Posted 12 Feb. 2022 at 12:28
David Swaelens-Kane, who had acquired the magazine “Photo” and the Playboy brand license for French-speaking countries, decided to relaunch the French rock magazine “Best”, which the forties and fifties remember as the great competitor of “Rock & Folk”, especially in the early 1980s. The new incarnation of the title will be in the format of a high-end “mook” (mixture of magazine and book) that David Swaelens-Kane hopes his readers will collect .
This mook and its website, which is free, will serve as a showcase for a “huge radio-hook competition in paper version”, as the new owner of the title says. The “Best Awards” will reward talents from new scenes, for example with management contracts to get a signature with a record company. “The DNA of the title is rock but we will be open to urban music,” says David Swaelens-Kane.
“Radio-hook paper version”
The competition will also reward music entrepreneurs. “I have always liked the entrepreneurial side, for me Elon Musk is the new Bob Dylan”, says the one who says he wanted to make music but understood “very early that he would not be David Bowie”.
David Swaelens-Kane recently invested in an event company in Belgium. He hopes to find synergies with “Best” such as organizing concerts or other musical events, including the Best competition, which will give rise to a big gala evening. For his adventures in the media, the idea is to be financially balanced on paper and to generate profits outside the media. “Best” will employ fifteen people, will be printed in 50,000 copies and will benefit from an investment of 1.5 million euros from David Swaelens-Kane.
“Best” was created in 1968 by Jacques Morlain and Gérard Bernar, two former “Disco Revue”, with a first number on the Rolling Stones, says Jacques Morlain in a podcast “Rock & Press”. The idea was to better cover Anglo-Saxon music, even if the magazine then defended the French scene well.
Patrick Eudeline
The golden age of the music press ended in the 1980s with competition from free radio and television, which now offered programs like “Les Enfants du rock” and the ban on for some strategic advertisers (alcohol, tobacco, etc.). The magazine ceased publication at the end of the 1990s, despite the addition of a CD-Rom to attract the rock fan! “Rock & Folk” is still published, even if the whole sector had to reinvent itself with the Web.
The idea of reviving “Best” was born from a conversation between David Swaelens-Kane and Patrick Eudeline, one of the historical feathers of “Best”. The literate rock-critic will take care of the editor-in-chief.
David Swaelens-Kane sold Photo “without losing any money” in 2020, he explains. Playboy is still in its purse and survives as a magazine even if it too has evolved into a mook.