According to The Columbia Journalism Review, roughly 700 new magazines start up each year. 60% of those magazines don't even last a year. Lasting 13 years and 80 issues, Punk Planet is clearly not included in that 60%, as the magazines in the 40% margin are ones that standout, spread ideas, and make relevant points about culture. Punk Planet was one of those magazines. On June 18, 2007, a blog post was published on their site declaring that Punk Planet was dead. The biggest blow to Punk Planet, according to the post, is their bad distribution deal with RetailVision. Other factors included a lack of advertisers and declining subscription sales. All of these factors spell out disaster for any magazine, making it virtually impossible for any paper zine to survive.
Even though most of the writing was purely contribution-based, Punk Planet tried to pay their writers every now and then, but all payments stopped six issues ago. It's just so powerful to see how love and passion have nothing to do with money. It's terrible to see such a unique and amazing zine fall. It was an amazing zine that didn't follow the current trend of focusing on consumerism and aesthetics in culture but ideas and the people behind them. It focused heavily on music as well, with Punk Planet literally trying to review every independent album sent to them, and if not in the zine, you could always find more reviews on their website. Of course all of this is hard to keep rolling since the magazine version of Punk Planet is dead.
Notice how I simply said, "the magazine version of Punk Planet is dead." Thankfully, it means that Punk Planet can live on through the internet if they play their cards correctly. Punkplanet.com is a hell of a domain name (and excellent site already), so they could definitely utilize that domain and their massive list of credentials to create a website as influential as their print zine. Even better, it's still possible a company could pick up Punk Planet and get the magazine kilns fired up again. For the time being, though, all of Punk Planet seems in pieces and they aren't sure of a new direction, but their spirit still seems to remain intact, and I'm positive they're not finished wreaking havoc against ideas they denounce and proliferating the independent and punk ideas they feel so passionate about.
