REEK ’N’ ROLL MAG

Wenner wants deal but suitors don’t hear music

Jann Wenner has landed between a rock and a hard place as he struggles to sell Rolling Stone.

The 71-year-old publishing mogul will pay dearly for clinging to the rock ’n’ roll magazine he founded 50 years ago, sources told The Post, as prospective buyers have evaporated along with music fans’ habit of buying glossy-print titles at newsstands.

“Jann knows he made his mark on American culture already and he is a realist,” said author Joe Hagan, whose biography on Wenner, entitled “Sticky Fingers,” is set to hit next month from Penguin Random House.

“The landscape has changed and he was not able to navigate through it.”

Time Inc. and Condé Nast are in cutback mode and not interested, with the latter apparently content to operate its Pitchfork music Web site, insiders say. Hearst, which had held talks to buy Rolling Stone a decade earlier, is also out of the running, according to sources.

American Media Inc., which cut a $100 million deal with Wenner earlier this year to buy Us Weekly, and more recently added Men’s Journal at an undisclosed price, looks unlikely to go to Wenner’s well a third time to buy Rolling Stone, several sources say.

With Old Media shrinking fast, tech titans also have been rumored as possible buyers.

“It would be a very sticky app for someone such as Verizon, Apple or Amazon,” one music and publishing veteran observed. “And for them, the money to buy it would be pocket change.”

Still, Silicon Valley has shown scant interest in print.

Vox, BuzzFeed and Vice have all been mentioned as possible suitors. But as one music veteran pointed out, “Rolling Stone has a brand identity for baby boomers and Gen X — but it has almost no resonance with millennials.”

Further complicating any deal is the fact that Singaporebased BandLab Technologies paid about $40 million for a 49percent stake in September 2016 — but apparently passed on buying the remaining 51 percent still owned by Wenner and family members.

Indeed, Wenner may be kicking himself for not dissolving his entire empire in 2007.

At the time, Wenner was said to have a deal on the table to sell Us Weekly to Hearst for $700 million to $750 million.

“It was about Us magazine,” said one source, noting that Us was spinning out a profit of more than $70 million at the time. But another source said there was a push to add a buyout option on Rolling Stone down the road — an idea Wenner resisted.

Wenner grew disenchanted when he realized Hearst had no intention of assuming a $300 million loan he took out to buy Walt Disney’s stake in Us Weekly as part of the deal.

After founding Rolling Stone in 1967, Wenner championed New Journalism icons like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. More recently, a discredited rape story in 2014 spawned three lawsuits, one of which was tossed but under appeal. The other two were settled for $4.65 million.