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Stylus Magazine

Defunct online music and film magazine

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ1039873 ↗
Source-derived summary

Stylus Magazine was an American online music and film magazine, launched in 2002 and co-founded by Todd L. Burns. It featured long-form music journalism, four daily music reviews, movie reviews, podcasts, an MP3 blog, and a text blog.

Additionally, Stylus had daily features like "The Singles Jukebox", which looked at pop singles from around the globe, and "Soulseeking", a column focused on personal responses in listening. Even though they never reached the readership of other music magazines such as PopMatters or Pitchfork, they still had a very consistent and fired-up audience. In 2006, the site was chosen by the Observer Music Monthly as one of the Internet's 25 most essential music websites.

Stylus closed as a business on 31 October 2007. On 4 January 2010, with the blessing of former editor Todd Burns, Stylus senior writer Nick Southall launched The Stylus Decade, a website with a new series of lists and essays reviewing music from the previous ten years. It is now also defunct. The Singles Jukebox relaunched with many of the same writers as a stand-alone website in March 2009 and continues today.

Reception

Stylus received positive attention from critics for its analytical depth and the breadth of its musical coverage.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Stylus Magazine” as defunct online music and film magazine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Stylus, Magazine and Defunct.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2002, 2006, 2007, 2010—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2002-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Stylus, Magazine and Defunct providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Stylus Magazine”, the useful work is to connect “defunct online music and film magazine” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1039873. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2006, 2007 and 2010.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Stylus Magazine”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Stylus Magazine primary sources, Stylus Magazine archive and Stylus research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Stylus Magazine”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Stylus Magazine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.