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Kiran Aditham
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Kiran Aditham is a Business Management grad from the University of Central Florida, Aditham earned his stripes as a freelance writer in music/arts publishing.

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Publishing’s Paradigm Shift: FADER Co-Founder Rob Stone Eyes Print’s Place in the Digital Revolution

Written on
October 5th 2006
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by Kiran Aditham  |
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I still like that as well. But having all of these different options at your disposal, I think that’s the great thing about living in this era. So, how did the deal with iTunes actually come about then?

iTunes was a client of ours. We had done some previous executions with them and some concepting out, and we just felt it was time and we approached them on doing it. It’s real interesting because they’re very much appreciative of The FADER and the quality of the magazine, and I think it aligned with them as being forward-thinking and ahead of the curve. To work with us made sense for them. It was pretty simple. I mean, they have a store and we were like “we want to give our magazine away in your store.”

That makes sense, even though initially I did a double take. But it’s such a successful storefront at this point, so it seems like the most ideal option for you to sell it on their site. So now, you have Puma and Southern Comfort onboard, but was it easy finding advertisers for the virtual Fader or was there a hesitation on their part?

It was met really well. The thing is, like what you’re saying, “The FADER on iTunes, what are they doing, what are they talking about? Is it a podcast? It’s the actual issue in PDF? You can download the whole thing?” It’s getting familiar with it, but I mean now we’re on our second issue of doing it. But yeah the [advertisers] all get it, they are all really excited. The ability to make it live and make their ad come to life is exciting to them. So, there wasn’t much resistance in getting them involved. In fact, I think in Southern Comfort’s case, they acknowledged it as being a great thing and approached us on being in a position like that in issue 39.

Now, the big 40th issue is out right?

40’s out and Puma is part of that and you know Puma is a forward thinking company, has great people there, great marketers, I think they can appreciate what The Fader is trying to do.

To reiterate, though, the print magazine is here to stay in your estimation?
I think print is not going to go away. I don’t see that being the case. The landscape is definitely changing, we know that. Yeah, definitely, as a publisher, it comes down to just what makes sense. Logically, it costs a lot of money to print on paper and ship and get on a press and put them in boxes and get them on trucks and distribute them. The cost to distribute a PDF through iTunes…I think we’ve got to figure out, as an industry, what the balance is. We know it’s not an extreme of either case. We can say that.

Brick-and-mortars aren’t going away so quickly. You know, you’re not going to shop for everything online. As long as that feeling is great walking into a newsstand or a magazine store or a Barnes & Noble, it’s going to be there. It’s going to be a part of it, grabbing a newspaper and getting on a train. That’s part of the journey in New York’s subways is being able to read on the train.

I think it’s just so instinctual in this town. It’s not like people are going to be like, now I have a PDF file I’m never going to read a paper again.

We hear all the time from our readers that they have every issue. I know with other magazines they’re more disposable, but FADER feels like a collectible or something you want to sit on your coffee table because it means something. Walking around with The FADER means something. It’s having the right pair of sneakers on to some people. Walking around with the right magazine defines who they are in a sense. That doesn’t go away and that’s going to be there.



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