Speculation over the life and death of the Chinese edition of Rolling Stone will end Monday, when the April issue of the prestigious music magazine hits the streets of Beijing, with a cover free of anything Rolling Stone.

Hao Fang, the magazine's editor, has posted the scanned cover of the new issue on his blog under the apt title: "Smells Like Rolling Stone Spirit." Compared to the debut March issue, the one major change immediately noticeable on the cover is the disappearance of the registered Rolling Stone trademark. In fact, the cover is Rolling Stone- free, while the title of the magazine reads Yin Xiang Shi Jie (YXSJ), or "Audio & Video World." YXSJ is itself a music magazine based in Shanghai, which served as the "shell" of the March issue of Rolling Stone China.

Hao has promised that the new issue's content will be every bit as strong as that of the first.

"I have no idea what the fuss [over the magazine's supposed demise] is about. The magazine is in totally good shape," he said.

The image Hao posted reveals a cover story about the Rolling Stones band, who performed in Shanghai on April 8. Other featured artists include Madonna, Kanye West, Tang Dynasty - one of the earliest rock groups in China - Zuo Xiao Zu Zhou, the avant- gardist-turned-alternative-rocker, and Wu Hongfei, a critically acclaimed musician who is also a journalist.

Since the end of March, rumors about the magazine supposedly being banned by the government began to spread via blogs and Western mainstream media. A post dated March 28 on the ultra-popular Chinese blog "Massage Milk" stated that Rolling Stone had not obtained the entrance license for foreign publications eager for a cut of the Chinese market. Some English-language blogs picked up the post and carried out their own investigations. On April 2, The Observer published a story entitled "Banned by Beijing - but Rolling Stone gathers no kudos."

While the Chinese mainstream media were silent over the story, avid bloggers disseminated the news of Rolling Stone supposedly being banned, either by pasting news stories published in the Western media or by supplying their own, mostly light-hearted, comments. Many, including some presumably well-informed media figures - have accepted it as the truth, with some even looking forward to owning a rarity: a magazine with only one issue.

According to an anonymous source, the reason for the authorities - in this case, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Press and Publication - taking a tough stance is the allegation that the creation of Rolling Stone China involved illegal license trading.

As the bureau currently does not grant licenses for magazines, license owners have been selling them for a number of years. Today, it's an open secret that if you want to launch a new magazine, the first thing you do is make sure that you are able to secure a license. Although this sort of license-trading is deemed illegal in China, the government has turned a blind eye to it in most cases. However, the fact that the entrance license is not mentioned on Massage Milk complicates matters. The blog post points out that the magazine will be de facto legal as long as it doesn't put "Rolling Stone" on its cover.

YXSJ itself was once the most popular magazine about rock and pop music in the mainland. In the early 1990s it ran the pioneering brand column "Conversation about Rock'n'Roll" by Wang Xiaofeng, now the blogger behind Massage Milk - and Zhang Lei. The column was widely regarded as the primer which illuminated Western rock music. In the late '90s, when a new generation of music lovers turned their backs on rock in favor of electronica, YXSJ did a great series on the likes of Aphex Twin, Board of Canada, Plastikman and Autechre. But its popularity has waned.

The renamed magazine will continue re-publishing some Rolling Stones articles in Chinese, blending them with original articles on homegrown music. Hao says there is no mandatory requirement on the ratio of translated and original articles.

After the Internet revolution, Chinese listeners' dependence on printed media shrank. Thanks to the All Music Guide, Amazon and Google, reviews, interviews and other kinds of musical discourse are only a click away; with p2p networks, music aficionados can swap albums with people on the other side of the world at a speed that would embarrass any postal system.

More importantly, music listening has become a more light-hearted pursuit. The first issue of Rolling Stone China was more or less trying to replicate the open editorial policy of its American parent, but with a cover story about a "rocker-for--nostalgia," an interview with "the-rocker-as-iPod-promoter" and generic features such as "30 must-see Hollywood movies of 2006," and one article about the sexually explicit blogger Muzimei who was in the limelight three years ago, it would seem to smell of anything but teen spirit.

Most readers found it hard to appreciate the first issue. Zhang Anding, a Guangzhou-based guitarist/sound artist, said he had lost interest reading its list of contents. "Experienced music lovers would know at first sight that this is a magazine for newbies," he said. "With Soulseek & All Music Guide you can access anything. Why would someone read a mag like this?"

Despite the benefits of the Internet, Nicole Chan, a university student majoring in Spanish, maintains a keen interest in print media. "I still expect a decent music magazine. For one thing, I love to have a hard copy to hold, and magazines usually have more systematic coverage [than Web sites and blogs.]"

Others are much more ruthless. "The cover story on Cui Jian is the worst I've ever read, the worst in the universe," said Ye Nan, editor of an architectural magazine in Beijing.

"It's obvious that Cui had become impatient during the interview," Ye says. "Other than that, the magazine seems to have no connection with the current world. It feels more like Yin Xiang Shi Jie than Rolling Stone. The latter is about the embodiment of a spirit, a kind of youthful ideology. And there are too many typos."

The issue contains a couple of notable mistakes. For instance, on page 73, in the article about Bram Cohen, the inventor of the popular p2p tool Bit Torrent, there is a paragraph mentioning the "Greateful Dead,". For many years in China, the name of Grateful Dead has been spelled as "Greatful Dead" but a magazine as prestigious as Rolling Stone is expected to do better.

Another non-trivial typo can be found in page 90, at the beginning of a four-page story titled "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski," by Peter Wilkinson. The story was republished in Chinese without crediting the translator. In the lead paragraph, the term BDSM was taken to be "the name of a sadomasochist group in Los Angeles." In fact, the original sentence reads: "The Dungeon served the devoted BDSM - bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism - community in Los Angeles."

As most people interested in rock music have a certain command of English, editorial regulations clash with people's reading habits. One reader, Dong Chaomei, questioned the editorial decision to use Chinese characters for names instead of the original English. "When I was reading about how `folk rock singer Xuruier Kelu ... broke up,' I had no idea what they were talking about. Later, when I finished the whole article, I came to realize it was Sheryl Crow! Gosh, it's the 21st century, so why would they want to use only the Chinese translation? It drastically compromises the reading experience."

The cover image on the April issue fails to convince the disappointed. "It won't appeal to me for sure," said Zhang. "Can't imagine they're still writing about people like Wu Hongfei! And Madonna! I'm speechless. Don't they think it's a bit late now? And there is Tang Dynasty, the same old trick as the Cui Jian feature of the last issue. We do have quite a few good rock bands that have emerged in recent years, but they usually won't get coverage."

Hao defends the inclusion of Tang Dynasty. "It's not an interview like the one we did with Cui Jian. It's actually a set of full-page fashion photos in which Tang and Hang on the Box pose as models, making a contrast between the masculinity of the former and the playful feminity of the latter. There is a degree of fashion in our magazine."

Qing Lang, a veteran editor and pop music pundit, is bored by the cover. "There is no visual focus on the cover photo. It doesn't catch your attention. And judging from the titles, the stories are mild." Qing thinks it's a pity the name Rolling Stone has been taken off. "Otherwise they would have a `Rolling Stones interviewed by Rolling Stone' cover story. That would be cool."