Bob Guccione Jr.’s magazine from 1985 to its sale in 1997.

Spin was a publisher’s project from the start. Wikipedia says the American music magazine was founded in 1985 by Bob Guccione Jr., dates its opening issue to May 1985 and gives its base as New York City. It notes that the title is stylised in capital letters as SPIN.

The magazine nearly stopped within two years. Wikipedia says that in August 1987 the publisher announced it would stop publishing Spin, but that Guccione Jr. kept control of the title and partnered with David H. Horowitz, a former president of MTV, to revive it quickly. During that period, it says, Spin was published by Camouflage Publishing, with Guccione Jr. as president and chief executive and Horowitz as investor and chairman.

The covers of those years set out the magazine’s territory. Wikipedia says Spin placed rising acts such as R.E.M., Prince, Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys and Talking Heads on its covers, and ran long features on established figures including Miles Davis, Keith Richards, Tom Waits and John Lee Hooker.

The magazine also put its name on books. Wikipedia says Spin produced the Spin Alternative Record Guide in 1995, compiling writing by music critics on artists and bands connected with alternative music, each entry with a discography and album reviews rated from one to ten. For its twentieth anniversary in 2005, it says, the magazine published Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music, with essays on genres and acts from the previous two decades.

The founder sold up in 1997. The Drum, in a long feature on the brand published on 24 February 2021, said Guccione Jr. sold and left Spin in 1997. Wikipedia says the buyer was Miller Publishing, a partnership of Robert Miller, David Salzman and Quincy Jones that also owned Vibe, the two titles together forming Vibe/Spin Ventures. The new owner appointed Michael Hirschorn as editor-in-chief, and in 1999, Wikipedia says, Alan Light, previously editor of Vibe, succeeded him.

Four owners, a digital edition and a print pause.

The next decade brought a run of new owners and formats. Wikipedia says Sia Michel became editor-in-chief in early 2002, succeeding Light. In 2006 the title moved to San Francisco ownership. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 1 March 2006 that the McEvoy Group, owner of Chronicle Books, had acquired Spin, and that its chairman Nion McEvoy would become chief executive of Spin Media LLC, a new company created for the purchase. The paper said Tom Hartle was named president, Malcolm Campbell publisher and Andy Pemberton editor-in-chief, that the previous owner had been Vibe/Spin Ventures LLC, and that Spin would continue to be published in New York.

The magazine moved onto screens in stages. Wikipedia says Spin began publishing a complete digital edition of each issue in 2008, and that in March 2010 its entire run of back issues became freely readable on Google Books. With the March 2012 issue, it says, Spin relaunched in a larger, bi-monthly format while expanding its online presence.

That print format did not last the year. Wikipedia says Spin was sold in July 2012 to Buzzmedia, a company that later renamed itself SpinMedia, and that the September/October 2012 issue was the last print edition before the magazine continued entirely online. Billboard, reporting on 27 August 2024, gave the same sequence: Spin stopped printing in late 2012 after Buzzmedia acquired it.

Two more changes of ownership followed. Billboard reported that in 2016 SpinMedia’s music brands, Spin, Vibe and Stereogum, were acquired by the Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group, and that the group sold Spin to the private equity firm Next Management Partners in 2020. Wikipedia names Eldridge Industries as the company behind the 2016 purchase and says Matt Medved became editor in December 2018. The Drum said Spin had been owned by the Billboard and Hollywood Reporter group for the four years before the 2020 sale, and that Jimmy Hutcheson was chief executive of both Spin and Next Management Partners. Next Management Partners has owned Spin since 2020.

A masthead in capitals, from newsstand to screen.

A music magazine masthead has to work while something else takes the attention. On most covers the photograph is the reason a reader stops, so the title sits at the top of the page and is often partly hidden by a head, a shoulder or a raised guitar. Designers plan for that: a masthead with heavy, wide letters can lose a corner and still be read, and art directors learn which parts of the word can be covered and which must stay clear. Around the photograph sit the cover lines, short phrases in a few sizes that name the acts inside and give the issue a voice. The type for those lines usually changes from issue to issue, while the masthead stays fixed and becomes the one element a reader can recognise from across a shop.

Formats have tested that fixed element. A weekly printed on newsprint was read quickly and thrown away, so its title had to be loud on rough paper with limited colour. A glossy monthly allowed finer printing, larger photography and more room around the name. Websites then asked the same word to work as a small header, a social media avatar and an app icon, where it may shrink to a square a few millimetres wide. Some titles answer by cutting the masthead to an initial or a short form with its punctuation; others keep the full word and simplify its weight. Digital covers keep the photograph in charge, with the masthead placed over an image that may be cropped differently on every screen.

The founder returns, the covers go digital and then back to paper.

The 2020s opened with the founder’s return. The Drum reported on 24 February 2021 that Next Management Partners had invited Guccione Jr. back in the spring of 2020 in an advisory role, and that creative director Danny Klein and managing editor Daniel Kohn were running the next phase with Hutcheson. The same feature described a monthly digital cover: each month an act such as Run the Jewels or the Foo Fighters appeared on Spin’s digital cover, which the magazine linked to its history in print and used to produce behind-the-scenes shoots and video. It also reported plans for Spin TV as a free, advertising-supported channel, and said a quarterly print magazine could be added in later years.

That print edition arrived in 2024. Billboard reported on 27 August 2024 that Spin was returning to print as a quarterly, with a new issue on newsstands that day featuring the country singer Lainey Wilson on the cover, and that the revived magazine would again be run by Guccione Jr. as editor-in-chief with a full editorial staff. The issue also carried an interview with Suki Waterhouse and an article by the Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery. Billboard said the magazine would be sold at stores including Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Hudson News, as well as at independent record shops, and quoted Hutcheson describing the move as a return to the brand’s roots. Wikipedia lists the magazine’s frequency as quarterly, with Next Management Partners as its company.

Across the four decades the name has stayed short and in capitals, while the object behind it changed from a New York monthly to a bi-monthly, then to a website with digital covers and back to a quarterly on paper. The founder who launched it in 1985 left in 1997 and returned in 2020, as an adviser and from 2024 as editor-in-chief again.

For a design guide, Spin shows how a four-letter masthead in capitals can carry a magazine through a dozen years without a print edition and then return to the newsstand under the same name. Compare Rolling Stone, another American music magazine with a long-running masthead, and Stereogum, a music site that shared owners with Spin from 2016. For this guide we use cover red, newsstand cream and ink black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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