Music publications BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine have been gutted by parent company Veeps, according to various sources. Nearly all staff at each publication appear to have been laid off yesterday. Veeps, which is now part of Live Nation, seems to have owned the publications since 2024 or 2025. Pitchfork has emailed Veeps and Live Nation representatives for comment. Emails to BrooklynVegan staffers, with the exception of founder Dave Levine, bounced back.
Veeps was founded by Good Charlotte’s Benji and Joel Madden and has operated for many years as a ticketed livestream platform. Publicist Jacob Daneman mourned BrooklynVegan on X last night: “RIP Brooklyn Vegan. Absolutely bewildering. Thinking of all the great people there and the unparalleled music coverage they’ve done over the years. Utterly unceremonious and moronic actions by Veeps.”
Each publication has a storied history and a more or less unwavering mission that has endured for multiple decades. Levine founded BrooklynVegan in 2004 at the peak of the era’s rock revival in New York; Revolver, founded as a general-interest rock magazine in 2000, has been a hard-rock and metal institution since the following year; Goldmine has been publishing a physical newspaper—and, more recently, magazine—for record collectors since the mid 1970s; and Alternative Press was founded in Cleveland in 1985 and remained in the city until its acquisition by another Maddens company, the Veeps parent MDDN, around 2020. A third brand, Project M, a digital media and e-commerce company, had also listed all of the publications among its portfolio for varying periods until Veeps took over.
