Blender, the music magazine, is dead. Its owners folded it this morning, eliminating about 30 jobs in the process.

We heard a rumor of this this morning, but Ad Age got the full story. Blender and Maxim were formerly owned by wild British publisher Felix Dennis, but he sold them for a quarter of a billion dollars in 2007, in a spectacularly well-timed disposal. The new owners, Alpha Media, could never really make its new acquisitions soar. They had heavy debt and declining income. And Blender, in particular, lacked a distinct identity—see this month's cover, for instance—and in its field, that can be (and was) deadly.

Paid subscriptions fell 8% [from 2007-08] to 768,000, while newsstand sales declined 18% to 44,233.

Ad pages at Blender also plunged 31% last year and another 57% from January through April, according to the Publishers Information Bureau and Media Industry Newsletter

Blender editor Joe Levy is now the new editor of Maxim, and Maxim's former editor Jim Kaminsky is leaving for undisclosed reasons. [Ad Age]