Hails & Horns Magazine is now free. Starting with their Winter 2009 / 2010 issue (Municipal Waste cover), out now, Hails & Horns will be online for free in a digital format. Print versions of the magazine are still available for a fee.

As far as I know, Hails & Horns is the first metal print publication to offer its entire magazine online at all, let alone for no cost. Of the big dogs, Decibel offers the first several paragraphs of each feature article and full text of the reviews in the back of the mag, and Revolver offers none of their printed content online. It’s no secret that magazines make a very small portion of their money from subscription fees — the big bread-earner is advertising — so it’s not that shocking that a magazine would forgo subscription fees altogether. Some free magazines are quite profitable (see: The Onion, your town’s alt weekly arts mag [i.e. The Village Voice], etc). What remains to be seen is whether this (or any) magazine’s print advertisers are going to be down with the switch, and whether online readers have an interest in long-form magazine-style journalism and whether they want to read it on a computer screen.

The Hails & Horns online reading interface is actually really cool. You can scroll through the issue page by page or skip to any page number you please. Plenty of ads still show up, but they’re in the same locations they would be in the print version — not a nuisance or hindrance to the reading experience at all. Articles have live links to each band’s website and MySpace page. There’s even an optional chat feature that allows you to converse with others who are reading the online mag at the same time as you. The whole interface is seamless and intuitive.

My intuition is that it’s going to be tough to get people to read magazines in this format. The Internet as a whole demands shorter articles and quick bits of information; speaking from personal experience, just because I have the patience to read a full New York Times article in the physical newspaper doesn’t mean I’ll exhibit the same behavior online. Whatever the reason, the computer and screen just seem to demand that we process information differently. Perhaps this will change in time and perhaps I’m an outlier, but right now it’s hard for me to imagine plopping my ass down in front of my computer to e-flip through the pages of an e-magazine. I’d rather do that on the shitter, on the subway or in bed; when I’m in front of the computer I want to scan, scroll, skim and click, getting as much information as possible as quickly as I can.

Still, I salute Hails & Horns for taking this courageous step. With print publications of all trades hurting — not just metal — I offer a hearty round of hails and horns to Hails & Horns for making such a gutsy move. If there’s a future for longer-form journalism in the online space, this is a big step in the right direction.

-VN