Music magazine Rolling Stones up for sale amid lack of funds

The iconic 50-year-old music magazine, Rolling Stones is up for sale due to an uncertain future outlook, its founder said. 

Jann Wenner, who founded Rolling Stone in 1967 now runs the magazine with his son Gus Wenner. In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, the father-son duo told the newspaper that the future looked difficult for Rolling Stones. 

"There's a level of ambition that we can't achieve alone. So, we are being proactive and want to get ahead of the curve," Gus Wenner said. 

Struggling for finances, Rolling Stone in 2016 sold a 49% stake to a Singaporean music and technology start-up, BandLab Technologies, which is headed by Kuok Meng Ru, who belongs to one of the Asia's richest families.

However, it is still not clear that wheather or not Kuok would want to take a controlling stake in Rolling Stone.

The tabloid is one of the highly reputated magazines covering rock music. But in 2014, its reputations and finances got a serious hit when it retracted a story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. The reports thereafter emerged that Rolling Stone did not follow basic journalistic procedures of checking facts. 

Rolling Stone had been appealing a $3 million defamation verdict a Virginia federal court jury awarded in November, last year to university administrator Nicole Eramo after it found the magazine and reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely had defamed her.

The Wenners, earlier this year sold off its other two titles - celebrity magazine US Weekly and lifestyle monthly Men's Journal - to American Media Inc.