About The Gap

The Gap

The Gap is a free, advertising-financed culture and music magazine published in Vienna, Austria, in German. Founded in 1997, it began as a black-and-white fanzine photocopied in a university basement and grew into one of Austria's largest culture magazines, covering independent music, film, art, games, literature, net politics, design and creative work. It appears in print six times a year and online at thegap.at, and it has kept a place in Viennese cultural life for well over a quarter of a century, long after many comparable Austrian music titles have closed or shrunk.

The magazine's own German-language reference description calls it a magazine for glamour and discourse, a pairing that captures its double character. On one side it is a practical guide to concerts, records, films and nightlife for a young urban audience; on the other it treats pop culture as a serious subject, carrying essays, interviews and political commentary alongside reviews. Its publisher describes its social and political orientation as left-leaning, and it places a deliberate emphasis on content from Austria itself, at a time when Austrian readers can easily be served by the much larger German magazine market in the same language.

From a Photocopied Fanzine to a National Culture Magazine

The Gap was founded in 1997 by Manuel Fronhofer and Thomas Heher, who were also its first editors-in-chief from issue 001. The first issue is dated 16 January 1997 in the magazine's German reference entry. The English-language account of its beginnings describes how the young title started as a black-and-white fanzine copied in the basement of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, with a first print run of about a thousand copies and the British band Blur on the cover. That modest, do-it-yourself origin is still central to how the magazine is remembered: it was made by fans and scene participants before it was a commercial product.

From those beginnings the title professionalised step by step. Its publishing responsibility passed through a sequence of small Viennese cultural organisations and individuals recorded in its imprint history: the Wahee! association for the promotion of music and culture for the earliest issues, then the Kulturverein The Gap from issue 034 in 2000, then Fronhofer personally from issue 054 in 2004. In 2007 the magazine increased its frequency to ten issues a year, a sign of how far it had moved from a fanzine schedule toward a regular place on the Austrian magazine market. It has survived in a segment that has thinned out sharply, a point Fronhofer himself made in an interview about Austrian music media, noting that several domestic music magazines had shut down or greatly reduced their activities while only a few print titles remained.

Founders, Publishers and Editors

For much of its life The Gap was published by Monopol Medien, the Vienna company founded in May 2004 in which the journalist Thomas Weber was a partner. Monopol also published the pop magazine TBA, a title founded by Fronhofer and Heher themselves after they had stepped away from The Gap, which appeared in Austria and, for a time, in Germany before it was discontinued in December 2011. Until September 2013 the agency Super-Fi was the main owner of Monopol, and Super-Fi's managing director Niko Alm served as publisher of The Gap from 2005 to 2007; after that ownership change Monopol operated independently. The magazine is now published by Comrades GmbH, which also publishes the cultural magazine morgen and organises the Vienna club festival Waves Vienna, a connection that underlines how closely the magazine sits inside Vienna's live-music economy.

The publisher's chair changed hands several times, with Weber taking the role from issue 077 in 2007 and Fronhofer returning, first alongside Martin Mühl from issue 164 in 2017 and then alongside co-founder Thomas Heher from issue 171 in 2018, the pairing still listed as the magazine's publishers. The editorship has rotated more often. After the founders, the editors-in-chief were, in sequence, Fronhofer alone, Fronhofer with Weber, Weber, Mühl, Mühl with Stefan Niederwieser, Niederwieser, Amira Ben Saoud, Yasmin Vihaus, Theresa Ziegler and Sandro Nicolussi. In 2023 Bernhard Frena took over the editorship from issue 197, as reported by the Austrian media trade press at the time.

What The Gap Covers

The Gap's subject matter is pop culture in the broad sense. Its core is current independent music, Austrian and international, but its stated coverage also includes film, art, games, literature, net politics and design, together with the creative industries that surround them. A typical issue therefore mixes record and concert coverage with film writing, interviews with artists and cultural workers, commentary on digital and media politics, and essays on the social questions that run through contemporary culture. The seed description of the magazine as a title for music, film, pop culture and urban life remains accurate, but the fuller topic list recorded in reference descriptions is wider than music alone.

Contributors over the years have included Thomas Edlinger, Peter Stuiber, Barbara Zeman, Jonas Vogt, Teresa Reiter, Werner Reiter, Andreas Klinger, Katharina Seidler, Christian Köllerer and Philipp L'Heritier, with earlier columnists including Heide Schmidt and Jürgen Wallner. That mix of music journalists, critics and writers from outside the music press helps explain the magazine's essayistic side: it has never been only a listings and reviews service, even though practical guidance for going out in Vienna has always been part of its appeal. Music Export Austria's archive of Austrian music coverage likewise carries a long run of items tagged to The Gap, reflecting its role as a chronicler of the domestic scene for an international-facing music-export organisation.

Frequency, Format and Circulation

The Gap is a free magazine, distributed without a cover price and financed by advertising. Its frequency has changed over its life. After the increase to ten issues a year in 2007, its present rhythm, as listed in its German reference entry and its publisher's media data, is six issues a year, which matches the bimonthly classification under which it appears in the Austrian magazine list. Print has not been abandoned: the magazine celebrated the appearance of its 200th issue in August 2023, and digital editions of later issues, including a special issue numbered 215a produced for the Diagonale film festival, are hosted on the Issuu publishing platform, which indicates that numbered print-style issues continued well beyond the 200 mark.

Circulation figures for a free title are publisher figures rather than newsstand sales, and they need to be read with their dates attached. An English-language reference, citing the magazine's own staff information from 2015, gave a print run of 40,000 copies. The more recent German reference entry, citing the media data of the present publisher Comrades, gives a sold or distributed circulation of 20,000 copies, again expressly marked as the publisher's own figure. The honest summary is that The Gap was a 40,000-copy free magazine in the mid-2010s by its own account and is listed at 20,000 copies in its current publisher's data; no independently audited circulation figure for the title was found in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

Digital Presence and New Platforms

The Gap was an early mover among Austrian magazines in building presences beyond print. Alongside the printed magazine it developed its website at thegap.at and presences on social platforms including Facebook and Twitter, and it published digital editions through Issuu. That early multi-platform approach mattered for its reputation: when listeners of the Austrian youth radio station FM4 voted it magazine or blog of the year in 2015, and again in 2016, the award category itself treated print magazine and online publication as a single field, and The Gap won it twice in succession.

Online, the magazine functions as a continuing cultural publication rather than a simple copy of the print issue, carrying articles, interviews and commentary between print editions; its editor-in-chief Bernhard Frena, for example, published a long examination of what FM4 music means on thegap.at in December 2024, in the run-up to that station's thirtieth anniversary. The relationship with FM4 is a recurring theme in coverage of the title: Der Standard, reporting the 200th issue in August 2023, described The Gap as the little brother of FM4 that had grown up, a phrase that places the magazine inside the same alternative cultural milieu as Austria's national youth and alternative radio station.

Editorial Character: Glamour and Discourse

The most quoted description of The Gap comes from its own former editor Thomas Weber, who called it more milieu than magazine. The phrase points to something real about its position: The Gap did not simply report on Vienna's independent music and club scene from outside, it was produced by people inside that scene, celebrated it and helped to define who belonged to it. Its twenty-fifth anniversary, on 22 April 2022, was marked with a party at the Vienna venue Fluc, with live acts including Culk, Farce, Zack Zack Zack and Zinn, which is the kind of birthday a scene institution, rather than a conventional magazine publisher, would organise.

Editorially, the magazine combines enthusiasm with a critical, left-leaning cultural politics. Its reference description states plainly that it sees itself as socially and politically oriented to the left, and its coverage of net politics, urban questions and the economics of creative work sits alongside the glamour of covers, fashion-conscious photography and nightlife reporting. That combination, entertainment surface and discursive ambition, is what its glamour and discourse label describes, and it distinguishes The Gap from both a pure fanzine and a purely commercial entertainment guide.

Audience and Readership

The Gap's audience is the young, urban, culturally active readership of Vienna and, through distribution and its website, of Austria more broadly: concert-goers, club audiences, students, creative workers and readers of independent music and film. As a free title it reaches that audience where it gathers rather than through subscriptions, and its advertising-financed model depends on delivering that specific milieu to advertisers. No independently verified readership survey figures for the title were found in the sources consulted, so this profile makes no claim about the size or demographic composition of its readership beyond the audience its content, distribution model and FM4 listener awards plainly imply.

Its Austrian emphasis is part of its value to that audience. Because German-language readers in Austria are also served by large German pop-culture titles, a Vienna magazine that systematically covers Austrian acts, Austrian venues and Austrian cultural politics fills a gap that imported titles do not. Fronhofer made a related point in interview, arguing that as online media grew and regionally relevant content became more important, the role of the German print publications that had long been present on the Austrian music market diminished, while a local title that knew its own scene could hold its ground.

Place in Austrian Media

The Gap's significance is out of proportion to its circulation. It is one of the very few Austrian pop-culture magazines founded in the 1990s fanzine era to have professionalised, survived the collapse of print music journalism and still be publishing numbered issues nearly three decades later. Its history traces the institutional history of independent culture in Vienna: from a university-basement fanzine, through the Monopol years alongside the now-closed TBA, to its present home at Comrades alongside the Waves Vienna festival, which has become one of the main showcase and conference events for new music in the city.

For readers outside Austria, the essential facts are these. The Gap was founded in Vienna in 1997 by Manuel Fronhofer and Thomas Heher, with a first issue dated 16 January 1997. It is a free, advertising-financed German-language magazine for independent music, film, art, games, literature, net politics and design, with a left-leaning editorial character and a strong Austrian focus. It is published by Comrades GmbH, appears six times a year in print and continuously online, lists a publisher-stated circulation of 20,000 copies, and has been edited by Bernhard Frena since 2023. Where the record is thin, notably on audited circulation and readership, this profile says so rather than filling the gap with invented numbers, a restraint the magazine's own milieu-over-metrics history makes appropriate.