Monday, April 25th, 2005

Hiphopmusic.com: Letter to Source Advertisers

Jay Smooth has posted the aforementioned letter to The Source‘s advertisers:

“Dear Valued Client and Marketing Partner,

I’m writing to you to discuss the current status of The Source Magazine’s circulation, as well as to share with you some exciting developments that are taking place under the banner of The Source – the most widely-recognized and well-respected brand name in Hip-Hop throughout the world. The year 2005 will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most pivotal years in the history of The Source…

During the last two years, I have been working hard to lay down the building blocks that will secure the future of The Source as a powerful global media and entertainment company. Check a few of the stats: the November 2004 broadcast of The Source Hip-Hop Music Awards was a smash, ranking as BET’s sixth highest-rated show ever; in addition, The Source Awards Weekend is now the largest and most exciting annual live event gathering of Hip-Hop fans, attracting over 75,000 people to Miami last October; The Source Hip-Hop Hits compilation album series was expanded with the release of both Volumes 8 and 9 last year through our own independent record company, The Source Music; the launch of The Source Mobile Channel was executed and has resulted in the sale of over 1 million ringtones in less than 5 months.

With all of the time and energy that was expended building up our brand through these new channels, there was one unfortunate mishap that affected our core business at The Source Magazine. During our move to new office space late last year, we lost important subscription files, including payment records, which has created a pool of approximately 80,000 subscribers to The Source that we cannot qualify as ‘paid’ under ABC guidelines. Given the magazine circulation scandals that have plagued this industry over the past couple of years, The Source recently met with ABC and decided to voluntarily and temporarily suspend itself from ABC auditing of our paid circulation, rather than attempting to mask this problem with the smoke and mirrors typically used by many magazine publishers to enhance the appearance of their subscription file. The bottom line is that we will be unable to provide an audited statement of our paid circulation for the last 6 months of 2004. ABC will be conducting a reinstatement audit to cover the period of January – June 2005, and will issue its normal publisher’s statement for this period in the month of August 2005.

…We are providing our clients with a guaranteed circulation of 400,000 for the January – June 2005 period, which will consist of a monthly average of approximately 280,000 paid single copies and 50,000 paid subscription copies, along with the 80,000 controlled subscriber copies. As we renew and convert this affected pool, and implement a number of new and innovative subscription acquisition methods, we are guaranteeing delivery of a fully qualified paid and audited circulation of at least 415,000 for the second half of 2004…”

+ SOHH.com interviews former COO (that’s the dude overseeing circ, among many other things) Jeremy “J-Mill” Miller, who has just launched Down Magazine.

+ Finally, Chuck D sets everyone straight on him and Air America:

“No, I didn’t leave Air America nor did I get fired. I’ll be doing a weekly show starting in May – sometimes recorded, at other times rolling live. Stop the blogs now saying I got canned in favor of Jerry Springer…”

posted by Jeff Chang @ 7:13 am | 2 Comments

2 Responses to “Hiphopmusic.com: Letter to Source Advertisers”

J.D. Considine says:

April 25, 2005 at 7:32 am

Boy, that letter to the advertisers is the best version of “the dog ate my homework” I’ve seen in a while!
Danyel says:

April 26, 2005 at 6:47 am

saw that letter a while ago. man. reeeee-dic-u-luss.

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