Guitar World Apes Decibel Magazine’s Flexi Series
Oh, hey, lookit. Guitar World is now offering subscribers a special flexi disc with some Dimebag-related shit on it:
If this offer seems familiar, well, that’s because Decibel has been doing it each and every issue for four years now.
Not that, uh, “adopting” another media outlet’s promotional ideas is, like, the most dastardly deed ever or anything — hell, despite what some younger readers might believe, flexis have existed since long before Decibel started including them in the mag (although Decibel does clearly deserve credit for making flexis “a thing” again — tellingly, if you do a Google image search for “flexi discs,” two of the first five images to appear are from the Decibel series).
What IS dastardly is this: Guitar World clearly stole Decibel‘s flexi logo (flexis don’t have a universal logo for the format, the way, say, Blu-ray discs do — Decibel‘s was special, designed just for them). In fact, while I haven’t verified this with anyone over at Decibel, it looks to me like Guitar World just took one of the images of dB‘s flexis and just Photoshopped their own shit onto it. Either that, or the two graphics just coincidentally happen to have light reflections in all the exact same spots:
This is all the more infuriating when you consider that Guitar World is owned by New Bay Media — the same company that owns Revolver, which is Decibel‘s biggest competitor. Guitar World even shares an office and employees with Revolver. (Decibel, like MetalSucks, is a member of the Blastbeat Ad Network. We do not, however, share an owner or an office.) And, in theory at least, any New Bay Media magazine should have a wwwwwaaaayyyyy bigger operating budget than dB does. So why couldn’t they be bothered to come up with their own ideas?
(And for the record, I know people who work at Decibel and people who work at Guitar World and Revolver, and they’re all swell folks! Still, I have to call bullshit on this, because, it’s, y’know. Total bullshit.)
If you want to get in on Decibel’s flexi series, you have to subscribe to the magazine! If you completely missed the point of this article and want a Dimebag flexi, go here.
