May/Jun 2014
Welcome to issue #101 of Tape Op.
Now that Tape Op has passed the 100th issue mark and survived 18 years, the astute among you may have noticed some changes.
We now offer a FREE protected PDF subscription version of Tape Op, available to anyone who signs up, fills out a short questionnaire, and has an email address. You can also view all of your current and past delivered issues by signing in on our site. We are excited to be able to send this magazine out, for free, anywhere in the world. We hope that fellow music recordists around the globe find out what we have to offer, and take advantage of it. Spread the word!
Readers in the United States will still receive a free print version of the mag, along with the PDF version. Contrary to most reports in mainstream media, publications like ours remain viable, due to the niche market we exist in. Continuing support from our advertisers, and readers who are passionate about music recording, are of the utmost importance to the content of Tape Op.
We've discontinued paid subscriptions. This may seem counterintuitive for a small business like ours; but it makes sense when you look at the time involved in managing, maintaining a database, addressing, shipping, responding to customer issues, and keeping a website updated for paid subscriptions. We have over 35,000 free subscriptions to the print magazine and less than 250 paid subs. It takes us about 5 minutes to process the 35,000 free subscriptions and a full day to process the 250 paid subs. We apologize to anyone who is upset about the lack of a paid subscription service, but the demand for this is so low, and we cannot find an outside company to handle this small of a job. (You can buy single copies from Hal Leonard; more info on this below.) We wish to thank our friends at Good Mountain and Tonevendor who've worked with us for years on this, as well as selling back issues.
Our tireless online publisher and web developer Dave Middleton has built our in-house PDF delivery system (no more relying on Apple and flaky app developers), and we have set even more delivery systems in motion: Individual back issues, from issue 20 and on, are available for purchase directly from us as PDFs. Tape Op Archive Subscriptions can access PDF versions of this same content (or text only for mobile devices) for the low cost of $5.99 a year, via a HTML5 PDF viewer. Our books will also be available on PDF directly from us, as well as through Amazon. Related to all this, the fine folks at Hal Leonard, who have distributed our Tape Op books for a number of years, will now also carry print copies of our back issues via their Music Dispatch arm, and can ship globally. For anyone that misses an issue, or lives outside the US and wants a printed copy of the mag, this is the way to go. Check out our books while you are there! This is all in effort to streamline the process of getting Tape Op to people like you, and hopefully gaining some new folks along the way. Thanks to all our readers for your continued support! We don't take it for granted.
Larry Crane, Editor & John Baccigaluppi, Publisher
Subscription Management and PDF Back Issues <tapeop.com>
Mail Order Back Issues <www.musicdispatch.com>
