What's Love Got to Do with It?

With no business plan and little money a young publisher launched a music magazine.

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No business plan, little money, zero experience -- is Shirley Halperin's passion enough?

"Does phish stink?"

Sixty-thousand readers in New York City's tristate area got the answer ("No!") to that cover-line question last August in the pages of Smug, Shirley Halperin's new alternative-music magazine. Since Halperin launched Smug, in February 1995, its circulation has grown from 5,000 to 20,000, its readership has expanded to 60,000, and monthly ad revenues have climbed from zero to $15,000. Four-color, full-page ads are increasingly supplanting quarter-page, black-and-white ones, in issues that have swelled from a dozen pages to 50. After just four issues, Smug beat out larger and long-established dailies and weeklies to win a prestigious local music award.

All this from a 23-year-old college dropout who hits the club scene at night and is building a magazine on a couple of networked computers in her bedroom by day.

Halperin's foray into self-employment wasn't planned. Three credits shy of graduation with a double major at Rutgers University, the Israeli-born Halperin had, as she says, "temporarily suspended my enrollment" to devote time to her nonacademic priorities: her jobs at a small record label in Manhattan and as arts editor of the Rutgers Review. But Halperin was fired from the paper in the fall of 1994 because she was no longer an enrolled student. She quickly decided the time was ripe to launch her own magazine, and a quarter of the Review arts staff, which she had grown from one person to 40, elected to join her.

In making the leap, Halperin overlooked the obstacles -- she had no business plan, little money, and zero experience running a company -- to focus on the opportunity: publications covering the music scene between Philadelphia and New York City, in her words, "sucked." The Village Voice carried club schedules, but its music coverage, she says, was overshadowed "by all that political stuff"; the Aquarian Weekly, in New Jersey, covered musical events, but Halperin saw it as targeted more toward "aging hippies and wanna-be musicians" than to young fans -- like herself. Those publications also cost money, something Halperin knew young people never have enough of. She reckoned that her magazine should be free. It wasn't a business decision. At that point, Halperin didn't know from business. Now that Smug threatens to become a business, Halperin vows she'll keep it free, "covering music that people like me care about, or should care about."

Smug: the name comes from a record label Halperin thought about starting, which she wanted to call Smug & Indifferent. The 10-issues-a-year publication is intended to provide music fans aged 16 to 30 with well-written stories "about musicians that matter," explains Halperin. The fact that that qualifier includes bands with names like Swinging Udders, Bent Backed Tulips, and Super Chunky Monkey begs the question, music that matters to whom?

Halperin -- and by extension, Smug -- has a nose for new music. The cover of each issue always carries, in addition to the names of the notables covered inside, the phrase "plus bands you haven't even heard of yet . . . " It's a key element in the magazine's business model: bands people typically haven't heard of yet can't afford to advertise in Smug's established competitors. Spin charges $29,700 for a four-color full-page ad; the Village Voice, approximately $7,000; and Smug, just $1,000. "This business is built on developing artists," explains John Germinario of Polygram Group Distribution, in Queens, N.Y. "The way we break and build them is to use vehicles like Smug." Barb Dehgan, a publicist at Hollywood Records, based in Los Angeles, notes that "Rod Stewart doesn't need Smug. But if it's a regional band, our money will be allocated to a regional publication -- like Smug -- where the band may have a following already. It doesn't make sense for baby bands to advertise in the bigger publications until awareness of them rises." Halperin's point is that even small bands and record labels have to start somewhere. Smug's ad rates will gradually increase as its costs rise, but they will always be "a little bit cheaper" than everyone else's, Halperin says.

Targeted advertisers -- recording labels, clubs, music retailers, and alternative clothing boutiques -- base some of their buying decisions on a magazine's look: its graphics, typefaces, photos, and design. They ask themselves, as Dehgan puts it, "Is this a publication you should be seen in?" Jason Colton, assistant manager for Phish, says he knew Smug was "respectable" when it asked to conduct a photo shoot with the band instead of running the standard handout shots.

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