Rolling Stone is a music and music industry magazine that was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason (Wenner is still editor and publisher). It embraced and reported on the hippy counterculture during the late 1960s and 1970s, and its rise to fame was synchronous with that of such bands as the Grateful Dead.

The magazine was so popular during this era that a song dedicated to it, "Cover of the Rolling Stone" by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, became a hit single.

By the 1980s, despite still nominally employing such people as Hunter S. Thompson and the infamous rock-journalist badboy, Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone had become institutionalized and adopted ideas (e.g., employee drug testing) shunned by the early Rolling Stone magazine. The magazine moved to New York to be closer to the advertising industry, and many date its change in culture from this point on.

In the early 2000s, losing advertiser money and thus revenue due to the rapid rise of young men's magazines such as Maxim and FHM, Rolling Stone reinvented itself, targeting a lower age group, and offering more sex-oriented content.

External link

• Rolling Stone website