70s to mid 80s Keyboard mags. (not number 1) I am willing to help, but at this point what, if anything can I do?

[RABid]

I remember maybe 15 years ago there was a push to get Keyboard Mag to release back issues on DVD much like Sound on Sound. The reply from the company was that the magazine did not own publishing rights to much of the photography in the magazines and that prevented releasing back issues in an archived form.