A new online music magazine just launched a little bit ago for all you to enjoy. PLAYGROUND MUSIC MAGAZINE is the name and it is nothing short of awesome. Not only do they have good bands, good photos, good words, they have an awesome design to the mag AND they have free tracks to click and download immediatly in the PDF. What more could you ask for than all that for free?! I’m excited to say that I was able to contribute to it’s birth with my live photos of Wolfmother.

Honestly - this is the best not only music but any online magazine I have seen. I would spend a whole long post talking about each feature and give it a design critique, but I don’t have that kind of time and lets just stick to the music. Head over and download the first issue.

Over the past month or so I’ve been emailing back and forth with Heathcliffe Bird, producer/creator/graphic designer of the whole bit. I asked him a few things and he answered.

What is the idea behind PLAYGROUND?

The aim is to put together (over a few issues) the magazine we always wanted to read… one we could pick up from wherever we were, free of charge, and with new bands, music, writers, photographers and things that we’d really want to know about. And some place to hang out and play and swap ideas. We also spend a lot of time on blogs and sites and listening to bands and we wanted to be able to shout about how good some of the stuff thats out there is. And we wanted something we could play with. Like our own skunkworks… somewhere we can try and figure out how to do the things we love about publishing while folding in all the tricks that the web and new media can do.

It’s like in a perfect music magazine you wouldn’t just read about bands… you’d hear them or watch them or chat directly with them if they’re doing something you really like. You don’t just read about stuff… you join in with it. And we wanted the kind of magazine that we could join in with, and that our mates and anyone who wanted could chip in and play with. Something less like MTV and more like having yr mates round and having fun, i guess.

How did PLAYGROUND come about?

Playground came about from loving and working on print magazines… we kinda wanted to see what would happen if we tried producing a magazine but using web and new media instead of paper. Just to see how it works and what we could do differently.

The web is great because it’s so fucking immediate. It can link out to anything from any place so its great for exploring… and you can play with sound and video which is fantastic. But there’s still something great about picking up a new issue of a magazine. Like being able to read cover to cover and knowing its all pages that you haven’t read before… and the way that magazines flow and how the pace changes throughout. If a good website is like listening to great tracks, then a good magazine is like a great mixtape. When you spend time around good editors you start to realise how smart they are at this stuff. Its old school tricks that we’re starting to lose as magazines get replaced by web.

So we started thinking about what would happen if you could podcast a website but put it together like a music magazine and we tried building it… It’s taken us the first issue to work out a format that’s do-able. But that’s pretty cool. Now we have to build it and make it work.

Do you plan on going to print or staying online?

Definitely online. Doing this is like being a kid with lego. And ’cause we’re inventing we get to bounce ideas off total strangers and have some great chat. And we can do stuff that isn’t possible on paper, and we can keep everything we do free of charge. But we have much to do to make it viable, and thats the stuff that we’re focussed on right now.

What do you think or want the future to hold for PLAYGROUND?

We’re just starting out so i guess the thing is to try and create that magazine that we’d kill to read. Issue one was about working out how pdf pages work and trying stuff out and working out how long things take and whats practical and possible… so we pinned down a lot of technical stuff and a design and commissioning and production and we’ve got tight writing styles and layouts to bring in for issue 2.

As a new magazine with no backing, getting bands and writers was a massive headache for the first issue. We were lucky that even with no magazine to show, some of the PR and music guys figured we were worth taking a chance on and lent us time. That was lucky and excellent. Now that we’ve shown we can deliver something, we’re starting to work out proper schedules for interviews and features and getting hold of bands is much easier. So issues 2 and 3 will see more content, more bands and new writers.

We’re also putting our backs into the free downloads. Where we had to rely on linkouts for free tracks in issue one, we’re chatting to PR and artists now about getting pre-cleared and exclusive tracks for download. If people are gonna read us, we want to give them something back. We’re also starting to look at audio podcasting and putting together stuff that runs alongside the written mag. We’ve been testing out on-page audio as well so you can hear tracks without leaving the magazine.

And over the next few issues, we have to work really hard on getting more writers, upping the bar on everything and finding us more readers. At the end of the day, its the readers that matter. And if anyone’s up for chipping in or playing, we’d love to hear from them. It’s that ‘having people round yr house’ thing… People are smart. Telling them what to listen to is all well and good but chatting to people about what’s great is stuff that makes it worth getting out of bed. People rule.

PLAYGROUND MUSIC MAGAZINE: Official Website