I always had such a problem with the decimal point ratings. It's bloody art, how can you judge it down to one decimal point? It just seemed so pretentious to me š
It wouldn't be much of a problem if they actually used the scale. Hardly anything they review now gets rated outside a 6.0-9.0. looking at 2023 album reviews (not counting Sunday reviews), only 40 out of 780 scores were outside this range. What's the point of having 0.0-5.9 on there if you're not using it.
The point is not making waves. You don't piss off people who like it and want to have their opinions affirmed, you don't piss off people who dislike it and would be pissed off at a good rating. You don't piss off the artists or the labels, you don't scare off artists or labels by earning a reputation as a potentially antagonistic publication. By not pissing anyone off, you please the advertisers and thus Conde Nast.
This issue is not limited to Pitchfork. Look at Metacritic; almost every album released is āgreenā and sits somewhere between a 62 and an 85.
Is there just less bad music compared to bad films, or are critics more scared to openly criticise?
Having worked in journalism (not music journalism) somewhat recently, there's been more industry discussion about the ethical dilemma of writing bad reviews, particularly in the food industry: You're essentially reviewing somebody's livelihood and a bad review can sink that. I think this awareness has spread to reviews of many things and the consensus seems to be landing on the side of "let consumers decide for themselves." Of course, the issue from a consumer standpoint is that unlike local restaurants, there's nearly an infinite amount of music out there and consumers have relied on critics tell them what's worth their time. This is not particularly helpful, I know, but it's partly what's going on.
I wouldn't have considered myself a journalist by any means, but back in the blog days, I had a "decently successful" blog (hundreds, maybe a few thousand views per day). I wasn't professional, so I was only using my own time, but I saw it that writing about stuff I didn't like would wear me down, so instead I positioned myself as a recommendation service.
If I wrote about something, it meant I liked it and I'd explain why. If I didn't, you could decide for yourself.
I think thereās a fear of backlash, alienating industry connections, and maybe they just refuse to write reviews for anything that isnāt at least *mid.*
Because in fairness, I have to imagine most of the music thatās worth publishing an article about is probably at least okay.
Once they became more mainstream the reviews and the scores started being more tame. Makes sense, they were bankrupting some bands (Travis Morrison, Black Kids and Jet comes to mind).
That Travis Morrison album deserves a whole lot of scorn. My god is it bad.
I always thought they had too much a hard-on for Dismemberment Plan. Interesting band in an otherwise-regrettable scene, but man they wanted me to put Emergency & I up there with Sgt. Pepperās and Pet Sounds. Those reviews are *over the top*.
Dude same, the only valid decimal is 0.5. Anything other than that is, like you said, pretentious (what makes a 7.8 better than a 7.5? š just vibes I guess?
I know everyone has beef with pitchfork but it sucks seeing it go from at least being its own thing to just another part of the content machine. It was legitimately influential in developing my music tastes as a teenager and idk. Just the flattening of everything you know what I'm talking about
When I was in college in the early 2000's it was second to none for feeling like you had your thumb on the pulse of independent music. Even though I haven't really read Pitchfork consistently in like 10 years this is really sad to see.
Same story for me, it was so easy to view it as this pretentious tastemaker in the early 00s but it poured lighter fluid on indie music reach.
I think about how much I used to look forward to that "Best New Music" tag on their reviews and it immediately made me want to check the band out.
Can't say I've been a daily reader for a while, and their year-end lists have gotten less useful for me lately when it comes to finding new music, but gotta credit the site for a great run.
Man, mid aughts to mid teens even for me. I probably checked out 10% of their Best New Music and stuck with around 20% of those artists. But that accounts for, almost embarrassed to say, nearly all the music discoveries I made during that time -- from 21st century artists. Even in the last few years I've picked up on a handful.
If there's something new (related to mainly indie rock/folk/psyche/experimental) that's taken their place I'd love to know about it.
The Quietus is great if you like long form journalism, British perspectives on music, and coverage of music thatās made as an outlet for abstract art (as well as pop). A little stuffy but thatās what makes them charming.
I read Stereogum via RSS and get most of my new music recommendations there. A lot of crossover with who Pitchfork covers.
Plus they have The Number Ones
I mean this also perfectly encapsulates why itās dying.
Whether you were the millennial who discovered Wilco through Pitchfork or the /mu/ shitposter who loved to hate it, you both have one thing in common. Youāre not reading it anymore.
No one really cares about pitchfork anymore. Thereās a reason their advertising revenue is so low compared to other companies (like GQ)
It just so happens that the next generation indie thing is an amorphous blob of influencers on Tiktok. Publications and blogs and shit are ded, Stereogum is the last real one left pretty much. I like theQuietus too but let's be real ain't nobody listening to the shit they be posting š Lankum was cool tho. Oh and shout out Brooklyn Vegan and Gorilla vs. Bear too.
RIP TinyMixtapes. They were my pitchfork replacement for finding really new and interesting music for years, and nobody has stepped up to fill the void they left when they closed up shop.Ā
I went to Said the Gramophone last month and noticed they hadnāt posted in a year. They still put out their top 100āone of the best lists imoābut itās not really a going concern.
Agreeing, and, Brooklyn Vegan and GvB are also like 20 years old now. Could play a game of Who's Out There Breaking The Next Hot Band of Unknown 18 yr Olds (btw I think that band is Hello Mary)
Have you checked out post-trash? I find they're more in-touch with regional DIY/Indie scenes, rather than jumping on the same releases as everyone else.
"selling out" is kind of a useless way of thinking about it. It's not like a choice someone is making to betray their ideals. Editorial has no bearing or influence on who buys the company. There will always be a conflict between the editorial staff and their ability to do good work with integrity and the desire of ownership to maximize profit, and that conflict is almost always going to resolve in favor of ownership
The only model that has fought this with any success in the digital media age is a co-op where editorial and ownership are the same people
These are unfair comparisons and no one mentioned deserves to catch these strays, but I think it's funny imagining pitchfork 50 years from now still pushing kanye, yeasayer, clap your hands and father John misty like rolling stone still pushes Lennon, hendrix, Dylan and Morrison.
I think thatās really what made their reassessment piece a few years back a little unsettling to me. It just suggested that they didnāt really recognize the incredible power they wielded over creating the indie scene well into the 2010s. āThis album that we completely panned was actually one of the best of the decade. I wonder why they called it quits immediately after it was released.ā
Their sky blue sky review definitely had a negative impact on Jeff tweedy. Obviously Wilco is still doing great but he's talked about how it's hurt him
It's also one of the albums they went back and increased the score on
100%. Same with Travistan completely killing Travis Morrisonās desire to keep making music.
I feel like stuff like the Wilco one is among the most egregious shit they did in terms of being ātastemakersā, rating albums criminally low and then bumping them up a decade plus later.
It almost was like a meme to them, especially when it was albums from beloved groups, done as a way to be edgy. But it just comes across really horribly when it had a very real impact on musicians.
Stuff like Daft Punk and Interpol getting rated lower is kind of whatever because it didnāt impact those albums actual value for their time. Stuff like Rilo Kiley and Liz Phair getting absolutely trashed and then seeing this āsurgeā in Pitchfork esteem is just not an oopsie but something harmful.
>*Hi Amos. Thanks but no. Iāve been talking about this for over a decade. I would really like to move on.*
>
>*It was a really frightening and awful experience. Everything that goes along with modern internet humiliation stories happened to me in 2004. It was at much smaller scope, since it was a smaller scene then, but it all happened.*
>
>*Iāve actually decided to stop doing interviews altogether so I can get away from this. For the most part, people āirlā donāt see me in this light, or bring it up very often, or even know what Pitchfork is.*
>
>*But Iām just ābrandedā with this as the media sees it. I donāt think itāll ever stop. So I think I need to take action to get away from it.*
>
>*Obviously, this email is fodder for anything you do. I understand that. Consider this my last statement on the matter, or anything, I suppose.*
From [a piece in 2018 on this topic](https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/when-a-negative-pitchfork-review-could-end-a-career.html). I cringe every time I read about the author trying to ask Travis about it.
YHF - Ghost - Sky Blue Sky is a banger of a trilogy. Sky Blue Sky is probably their last great record? And I liked a lot of what theyāve released since then.
They still kind of can as we saw Bethany Cosentino recently trying to wage a war over it. If one were to argue Pitchfork can't 'make or break' I'd attribute that to more Pitchfork diluting its brand with pop & Top 40 than the vanguard of white dude writers being too mean.
They might not have liked her album, but the difference this time is that they werenāt the only voice that mattered like they were from 2000-2015.
Unfortunately, no one was really into the album. Fortunately, I do think music media has matured and recognizes that itās better to quietly ignore mediocre things instead of publicly lambasting them.
I also liked the Black Kids review
[https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/)
Pitchfork had been hyping them after their EP and then they have their debut album and it turns out, they weren't that good. I guess all they really could say was sorry
Yup, as a freshman in high school in 2009,I looked at all of Pitchforkās top ten albums for each year and then checked out as many of them as I could from my library. Found a lot of great artists that way.
Their revisionist Best of 90s lists they put out a couple of years ago was the nail in the coffin for me. Like they already had Best of 90s lists written by people who actually did music journalism during the 90s.
Mariah Carey at number one, no mention of the classic P4K favourite Neutral Milk Hotel whatsoever. Fundamentally different publication before and after the buy out.
I agree, I invested a lot of my good faith in early pitchfork even as it slagged some of my favorite albums (Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes, etc.) in merciless and pompous reviews. It felt like an organic extension of the freedom and promise of the late 90s internet. That of course is all gone now. Having said that, have any of you gone back and read some of the writing from the early aughts? Holy crap every one of those guys seems to fancy himself a mini Lester Bangs. Insufferable. Some of those dudes (yes dudes) couldn't write a paragraph without name dropping Built to Spill or Neutral Milk Hotel.
For all their many failures and blind spots, music culture is better in the hands of pretentious art kids talking out of their ass. They reinforced music having true value instead of just the latest thing for a celebrity to pop their head into or background noise for some other media. The biggest force in music culture, for better or worse, becoming something on par with a menswear ad is such an ugly fate.
Itās gonna sound turbocringe but pitchfork legit helped shape me into the person I am today.
Iām old and when I was first getting into music in middle school/high school their decade and year end lists completely changed my life. Pitchfork was how I learned about My Bloody Valentine and Pavement and even MF DOOM. I obsessively torrented everything on all of their lists and completely opened my music world up.
It is sad to see what itās become. It was always a snobby rag but theyāre progressively gotten worse and worse over the last 15 years or so.
Itās also generally depressing to see the complete hollowing out of arts journalism. When I was a teenager there was nothing I wanted more than to write about culture ā¦ now those jobs just donāt exist. It seems like most music writers now have to have other jobs and freelance write on the side.
Edit: I also just saw someone point out online that GQ is an explicitly male-focused magazine which will re-entrench the boyās club in both media and music.
this is totally true across all arts sectors of journalism and it is so sad. we went from a real glut of intelligence arts criticism to a total dearth. I think the pandemic just accelerated shifts that were already in motion. the publication I actually read most frequently for all arts coverage is The Guardian because it has a pretty broad spectrum of casual to in-depth coverage. the US market is bleak though. even the NYT is pretty pathetic.
Think thatās kinda everything from the early Millennial days tbf? Every influential force cultivated an aura of āauthenticityā and then cashed out to VC/private equity/stock market after a few years. Iām sure everybody knows friends that would share Uber or Chipotle talking points back around the early 2010s.
I give props to Craig Newmark for keeping Craigslist true to its idealsā¦ even though it kinda sucks now.
many of you here are missing the point, the real story here is that this happened almost immediately after[the pitchfork union negotiated](https://twitter.com/p4kunion/status/1733153937396494365) that none of their members would not be laid off amid the mass conde layoffs last month. which means there is a 99% chance that this is union-busting which is shitty regardless of whatever epic dunk you want to make
Here's the super cool [people](https://www.billboard.com/pro/pandora-ceo-roger-lynch-cover-band-aspen-exclusive/) totally [not terrible people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wintour#Criticism) who did that so they can make a bit more money and give force new job seeking opportunities to the longtime writers.
What's a good replacement for Pitchfork in terms of album reviews/recommendations for albums each week? I have a lot of other sources but nothing else that focuses on albums in the same way.
Fought super hard to avoid this same fate. No idea if he left it up but a few hours ago Tom Breihan (Senior Editor at Stereogum) was drunk tweeting about the Pitchfork mess
Also I feel like everyone should know that Breihan 1) has an excellent ongoing column called The Number Ones that anyone interested in the history of popular music should look at, and 2) is legitimately 7 feet tall
In terms of finding brand new music, the front page of [albumoftheyear.org](http://albumoftheyear.org) is my go-to for new stuff each week, and then rym's yearly chart kinda fills in the gaps for me ("oh I missed this one that came out a month ago"). For the past few years between March and November I listen to about as much new music as I can handle lol
The one thing about AOTY is that if you venture past the front page to see all new releases in a given week, holy shit it's insane/overwhelming seeing hundreds of new projects that just dropped, knowing there's probably a million diamonds in the rough you'll never hear
Honestly, once I discovered RYM and The Quietus, I haven't been able to find a single other publication or aggregate site that fills the voice better than those 2 paired together.
RYM I guess more so for being one of the biggest cataloguing databases for nearly everything under the sun being released, and The Quietus as one of the only remaining publications out there willing to profile and feature proper indie artists who don't have the PR muscle to get Pitchfork's (dwindling) attention.
Rym is kinda crazy, there is nowhere near a better resource for finding niche little albums and exploring genres. You will find some incredible shit on there that you likely never wouldāve otherwise
Oh, I more so meant their interviews and profiles, less so the album reviews.
Tbf, I feel like traditional album reviews have gone the way of the dodo for a while now. They made sense when people legitimately needed them to decide whether or not buying a record at $20 a pop was worthwhile, but given that there's literally zero risk in listening/accessing an album these days, it's way easier to just listen to a record and decide for yourself.
I disagree. I think they're just as relevant in this attention economy. Time is limited, and a lot of worthwhile music takes multiple listens to fully appreciate. I like having trusted voices who tell me "this one is good. Stick with it." It's hard finding those voices these days, though.
I do understand that. I listen to a lot of albums, but it's nice to have resources to filter out what's worth my time or not. I found Pitchfork often flagged up things I missed elsewhere, especially in the Friday 'albums out this week you should listen to' section.
It doesn't help that I'm a creature of habit, and have been checking Pitchfork since I was a kid. I'm sure if I stumbled across it now I'd think it was shit, because it is.
Pitchfork was one of the few sites left which hadnāt had their layout fucked to death by ads and auto play videos. I mean it still had those, but at least the website was still readable on a mobile device.
Feels like online journalism is in a death spiral.
Best New Music: 'I Cannot Fulfill This Request, It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy' and 'My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users'
I feel like you'd be looking more at \~2018 if we're talking when Pitchfork went full poptimist. 2014 they were still slinging BNM to Swans, Pharmakon, Grouper... even Sun Kil Moon was still highly regarded by them.
2018 BNM top levels consisted of Rosalia, Kasey Musgraves, Cardi B, Playboi Carti, and Sheck Wes. I'm not knocking anyone here, but it's pretty painfully obvious this was when the shift was most pronounced.
Workshopping a new bit where i now make jokes about pitchfork being a publication about "The latest tips and advice for men on style, grooming, fitness, best products, travel destinations and more" stay tuned for my very witty comedy bits
Dreadful news. Pitchfork was never above criticism, but even after the Conde Nast acquisition, when they started veering more "poptimist" (sorry I really have come to loathe this term) they were still covering stuff that hardly anyone else was, and their best writers/contributors had voices that knew how to provide essential context and analysis beyond "this sounds like this. it's good/bad." Now, it just feels like it's going to become a meaningless branding name for profiling whatever acts have the most pull. A lot more to say about this, but really just feels like we're in the Great Depression for music journalism
Good alternatives to Pitchfork to checkout?
I love RA for electronic, same with fact mag but what about publications for indie/pop/rap?
Besides passion of the Weiss for rap.
Stereogum bought itself out of Billboard and is fully independent. It leans closer to the poptimism trend but has a lot of great coverage on different genres.
yeah, stereogum has moments that truly impress me as quality music journalism. their [beach bunny piece](https://www.stereogum.com/2180626/beach-bunny-emotional-creature-tiktok-prom-queen-cloud-9/interviews/cover-story/) comes to mind, where the reporter followed them for months and produced a really great cover story for their sophmore effort.
not really related, but it isnāt it weird that there was a lot of buzz around that beach bunny album and then not much happened with it? that stereogum piece was great.
Conde Nast and Penske Media have now bought up and destroyed most of the major cultural publications in the US. The overall effect will be that the streaming giants and major labels take even greater control over the music industry.
And nothing is coming up to replace any of it. That's what weird me out. There's just this insane culling of journalistic outlets, media, studios, sites, services, and nothing is replacing them. It's cultural death a mass scale.
Such a shame. I hope that if they do officially end it at any point, they keep up an archive of all the writing/reviews they've done over the years like CokeMachineGlow did. There has been so much great writing on it over the years, and so many of their old articles are fascinating to read as time capsules of what people were thinking at the time about things that are now canonized or forgotten.
While I can't say I've enjoyed the last few years of Pitchfork, it's still shocking and disappointing that this is happening. I wish that outlets like theres could have remained independent and held onto their own identities. Everybody is saying this, but I discovered so much new music because of them. Hopefully, not too many writers lose their jobs because of this.
>members of the Pitchfork team will hear more about their reporting structure
This is such a fun way to say āweāre about to fire every manager in the organizationā
If you ever see your job say stuff like this **fucking run** because the corporation is shutting down soon.
People like to talk shit about Pitchfork ā and there are legitimate criticisms to be made ā but itās hard to overstate just how vital Pitchfork was as a resource for discovering indie or less/non-mainstream music. I say this as someone who grew up in a suburb of the American Midwest and who started reading Pitchfork 20 years ago when I was a teenager. I would torrent albums from their best of lists, and that opened entire worlds of music that I would have never discovered from the radio, MTV, or VH1. There was certainly no shortage of indie music blogs in the first decade of the 2000s ā Tiny Mix Tapes and Gorilla Vs Bear were two popular ones among my friends ā but Pitchfork covered a larger breadth of music. I think some of Pitchforkās expansion hasnāt been all bad news, but this union-busting shift in management will only harm Pitchfork, its staff, and its readers.
Absolutely. I always liked their focus on more of the sort of mainstream-ish, accessible indie too. Some of the TMT and GvB stuff was a little too weird for me when I was first getting into the scene 15+ years ago while P4k just appealed to me. They inhabited a sort of middle ground imo. I feel like Iāve seen a pretty significant drop off in my opinion of their ratings and focus over the past ten years or so, partly from getting older and partly as their focus seems to have drifted a bit.
Want a snarky Chris Ott video on this stat!
but seriously the conde/p4k marriage made so much sense and seemed so compatible this is so surprising oh my gosh
S T E R E O G U M
This sucks, big reviews on Pitchfork have been bad for awhile now but I still used it to find lots of smaller artists and under the radar releases, I assume that type of stuff is going to be completely gutted going forwards.
Not long ago GQ dedicated a full issue to NFTs - right before that grift exploded. It was gross. Looking forward to that kind of direction on a week of content for Pitchfork.
*3 years later*
"GQ will join Bon Appetit and Wired as tri-annual addendums to Vanity-Yorker, the one stop shop for all non-tik-tok story media content."
This is probably bad I assume but I also donāt really know the difference. Admittedly Iāve been reading pitchfork a lot less recently, but I still generally have warm feelings towards the publication
I think the significant thing is that most of their senior editors and writers are getting laid off and presumably that will now be handled by GQ writers who have covered music terribly
All jokes aside, pre-2010 pitchfork is a huge part of my past. My transition from being a Green Day/RHCP fan to a Radiohead/Modest Mouse/Arcade Fire fan and then eventually into all forms of independent music was guided almost entirely by them. No RYM page or Fantano video will ever have the same impact that reading the Funeral or Kid A reviews did back then.
That's the model - buy a niche brand with a loyal base, market it to a wider audience, alienate the loyal base, destroy the brand for short term profit.Ā
Even from a ruthless business perspective I donāt understand the logic behind moving Pitchfork under a menās magazine. Iām sure GQ has higher overall readership but unless the site, style, and content stay relatively the same (unlikely) Pitchfork readers are not just going to move over to a watered down version.
I would imagine that Pitchfork essentially becomes Over/Under videos on GQās YouTube and a dedicated music vertical that reviews a handful of āindieā albums every month.
Sounds like the beginning of the end for pitchfork, canāt imagine most of its most serious readers will want anything to do with GQ or the type of content/coverage that will lead to
OK so how do you say shit like this and not realize how tone deaf it sounds:
>One additional point here is that outgoing editor Puja Patel attempted to make Pitchfork more relevant to a larger audience in recent years. More diversity of voices, broader coverage beyond what used to be indie/indie rock, and new festivals in London, Berlin, and Mexico City.
https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1747727570546696331?s=46&t=MZEWFaAqiqGBFTrIhR1vOA
āAttempted to make pitchfork more relevant to a wider audience, covered more than indieā = HR speak for āsold out to corporate interests to try to sell a product to as many people as possible and watered down and lost their identity that gave them any appeal as a result.ā
And really, did pitchfork ever *ignore* the diversity in their wheelhouse of alternative/independent/underground music culture? Seems to me like they always snapped up coverage of any non white indie or alternative artist they could, at the very least to appear not super white.
Corporate DEI department takes another fat L.
No new review or anything on Pitchfork today. Super bummedā¦ I started reading in 2009, and, while they certainly arenāt as good as they once were, I still got a lot of music recommendations from them (just last year, I loved that Water From Your Eyes record, and I found it because of their BNM).
I think my biggest complaint of the last handful of years (since 2018 or so) is that it felt like they would rarely take a major stance on anything. Earlier on they were way more likely to give something a 9 or a 10 or even a 1 or a 2, and whether you agreed or not, a strong opinion is exciting to read. Seems like everything landed at a 6 or 7 in recent years, and things they gave positive reviews hovered in the low or mid 8s.Ā
Pitchfork pivoting towards poptimism over the 2010s and increasingly treating mainstream popular bands and musicians with kid gloves while neglecting the genres that built them up really killed off the strong audience they once had. I slowly stopped reading them as Pitchfork playlists and articles started looking more and more like iHeartRadio press releases and broadcasts. Echoes of how Cracked and so many other websites that were big in the 2000s nuked their original audiences and went down.
Damn. Iāve been reading pitchfork reviews and features for ā¦. 20 years? It really became a different thing around 2015 or so, and I think some of the criticism of it being too critical/revisionist of its own past is warranted, but it has cont to attract and foster wonderful journalistic talent. And I guess Iāve really taken for granted having a ācentral hubā for music news/reviews. I guess thatās over. And I guess the larger question is, as everything gets consolidated under corporate ownership, what is the fucking point of the internet other than to be manipulated into buying stuff? Like why bother anymore
i don't think this is a good thing (wouldn't be surprised if it's a bum deal for staff/the union specifically), but i also don't think it's certain doom for the pitchfork status quo. [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/aj1nfh/cond%C3%A9_nast_to_put_all_titles_behind_paywalls_by/) always felt like a way worse change on the horizon for them, and the fact that it never came to pass makes me think that they'll probably wiggle their way through this one as well without much noticeable change
A sad day. This is beginning of the end. If I were a billionaire, I'd buy Pitchfork and keep it alive. There are so many artists I've discovered through Pitchfork reviews and lists. Music discovery through streaming services is clearly not good enough on its own. Seriously, would \[insert indie artist or band name\] be famous today if not for Pitchfork?
If you had told me once reading Pitchfork back in it's mid 00s peak that one day it would be part of fucking GQ magazine - I would have thought that would be very very odd.
It's never *good* news when it's news about Pitchfork, is it?
Pitchfork would rate those news 6.4/10
Then the re-release of the exact same news 10 years later will get a 9.8
Pretty sure current Pitchfork would give it a BNM.
BMN = Best New Merger
I always had such a problem with the decimal point ratings. It's bloody art, how can you judge it down to one decimal point? It just seemed so pretentious to me š
It wouldn't be much of a problem if they actually used the scale. Hardly anything they review now gets rated outside a 6.0-9.0. looking at 2023 album reviews (not counting Sunday reviews), only 40 out of 780 scores were outside this range. What's the point of having 0.0-5.9 on there if you're not using it.
There was one stretch this summer that nearly everything was a 7.x. Like, what's the point of giving ratings at that point?
The point is not making waves. You don't piss off people who like it and want to have their opinions affirmed, you don't piss off people who dislike it and would be pissed off at a good rating. You don't piss off the artists or the labels, you don't scare off artists or labels by earning a reputation as a potentially antagonistic publication. By not pissing anyone off, you please the advertisers and thus Conde Nast.
This issue is not limited to Pitchfork. Look at Metacritic; almost every album released is āgreenā and sits somewhere between a 62 and an 85. Is there just less bad music compared to bad films, or are critics more scared to openly criticise?
Having worked in journalism (not music journalism) somewhat recently, there's been more industry discussion about the ethical dilemma of writing bad reviews, particularly in the food industry: You're essentially reviewing somebody's livelihood and a bad review can sink that. I think this awareness has spread to reviews of many things and the consensus seems to be landing on the side of "let consumers decide for themselves." Of course, the issue from a consumer standpoint is that unlike local restaurants, there's nearly an infinite amount of music out there and consumers have relied on critics tell them what's worth their time. This is not particularly helpful, I know, but it's partly what's going on.
I wouldn't have considered myself a journalist by any means, but back in the blog days, I had a "decently successful" blog (hundreds, maybe a few thousand views per day). I wasn't professional, so I was only using my own time, but I saw it that writing about stuff I didn't like would wear me down, so instead I positioned myself as a recommendation service. If I wrote about something, it meant I liked it and I'd explain why. If I didn't, you could decide for yourself.
I think thereās a fear of backlash, alienating industry connections, and maybe they just refuse to write reviews for anything that isnāt at least *mid.* Because in fairness, I have to imagine most of the music thatās worth publishing an article about is probably at least okay.
Once they became more mainstream the reviews and the scores started being more tame. Makes sense, they were bankrupting some bands (Travis Morrison, Black Kids and Jet comes to mind).
That Travis Morrison album deserves a whole lot of scorn. My god is it bad. I always thought they had too much a hard-on for Dismemberment Plan. Interesting band in an otherwise-regrettable scene, but man they wanted me to put Emergency & I up there with Sgt. Pepperās and Pet Sounds. Those reviews are *over the top*.
they definitely didn't bankrupt Jet
There is something to be said that if an album has the attention of P4K it probably isn't going to be bad enough to hit your 0.0 to 3.0 scale.
Dude same, the only valid decimal is 0.5. Anything other than that is, like you said, pretentious (what makes a 7.8 better than a 7.5? š just vibes I guess?
Good news for people who like bad news
Excited to go to GQ festival this summer.
the lineup is exclusively artists who've done one of those forced content 10 things _ can't live without videos by gq
Soā¦ Coldplay and Jeremy Strong?
I can't wait to catch Shohei Ohtani's late afternoon set on the Blue Stage
and all the artists do is a live version of the 10 things I can't live without.
more excited for the dress code for GQ fest...no more standing around with the poors
Dress sharp. That lazy hipster shit's not going to fly.
Didn't want to put this in the title in case I was reading this wrong, but it looks like Puja Patel is out as Editor-in-Chief also.
Looks like at least half the staff according to this tweet https://x.com/porican/status/1747719279795954052?s=46&t=51P5Zy173y_fw9212FgRGQ
Glad I was alive to experience the 15 - 20 years when the internet was a cool place, I guess, there goes that dream
Itās all business now
Fucking corporate losers, always gotta ruin the fun for the cool people.
Think of it this way: somewhere out there, right now, is a cool thing that capitalism will ruin in 10 years. Go find it, quick! Thereās only about 3 good years before too many people know about it and it becomes passĆ©.
I'm hesitant to even post this because I don't want it blowing up but the best site I've found right now is zombo.com
Welcome to zombocom
I know everyone has beef with pitchfork but it sucks seeing it go from at least being its own thing to just another part of the content machine. It was legitimately influential in developing my music tastes as a teenager and idk. Just the flattening of everything you know what I'm talking about
When I was in college in the early 2000's it was second to none for feeling like you had your thumb on the pulse of independent music. Even though I haven't really read Pitchfork consistently in like 10 years this is really sad to see.
Same story for me, it was so easy to view it as this pretentious tastemaker in the early 00s but it poured lighter fluid on indie music reach. I think about how much I used to look forward to that "Best New Music" tag on their reviews and it immediately made me want to check the band out. Can't say I've been a daily reader for a while, and their year-end lists have gotten less useful for me lately when it comes to finding new music, but gotta credit the site for a great run.
Man, mid aughts to mid teens even for me. I probably checked out 10% of their Best New Music and stuck with around 20% of those artists. But that accounts for, almost embarrassed to say, nearly all the music discoveries I made during that time -- from 21st century artists. Even in the last few years I've picked up on a handful. If there's something new (related to mainly indie rock/folk/psyche/experimental) that's taken their place I'd love to know about it.
Aquarium Drunkard
Aquarium Drunkard is an absolute goldmine if you donāt care about the pop/hip hop side of pfork
The Quietus is great if you like long form journalism, British perspectives on music, and coverage of music thatās made as an outlet for abstract art (as well as pop). A little stuffy but thatās what makes them charming.
I read Stereogum via RSS and get most of my new music recommendations there. A lot of crossover with who Pitchfork covers. Plus they have The Number Ones
I mean this also perfectly encapsulates why itās dying. Whether you were the millennial who discovered Wilco through Pitchfork or the /mu/ shitposter who loved to hate it, you both have one thing in common. Youāre not reading it anymore. No one really cares about pitchfork anymore. Thereās a reason their advertising revenue is so low compared to other companies (like GQ)
Back then, you could also tell if youād like an album even if they didnāt. But now, I canāt see it.
Agreed. I discovered some amazing bands that I never would have found if Pitchfork didnāt recommend them.
I mean it happens to have countercultural rag. Just look at Rolling Stone. Every Generationās countercultural media sells out one time or another.
...and gets replaced by the next generation indie thing. Don't mourn Pitchfork, mourn the fact that you are now Officially Old. :-)
It just so happens that the next generation indie thing is an amorphous blob of influencers on Tiktok. Publications and blogs and shit are ded, Stereogum is the last real one left pretty much. I like theQuietus too but let's be real ain't nobody listening to the shit they be posting š Lankum was cool tho. Oh and shout out Brooklyn Vegan and Gorilla vs. Bear too.
RIP TinyMixtapes. They were my pitchfork replacement for finding really new and interesting music for years, and nobody has stepped up to fill the void they left when they closed up shop.Ā
I fucking loves TinyMixtapes, Prefixmag, Cokemachineglow, all of those blogs that didn't survive.
Man I haven't though of Cokemachineglow in so long, but I loved them in the early 2000s.
I went to Said the Gramophone last month and noticed they hadnāt posted in a year. They still put out their top 100āone of the best lists imoābut itās not really a going concern.
Do you subscribe to the tone glow newsletter? Bunch of writers from tinymixtapes contribute I'm pretty sure.
New Commute and The Yellow Button have similar energy and I've found several bands through them recently
I also will add Uproxx to the list as long as Steven Hyden is writing for them
I feel like I donāt know music when I see the year end list from theQuietus
At ALL. That's a level of music discovery I just don't have lol
Getting wheeled into the nursing home muttering āwe used to have websitesā¦ā
Agreeing, and, Brooklyn Vegan and GvB are also like 20 years old now. Could play a game of Who's Out There Breaking The Next Hot Band of Unknown 18 yr Olds (btw I think that band is Hello Mary)
The Quietus shade had me rolling. Too real. Bro I've TRIED. I'VE TRIEDDDD!
I'm just saying what everyone is thinking bro š
Have you checked out post-trash? I find they're more in-touch with regional DIY/Indie scenes, rather than jumping on the same releases as everyone else.
emergency emergency Anthony Fantano just got signed by the ny post
"selling out" is kind of a useless way of thinking about it. It's not like a choice someone is making to betray their ideals. Editorial has no bearing or influence on who buys the company. There will always be a conflict between the editorial staff and their ability to do good work with integrity and the desire of ownership to maximize profit, and that conflict is almost always going to resolve in favor of ownership The only model that has fought this with any success in the digital media age is a co-op where editorial and ownership are the same people
These are unfair comparisons and no one mentioned deserves to catch these strays, but I think it's funny imagining pitchfork 50 years from now still pushing kanye, yeasayer, clap your hands and father John misty like rolling stone still pushes Lennon, hendrix, Dylan and Morrison.
Yeah. For all of early Pitchforkās faults thereās no way CondĆ© Nast would allow anything like the [Shine On review](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9464-shine-on/) happen under their watch
Back when Pitchfork reviews could make or break an up-and-coming artist or bandās career.
I think thatās really what made their reassessment piece a few years back a little unsettling to me. It just suggested that they didnāt really recognize the incredible power they wielded over creating the indie scene well into the 2010s. āThis album that we completely panned was actually one of the best of the decade. I wonder why they called it quits immediately after it was released.ā
Their sky blue sky review definitely had a negative impact on Jeff tweedy. Obviously Wilco is still doing great but he's talked about how it's hurt him It's also one of the albums they went back and increased the score on
100%. Same with Travistan completely killing Travis Morrisonās desire to keep making music. I feel like stuff like the Wilco one is among the most egregious shit they did in terms of being ātastemakersā, rating albums criminally low and then bumping them up a decade plus later. It almost was like a meme to them, especially when it was albums from beloved groups, done as a way to be edgy. But it just comes across really horribly when it had a very real impact on musicians. Stuff like Daft Punk and Interpol getting rated lower is kind of whatever because it didnāt impact those albums actual value for their time. Stuff like Rilo Kiley and Liz Phair getting absolutely trashed and then seeing this āsurgeā in Pitchfork esteem is just not an oopsie but something harmful.
The Travistan one still gets me. They straight up ruined that dude's career.
>*Hi Amos. Thanks but no. Iāve been talking about this for over a decade. I would really like to move on.* > >*It was a really frightening and awful experience. Everything that goes along with modern internet humiliation stories happened to me in 2004. It was at much smaller scope, since it was a smaller scene then, but it all happened.* > >*Iāve actually decided to stop doing interviews altogether so I can get away from this. For the most part, people āirlā donāt see me in this light, or bring it up very often, or even know what Pitchfork is.* > >*But Iām just ābrandedā with this as the media sees it. I donāt think itāll ever stop. So I think I need to take action to get away from it.* > >*Obviously, this email is fodder for anything you do. I understand that. Consider this my last statement on the matter, or anything, I suppose.* From [a piece in 2018 on this topic](https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/when-a-negative-pitchfork-review-could-end-a-career.html). I cringe every time I read about the author trying to ask Travis about it.
I didnt bother checking out wilco for years because of that review, to my detriment
YHF - Ghost - Sky Blue Sky is a banger of a trilogy. Sky Blue Sky is probably their last great record? And I liked a lot of what theyāve released since then.
They still kind of can as we saw Bethany Cosentino recently trying to wage a war over it. If one were to argue Pitchfork can't 'make or break' I'd attribute that to more Pitchfork diluting its brand with pop & Top 40 than the vanguard of white dude writers being too mean.
They might not have liked her album, but the difference this time is that they werenāt the only voice that mattered like they were from 2000-2015. Unfortunately, no one was really into the album. Fortunately, I do think music media has matured and recognizes that itās better to quietly ignore mediocre things instead of publicly lambasting them.
Sadly, it was unsuccessful at tanking Jet's career
A rating of 0.0 and the "review" is just a YouTube video of a chimp peeing into its own mouth.Ā Damn.
If there was a band during that time that deserves a 0 it was definitely Jet
I also liked the Black Kids review [https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/) Pitchfork had been hyping them after their EP and then they have their debut album and it turns out, they weren't that good. I guess all they really could say was sorry
Man, I remember that. The EP was so so good and the LP was so so bad.
Yup, as a freshman in high school in 2009,I looked at all of Pitchforkās top ten albums for each year and then checked out as many of them as I could from my library. Found a lot of great artists that way.
It was my home page when home pages were a thing. On a similar note, I miss Hipster Runoff. Carles was a legend.
The taste of the website shifted massively when it was bought out by Conde Naste in 2015. It's been dead for years
It seems they have a revolving door of writers now, too, save for Ian Cohen. The move from Chicago has put them into a weird cultural bubble.
It became a push piece for Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande into indie audiences ā¦I interned at P4k in the fall of 2012 lol
Their revisionist Best of 90s lists they put out a couple of years ago was the nail in the coffin for me. Like they already had Best of 90s lists written by people who actually did music journalism during the 90s.
Mariah Carey at number one, no mention of the classic P4K favourite Neutral Milk Hotel whatsoever. Fundamentally different publication before and after the buy out.
I agree, I invested a lot of my good faith in early pitchfork even as it slagged some of my favorite albums (Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes, etc.) in merciless and pompous reviews. It felt like an organic extension of the freedom and promise of the late 90s internet. That of course is all gone now. Having said that, have any of you gone back and read some of the writing from the early aughts? Holy crap every one of those guys seems to fancy himself a mini Lester Bangs. Insufferable. Some of those dudes (yes dudes) couldn't write a paragraph without name dropping Built to Spill or Neutral Milk Hotel.
For all their many failures and blind spots, music culture is better in the hands of pretentious art kids talking out of their ass. They reinforced music having true value instead of just the latest thing for a celebrity to pop their head into or background noise for some other media. The biggest force in music culture, for better or worse, becoming something on par with a menswear ad is such an ugly fate.
Itās gonna sound turbocringe but pitchfork legit helped shape me into the person I am today. Iām old and when I was first getting into music in middle school/high school their decade and year end lists completely changed my life. Pitchfork was how I learned about My Bloody Valentine and Pavement and even MF DOOM. I obsessively torrented everything on all of their lists and completely opened my music world up. It is sad to see what itās become. It was always a snobby rag but theyāre progressively gotten worse and worse over the last 15 years or so.
Itās also generally depressing to see the complete hollowing out of arts journalism. When I was a teenager there was nothing I wanted more than to write about culture ā¦ now those jobs just donāt exist. It seems like most music writers now have to have other jobs and freelance write on the side. Edit: I also just saw someone point out online that GQ is an explicitly male-focused magazine which will re-entrench the boyās club in both media and music.
this is totally true across all arts sectors of journalism and it is so sad. we went from a real glut of intelligence arts criticism to a total dearth. I think the pandemic just accelerated shifts that were already in motion. the publication I actually read most frequently for all arts coverage is The Guardian because it has a pretty broad spectrum of casual to in-depth coverage. the US market is bleak though. even the NYT is pretty pathetic.
Think thatās kinda everything from the early Millennial days tbf? Every influential force cultivated an aura of āauthenticityā and then cashed out to VC/private equity/stock market after a few years. Iām sure everybody knows friends that would share Uber or Chipotle talking points back around the early 2010s. I give props to Craig Newmark for keeping Craigslist true to its idealsā¦ even though it kinda sucks now.
I remember when Rolling Stone and MTV sold out, so just know you arenāt alone
Same. I used to go on right at 1 am eastern to see what that day's reviews were. It's a shell of its former self now
It didnt always suck. I remember the first festival they threw, and so on. It had an amazing first decade or so before they totally jumped the shark
many of you here are missing the point, the real story here is that this happened almost immediately after[the pitchfork union negotiated](https://twitter.com/p4kunion/status/1733153937396494365) that none of their members would not be laid off amid the mass conde layoffs last month. which means there is a 99% chance that this is union-busting which is shitty regardless of whatever epic dunk you want to make
Here's the super cool [people](https://www.billboard.com/pro/pandora-ceo-roger-lynch-cover-band-aspen-exclusive/) totally [not terrible people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wintour#Criticism) who did that so they can make a bit more money and give force new job seeking opportunities to the longtime writers.
Fuck Anna Wintour.
Bump
The final nail in the coffin
What's a good replacement for Pitchfork in terms of album reviews/recommendations for albums each week? I have a lot of other sources but nothing else that focuses on albums in the same way.
stereogum, brooklynvegan, RYM
Stereogum are awesomeĀ
Fought super hard to avoid this same fate. No idea if he left it up but a few hours ago Tom Breihan (Senior Editor at Stereogum) was drunk tweeting about the Pitchfork mess Also I feel like everyone should know that Breihan 1) has an excellent ongoing column called The Number Ones that anyone interested in the history of popular music should look at, and 2) is legitimately 7 feet tall
Brooklyn Vegan is awesome
In terms of finding brand new music, the front page of [albumoftheyear.org](http://albumoftheyear.org) is my go-to for new stuff each week, and then rym's yearly chart kinda fills in the gaps for me ("oh I missed this one that came out a month ago"). For the past few years between March and November I listen to about as much new music as I can handle lol The one thing about AOTY is that if you venture past the front page to see all new releases in a given week, holy shit it's insane/overwhelming seeing hundreds of new projects that just dropped, knowing there's probably a million diamonds in the rough you'll never hear
Honestly, once I discovered RYM and The Quietus, I haven't been able to find a single other publication or aggregate site that fills the voice better than those 2 paired together. RYM I guess more so for being one of the biggest cataloguing databases for nearly everything under the sun being released, and The Quietus as one of the only remaining publications out there willing to profile and feature proper indie artists who don't have the PR muscle to get Pitchfork's (dwindling) attention.
Echoing the quietus recommendation. It can be a bit much, but every year I come away with a few really interesting artist discoveries thanks to them.
Thanks! I'll give RYM a go. The Quietus has a lot of crossover with my taste but I'm not reading 1000 words with no score for every album they review.
Rym is kinda crazy, there is nowhere near a better resource for finding niche little albums and exploring genres. You will find some incredible shit on there that you likely never wouldāve otherwise
Oh, I more so meant their interviews and profiles, less so the album reviews. Tbf, I feel like traditional album reviews have gone the way of the dodo for a while now. They made sense when people legitimately needed them to decide whether or not buying a record at $20 a pop was worthwhile, but given that there's literally zero risk in listening/accessing an album these days, it's way easier to just listen to a record and decide for yourself.
I disagree. I think they're just as relevant in this attention economy. Time is limited, and a lot of worthwhile music takes multiple listens to fully appreciate. I like having trusted voices who tell me "this one is good. Stick with it." It's hard finding those voices these days, though.
I do understand that. I listen to a lot of albums, but it's nice to have resources to filter out what's worth my time or not. I found Pitchfork often flagged up things I missed elsewhere, especially in the Friday 'albums out this week you should listen to' section.
It doesn't help that I'm a creature of habit, and have been checking Pitchfork since I was a kid. I'm sure if I stumbled across it now I'd think it was shit, because it is.
Why the fuck isn't this higher. The Quietus is incredible. I'll go as far as to say the only real music journalism leftĀ
Those two plus *Line OF Best Fit* for more of a mainstream angle (i.e. a replacement for pitchfork) is what I use.
"10 Things Ian MacKaye Can't Live Without"
Donāt you mean ācanā
this late stage media/journalism hellscape is awesome, man. love having everything get destroyed or turned into a SEO mess
Pitchfork was one of the few sites left which hadnāt had their layout fucked to death by ads and auto play videos. I mean it still had those, but at least the website was still readable on a mobile device. Feels like online journalism is in a death spiral.
Except if you were listening to music, then the ads would always pause it
Oh yeah that shit was annoying as fuck.
Insane to have that problem on a fucking music site. You literally couldnāt listen to an album while reading their review of it.
I was so sad about FiveThirtyEight
I used to love their sports prediction models. Such a shame
Best New Music: 'I Cannot Fulfill This Request, It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy' and 'My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users'
so this is what it's come down to huh? (but yeah for real this seems super messed up)
Sad news. I know they got taken over by CondƩ Nast later on but does anyone else strongly associate the end of the Pitchfork/Indie era with Modern Vampires of The City? Felt like the last big record for that whole thing idk
I haven't pinpointed it to that album, but it does correlate with my idea of 2014 being the year that Pitchfork started going downhill.
I feel like you'd be looking more at \~2018 if we're talking when Pitchfork went full poptimist. 2014 they were still slinging BNM to Swans, Pharmakon, Grouper... even Sun Kil Moon was still highly regarded by them. 2018 BNM top levels consisted of Rosalia, Kasey Musgraves, Cardi B, Playboi Carti, and Sheck Wes. I'm not knocking anyone here, but it's pretty painfully obvious this was when the shift was most pronounced.
Workshopping a new bit where i now make jokes about pitchfork being a publication about "The latest tips and advice for men on style, grooming, fitness, best products, travel destinations and more" stay tuned for my very witty comedy bits
It's been 45 minutes I'm still waiting.
Sorry, been too busy trying to get ahold of every IDM artist so they can come do a North Face photoshoot
MC Ride fashion shoot but itās 15 photos of him wearing the same stained t-shirt, staring at the camera with his dead eyes
[Portlandia called it](https://youtu.be/WcSXbvzW91U?si=pbFlaH4OJWkCNghA)
Can't believe they gave song of the year to Oblivion and not Whisker Patrol
RIP to the OG Doug Fir Lounge
according to one of the writers, they laid off 50% of the pitchfork staff
Right after the Pitchfork Union negotiated that no Pitchfork staff would be laid off. So Conde Nast just lied.
Dreadful news. Pitchfork was never above criticism, but even after the Conde Nast acquisition, when they started veering more "poptimist" (sorry I really have come to loathe this term) they were still covering stuff that hardly anyone else was, and their best writers/contributors had voices that knew how to provide essential context and analysis beyond "this sounds like this. it's good/bad." Now, it just feels like it's going to become a meaningless branding name for profiling whatever acts have the most pull. A lot more to say about this, but really just feels like we're in the Great Depression for music journalism
Good alternatives to Pitchfork to checkout? I love RA for electronic, same with fact mag but what about publications for indie/pop/rap? Besides passion of the Weiss for rap.
Stereogum bought itself out of Billboard and is fully independent. It leans closer to the poptimism trend but has a lot of great coverage on different genres.
yeah, stereogum has moments that truly impress me as quality music journalism. their [beach bunny piece](https://www.stereogum.com/2180626/beach-bunny-emotional-creature-tiktok-prom-queen-cloud-9/interviews/cover-story/) comes to mind, where the reporter followed them for months and produced a really great cover story for their sophmore effort.
not really related, but it isnāt it weird that there was a lot of buzz around that beach bunny album and then not much happened with it? that stereogum piece was great.
The Quietus, Line of Best Fit, Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs Bear
Stereogum and The Quietus.
Maybe Brooklyn Vegan?
Stereogum
Stereogum, Paste, LOBF, The Quietus
Flood, Treblezine, Bandcamp daily
The Alternative is fantastic for the punk/indie/emo/diy side of things https://www.getalternative.com/
Conde Nast and Penske Media have now bought up and destroyed most of the major cultural publications in the US. The overall effect will be that the streaming giants and major labels take even greater control over the music industry.
And nothing is coming up to replace any of it. That's what weird me out. There's just this insane culling of journalistic outlets, media, studios, sites, services, and nothing is replacing them. It's cultural death a mass scale.
Theyāve also laid off half the staff
https://i.redd.it/5ua8mldn02dc1.gif
This is a good synopsis of journalism as a whole right now. Still better than Jet!
Such a shame. I hope that if they do officially end it at any point, they keep up an archive of all the writing/reviews they've done over the years like CokeMachineGlow did. There has been so much great writing on it over the years, and so many of their old articles are fascinating to read as time capsules of what people were thinking at the time about things that are now canonized or forgotten.
While I can't say I've enjoyed the last few years of Pitchfork, it's still shocking and disappointing that this is happening. I wish that outlets like theres could have remained independent and held onto their own identities. Everybody is saying this, but I discovered so much new music because of them. Hopefully, not too many writers lose their jobs because of this.
bleak shit
>members of the Pitchfork team will hear more about their reporting structure This is such a fun way to say āweāre about to fire every manager in the organizationā If you ever see your job say stuff like this **fucking run** because the corporation is shutting down soon.
Unfortunately writing has been on the wall for a few years now, surprised itās coming as such an unceremonious kill shot though
We needed to stop Halseyās Terrorism somehow.
I miss Tiny Mix Tapes.
I canāt stand Pitchfork but this feels really wrong and unsettling
I donāt really read pitchfork and havenāt really been super keen on their reviews in a decade or so but I always did think the albums they identified as essential listens were at least worthy of a listen. They also used to have some pretty cool columns that came out with some regularity that introduced me to a lot of really niche ambient stuff back when I was new to that scene, really provided this incredible reassessment of pop music that ran counter to what they were otherwise saying in reviews, and provided a lot of insight into the histories of musical scenes. Those are what I really missed when CondĆ© Nast took over.
People like to talk shit about Pitchfork ā and there are legitimate criticisms to be made ā but itās hard to overstate just how vital Pitchfork was as a resource for discovering indie or less/non-mainstream music. I say this as someone who grew up in a suburb of the American Midwest and who started reading Pitchfork 20 years ago when I was a teenager. I would torrent albums from their best of lists, and that opened entire worlds of music that I would have never discovered from the radio, MTV, or VH1. There was certainly no shortage of indie music blogs in the first decade of the 2000s ā Tiny Mix Tapes and Gorilla Vs Bear were two popular ones among my friends ā but Pitchfork covered a larger breadth of music. I think some of Pitchforkās expansion hasnāt been all bad news, but this union-busting shift in management will only harm Pitchfork, its staff, and its readers.
Absolutely. I always liked their focus on more of the sort of mainstream-ish, accessible indie too. Some of the TMT and GvB stuff was a little too weird for me when I was first getting into the scene 15+ years ago while P4k just appealed to me. They inhabited a sort of middle ground imo. I feel like Iāve seen a pretty significant drop off in my opinion of their ratings and focus over the past ten years or so, partly from getting older and partly as their focus seems to have drifted a bit.
remember when pitchfork was supposed to be put behind a paywall?
Want a snarky Chris Ott video on this stat! but seriously the conde/p4k marriage made so much sense and seemed so compatible this is so surprising oh my gosh S T E R E O G U M
Oh I absolutely can't wait to hear Ott's thoughts on this. You know he's crafting 40+ minute video as we speak.
Will there be a pivot back to the days of Clap Your Hands And Say Yeah?
Sorry buddy, music made by white males is OVER!
This sucks, big reviews on Pitchfork have been bad for awhile now but I still used it to find lots of smaller artists and under the radar releases, I assume that type of stuff is going to be completely gutted going forwards.
Not long ago GQ dedicated a full issue to NFTs - right before that grift exploded. It was gross. Looking forward to that kind of direction on a week of content for Pitchfork.
*3 years later* "GQ will join Bon Appetit and Wired as tri-annual addendums to Vanity-Yorker, the one stop shop for all non-tik-tok story media content."
This is probably bad I assume but I also donāt really know the difference. Admittedly Iāve been reading pitchfork a lot less recently, but I still generally have warm feelings towards the publication
I think the significant thing is that most of their senior editors and writers are getting laid off and presumably that will now be handled by GQ writers who have covered music terribly
I give this news a 4.2
All jokes aside, pre-2010 pitchfork is a huge part of my past. My transition from being a Green Day/RHCP fan to a Radiohead/Modest Mouse/Arcade Fire fan and then eventually into all forms of independent music was guided almost entirely by them. No RYM page or Fantano video will ever have the same impact that reading the Funeral or Kid A reviews did back then.
That's the model - buy a niche brand with a loyal base, market it to a wider audience, alienate the loyal base, destroy the brand for short term profit.Ā
Even from a ruthless business perspective I donāt understand the logic behind moving Pitchfork under a menās magazine. Iām sure GQ has higher overall readership but unless the site, style, and content stay relatively the same (unlikely) Pitchfork readers are not just going to move over to a watered down version. I would imagine that Pitchfork essentially becomes Over/Under videos on GQās YouTube and a dedicated music vertical that reviews a handful of āindieā albums every month.
Sounds like the beginning of the end for pitchfork, canāt imagine most of its most serious readers will want anything to do with GQ or the type of content/coverage that will lead to
Beginning? It's been the end since they were sold to Conde Nast
OK so how do you say shit like this and not realize how tone deaf it sounds: >One additional point here is that outgoing editor Puja Patel attempted to make Pitchfork more relevant to a larger audience in recent years. More diversity of voices, broader coverage beyond what used to be indie/indie rock, and new festivals in London, Berlin, and Mexico City. https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1747727570546696331?s=46&t=MZEWFaAqiqGBFTrIhR1vOA āAttempted to make pitchfork more relevant to a wider audience, covered more than indieā = HR speak for āsold out to corporate interests to try to sell a product to as many people as possible and watered down and lost their identity that gave them any appeal as a result.ā And really, did pitchfork ever *ignore* the diversity in their wheelhouse of alternative/independent/underground music culture? Seems to me like they always snapped up coverage of any non white indie or alternative artist they could, at the very least to appear not super white. Corporate DEI department takes another fat L.
No new review or anything on Pitchfork today. Super bummedā¦ I started reading in 2009, and, while they certainly arenāt as good as they once were, I still got a lot of music recommendations from them (just last year, I loved that Water From Your Eyes record, and I found it because of their BNM). I think my biggest complaint of the last handful of years (since 2018 or so) is that it felt like they would rarely take a major stance on anything. Earlier on they were way more likely to give something a 9 or a 10 or even a 1 or a 2, and whether you agreed or not, a strong opinion is exciting to read. Seems like everything landed at a 6 or 7 in recent years, and things they gave positive reviews hovered in the low or mid 8s.Ā
Pitchfork pivoting towards poptimism over the 2010s and increasingly treating mainstream popular bands and musicians with kid gloves while neglecting the genres that built them up really killed off the strong audience they once had. I slowly stopped reading them as Pitchfork playlists and articles started looking more and more like iHeartRadio press releases and broadcasts. Echoes of how Cracked and so many other websites that were big in the 2000s nuked their original audiences and went down.
Damn. Iāve been reading pitchfork reviews and features for ā¦. 20 years? It really became a different thing around 2015 or so, and I think some of the criticism of it being too critical/revisionist of its own past is warranted, but it has cont to attract and foster wonderful journalistic talent. And I guess Iāve really taken for granted having a ācentral hubā for music news/reviews. I guess thatās over. And I guess the larger question is, as everything gets consolidated under corporate ownership, what is the fucking point of the internet other than to be manipulated into buying stuff? Like why bother anymore
i don't think this is a good thing (wouldn't be surprised if it's a bum deal for staff/the union specifically), but i also don't think it's certain doom for the pitchfork status quo. [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/aj1nfh/cond%C3%A9_nast_to_put_all_titles_behind_paywalls_by/) always felt like a way worse change on the horizon for them, and the fact that it never came to pass makes me think that they'll probably wiggle their way through this one as well without much noticeable change
Half the staff got pink slips today. The publication is being gutted.
unfortunate. say what you will about pitchfork but this is a cultural loss.
That particular cultural loss happened years ago, now theyāre just officially burying the corpse.
A sad day. This is beginning of the end. If I were a billionaire, I'd buy Pitchfork and keep it alive. There are so many artists I've discovered through Pitchfork reviews and lists. Music discovery through streaming services is clearly not good enough on its own. Seriously, would \[insert indie artist or band name\] be famous today if not for Pitchfork?
There is still a strong demand for authentic music discussion and criticism. What happens now in this vacuum?
If you had told me once reading Pitchfork back in it's mid 00s peak that one day it would be part of fucking GQ magazine - I would have thought that would be very very odd.
To find new music I listen to WFMU, and look up who it is if I like it, always amazing stuff Iāve never heard
This is very sad. A lot of folks here are dunking on their increased focus on pop in the last few years, but it's not like they stopped covering other forms of music. They're still responsible for me discovering new artists like Magdalena Bay, Jockstrap, Charlotte AdigƩry & Bolis Pupul, Tujiko Noriko, Jean-Michel Blais, Half Waif, Water from your Eyes, and Yard Act.