Rolling Stone subscribers react to canceled lifetime subscription plan

Nathan Cone remembers the very first issue of Rolling Stone he received in print. Sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, Cone was flipping through an issue of Rolling Stone magazine when he saw an “I would always joke to people that Rolling Stone knows when I’m going to die,” Cone told me, chuckling about the absurdity of it. In fact, they’ve been standard practice for Rolling Stone since the beginning, said Stu Zakim, who noted that early subscribers in the 1960s received a free “roach clip” with their copies of the magazine. At the time, Zakim said that Rolling Stone started featuring fewer of founder Jann Wenner’s rock star friends on the cover, so the lifetime subscription might have been an appeasement tactic. “Hence, no breach.” Related From Slate The Ugly Truth Behind Ticketmaster’s Lawsuit For lifetime subscribers, who will receive their final print issue in June, the news still stings.