It’s unclear whether Spin will survive as a print magazine. A Buzz Media spokeswoman told me “what first attracted Buzz Media to Spin was its print presence, potential for cross-platform opportunities and great storytelling.” She says the company “believes there is a unique role for print” and sees it as “another outlet for people to access content about their passion topics,” but “in the longer term, Buzz Media is still defining how print fits in from a platform perspective.”

Spin Media CEO Alan Nichols says in a statement, “As our audience has migrated to digital platforms, so too has Spin, as evidenced by our growing audience of more than one million digital users and our award-winning iPad app,. This deal greatly accelerates our digital transition.”

Buzz Media says it has 120 million monthly unique visitors across its sites. Spin’s print circulation is 350,000 and ad pages fell 9.7 percent between 2010 and 2011, according to the MPA. It shifted from publishing monthly to bimonthly last year.

Lapatine founded the site in 2003 when he was a web producer at VH1, working under Hirschhorn, who was then the digital head at MTV Networks. As we reported, Pittman and Hirschhorn invested in Stereogum in October 2006.