Trancer’s Guide Magazine Cancelled

It seems as if there won’t be any more Trancer’s Guide magazines published from now on:

After five editions of our magazine we have decided to stop the project. This means that there will be no Trancer’s Guide 2009. The reason for this action is the difficult economic situation of the trance scene which makes it difficult to finance the project.

The Trancer’s Guide was supported primarily through the sale of advertising space. With rates ranging up to 1,000 € for a full page ad, it must have been too much for high profile festival organizers and major labels interested in something more focused and timely. The Guide, published once a year, was not able to keep up with the quicksilver pace of psytrance culture.

Whatever the reason for its unremarkable ending, I don’t think the Trancer’s Guide was a bad idea. In fact, I really like the concept! The Guide offered an overview of psytrance activity all around the world while celebrating the multiculturalism of the global movement. The accompanying compilation CDs weren’t anything special but the idea was excellent, and there certainly was room for it to grow. So what happened?

The Guide was doomed by the economics of atoms. Print publications, although they carry a certain prestige, are bulky, slow, and expensive to produce. Then you have to ship them all over the place! What a hassle. Sure, there was a PDF version of the guide, but it was always released long after the print version. The publishers simply weren’t committed to digital media. I wonder if it even occurred to them to push the Guide online and leave the dead trees alone. Of course, it might be tough to profit from an online version of the Guide, but if they aren’t interested… someone else will be.

I’ve already had a try at it, in my own way. I wrote an article for the Trancer’s Guide back in 2007–you can read it here. Virtually none of it made it to print. There simply wasn’t any room. The problem is one of geography: Canada is vast, but its level of trance activity is not high–especially compared to nations like Germany and Israel. Crucially, we are not in any way centralized. You can’t write something about “the scene in Canada” as it wouldn’t make very much sense.

This is why I opened the regional guide here on Ektoplazm. It provides much more detail about local scenes across Canada than you could ever find in the official Trancer’s Guide. That’s the power of online media! I’ve had just one problem: encouraging outside contributors to write about whatever might be happening in their area. I only feel qualified to write about Toronto. Others will have to step up to flesh out the information in our version of the guide. If anyone out there reading this has an interest, feel free to drop me a line. It is one area of the site that I haven’t had much time to update–and I would certainly welcome some help with it.