Rolling Stone owner mulling options for its majority stake

MUMBAI: The owner of Rolling Stone magazine said it’s exploring strategic options for its majority stake, signalling co-founder Jann Wenner is preparing to relinquish control of the half-century-old iconic music publication.

Wenner Media LLC hired Methuselah Advisors, the company said in a statement late Sunday. The company didn’t say whether Wenner is in talks with any potential suitors.

Founded in 1967, Rolling Stone became a fixture of American pop culture, helping launch the careers of writers and creative artists over 50 years. But like many of its peers, the magazine has steadily lost advertising and readership to nimbler online alternatives over the years.

The announcement comes almost a year after Wenner sold a 49% stake in the magazine to Singapore-based BandLab Technologies, a budding digital music company co-founded by Kuok Meng Ru, the scion of one of Asia’s richest families. BandLab declined to comment on Wenner’s latest statement.

Earlier this year, Wenner Media sold Men’s Journal and Us Weekly to American Media Inc for undisclosed sums.

When the minority stake in Rolling Stone was sold to BandLab in September 2016, it was the first time Wenner had admitted an outside investor, encapsulating the plight of an industry fighting to stay relevant in an online age. The deal was an opportunity to take the brand into new and different markets, Gus Wenner, the company’s digital chief, had said then.

Kuok, the third son of Singapore-based agribusiness tycoon Kuok Khoon Hong, graduated from Cambridge University with a mathematics degree and launched BandLab in 2016 as a social network for musicians and fans. The startup is funded by private investors, including Kuok’s father and JamHub Corp, a maker of audio mixers. — Bloomberg