Nathan Cone remembers the very first issue of Rolling Stone he received in print. It was a 1989 issue with Paul McCartney on the cover, just after the ex-Beatle’s Flowers in the Dirt studio album came out. A dedicated subscriber of the storied music rag, Cone felt he got the deal of a lifetime more than a decade later.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, Cone was flipping through an issue of Rolling Stone magazine when he saw an advertisement for a $99 lifetime subscription to the magazine. He was already paying something like $19 a year for his subscription, so he signed up right away. After that, every new issue showed that his subscription would, in fact, expire—but not until 2059.
“I would always joke to people that Rolling Stone knows when I’m going to die,” Cone told me, chuckling about the absurdity of it. “Because when I’m 86 years old or whatever, will I expire first or will the magazine expire?”
At 51, Cone is still very much alive. But, in early May, he received an email that informed him that his lifetime subscription was, in fact, ending—at least in its current form.
Dear Rolling Stone Subscriber:
Thank you for being a loyal reader of Rolling Stone. We are transitioning the delivery of Rolling Stone’s lifetime subscribers to a digital format. Your final printed copy will be the June 2024 issue.
The e-Edition format is an exact replica of the magazine you can read on your computer, tablet, or phone. A reminder email will be sent to you every time a new issue is published. In addition to access to the current issue, you will have access to a library of issues for the past five years.
If you need to update your email address with us, or you wish to stop receiving Rolling Stone, please contact customer service at rollingstone.com/customerservice or customerservice@rollingstone.com.
Sincerely,
David Roberson SVP, Subscriptions
Across the internet, fellow lifetime subscribers bemoaned the decision. “Guess I was costing them too much money,” one Reddit user wrote alongside an image of their letter, garnering 33,000 upvotes on the community r/MildlyInfuriating. A user on X, formerly Twitter, said he’s considering organizing a class-action lawsuit.
Cone is the vice president of cultural and community engagement at Texas Public Radio, and although his work is in a different medium, he says there’s something about reading a print magazine that isn’t replicable in any other format.
“You’re gonna come across articles and stories and reviews and news that you might not have … on your computer. It allows for slightly slower reading when you’re reading something physically,” Cone said. “Not to mention, the photography has been a hallmark of their issues from the very beginning.”
These days, Cone relies on Rolling Stone to teach him about up-and-coming artists that his kids are following, too—so that serendipity of passive print reading is even more important to him.
Samir Husni, a magazine consultant who goes by Mr. Magazine, is also a lifetime subscriber.
He feels wronged by this decision. “That was not our agreement. Our agreement was the lifetime of you or the lifetime of the magazine, if you pay $99—and $99 back then was a lot of money for a magazine subscription.” He even put the subscription in his son’s name so it would live on beyond him.
He also feels bad for collectors—he’s one himself. He has donated 188,000 magazines to the University of Missouri’s library system. “It’s not the same thing, getting a PDF. You can’t touch it, you can’t feel it. I mean, how would I know it’s the genuine real thing? Anyone can fake a PDF these days.”
A spokesperson for Penske Media Corporation, which owns Rolling Stone, did not respond to a series of questions about why it made the change, if it will do anything to appease its lifetime subscribers, and if this change signals a broader strategic pivot in the distribution of the print version of Rolling Stone.
In the past 25 years, the internet has irrevocably changed the business of media. Print publications have tried to capture the margins of the analog world while reaching readers on the web, but digital paywalls are porous, readers are used to free ad-supported media, and advertising dollars are gobbled up by digital media middlemen. Social media platforms have had a mercurial relationship with publishers, too, funneling readers to news sites before turning down the nozzle to a slow drip. Meanwhile, the remaining print publications have consolidated. In 2017, Penske Media Corporation acquired a controlling stake from Wenner Media and bought the rest in 2019. Penske also owns many of the other top entertainment publications, such as Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard.
Promotional stunts for magazines predate the pressures of the internet. In fact, they’ve been standard practice for Rolling Stone since the beginning, said Stu Zakim, who noted that early subscribers in the 1960s received a free “roach clip” with their copies of the magazine.
Zakim worked at Rolling Stone twice—once in the 1980s, and then in the early 2000s as the publication’s communications chief. By his second tour, the edgy magazine was more buttoned up and less fun—the economics of the business had already changed.
At the time, Zakim said that Rolling Stone started featuring fewer of founder Jann Wenner’s rock star friends on the cover, so the lifetime subscription might have been an appeasement tactic. “It was a little more diverse and hipper, so they were probably getting some pushback from older readers.” Still, he figures it could not have been a huge number of people who actually took the magazine up on this deal.
Gary Armstrong, who was the chief marketing officer of Rolling Stone in the 2000s, suggests that the threat posed by Maxim and other men-focused magazines could have factored into the sweet deal offered to readers. Plus, it boosted subscription numbers, meaning Rolling Stone could increase rates for print advertisements. “Once you have big circulation, the advertisers follow,” Armstrong told me.
There are good questions about whether what Rolling Stone is doing constitutes a breach of contract with their subscribers—and if they even care. Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University School of Law, said there’s no reason to think this wasn’t a valid contract when it was struck. That said, Rolling Stone might breach the contract anyway—something called efficient breach, a scenario in which it’s cheaper to pay damages than continue to lose money under the status quo. Not only are subscription sales less profitable than newsstand sales, but the very cost of printing magazines has increased in recent years.
Rush Hicks, a lawyer who is the former chair of the music business program at Belmont University, said that in the case of a lawsuit, a court would look at the changing business and technology of magazine publishing since the deal was made. “But the central question would be: What was the original intent of the parties regarding a print subscription versus some other delivery method,” Hicks said. That’s hard to glean from the limited details about the fine print of the subscription offering.
Still, Roberts notes, Rolling Stone has changed hands since the deal was made. Without a clause ensuring that any future owners abide by the terms these lifetime subscribers bought into, “the new owner is probably not bound by the lifetime subscription deal,” Roberts told me. “Hence, no breach.”
For lifetime subscribers, who will receive their final print issue in June, the news still stings. Making matters worse, the email they received gave no instructions about how to actually subscribe to the print version of the magazine, which costs $60 for an annual print subscription or $120 for an annual print and digital subscription—more than the total cost of the lifetime subscription.
I asked Cone if he plans to subscribe in print. He said he’d have to do the math to see if it fits in his budget. It’s a big expense, especially for something he assumed he’d continue to get for free for decades to come.
Husni said there’s no way. “Oh no, definitely not. I have a lifetime subscription—and I’m still living!”