“While we had initially targeted a public beta launch of May 13th, we are instead going to remain in private beta to optimize with our industry partners and fully ensure the smoothness of our presentation,” the terse email read.
“We’ll be announcing a new launch date shortly.”
So goes the dry, terse press release by Scoop Marketing, the PR firm hired by Rolling Stone Magazine owning company, Penske Media Corporation, concerning the much anticipated public launch of the Rolling Stone music charts that were intended to rival Billboard-Nielsen and their charts. Only a week before the launch, at the Music Biz conference in Nashville, the magazine announced that, “we are in the music space to stay.”
This is one of the signs that digitalmusic.com sees as possible trouble with the long-running, popular culture magazine. But they also remind us that the magazine recently fired Andrew Budkofsky, its Chief Revenue Officer and Publisher, even though the move was explained as ‘a mutual separation.’ Neither side wanted to give a comment.
On the other hand, Jim Lidestri of the Alpha/BuzzAngle, whose ‘Alpha Data’ is supposed to power Rolling Stone’s chart release told digitalnews.com that, “he ‘wasn’t in the loop’ on the Budkofsky situation.”
To add to the confusion, Penske Media removed Budkofsky from their list of top executives, and Tim Ingham, of Music Business Worldwide and responsible for Rolling Stone’s music industry expansion, said he never even heard of the guy. While at the same time Budkofsky was listed as one of the top four executives at Rolling Stone on Penske’s corporate site.
It begs to question whether all of these issues are just temporary set backs or signs of more serious trouble for Rolling Stone and their expansion into the music industry.
