When high school graduate Ryan Schreiber launched a music site expectedly called Turntable in February 1996, I probably was playing somewhere on a school yard with my friends, portraying ninja turtles or other heroes of action movies of that era. Weezer, Fiona Apple, Wilco, and Everything But the Girl were definitely not among my interests.
It’s hard to even remember what I had been listening to those days at the age of ten besides Teenage Ninja Turtles. But I also had that turntable at home and with time it (and then — my new cassette recorder) became filled with good music. Later, Turntable turned into Pitchfork and played a determining role in many lives of music lovers including mine. Today… let me check my birth certificate, I’m 37 and have tens of thousands of albums in my Spotify library and write music reviews on an everyday basis. Thanks to that very website.
After the shocking news of January 17 that media conglomerate Condé Nast is merging one of the most influential music publications of the internet era with men’s magazine GQ, accompanied by massive layoffs, social media and many magazines were flooded with posts and articles full of compassion and regret. Almost every music journalist and many musicians, except for some gloating and snarky individuals, are sure that it’s very bad for music journalism. I’m not an exception.
But, as Konstantin Stanislavski might put it, in the given circumstances, it’s crucial to act accordingly, e.g., to find positive aspects and move towards them. Hence, below, I’ll do some analytical magic by trying to find good signs in what seems like bad news for music journalism.
One of the best editorials is dissolved but not vanished
I like to make Google Sheets. To be honest, I do it on almost every occasion. I have a special sheet for my computer components. Also, I have one with a usage duration schedule for almost every detergent, body care product, and other bottles in my house. It’s really useful. What? So, I compiled one for calculating Pitchfork’s layoffs too. According to my research based on X’s posts, about 11-12 of the 19 essential team members were fired. Just imagine, around 63% of the team! Most contributing editors and writers are probably still active.
Associated Press sources involved in the situation seem to agree with me — they reported that “at least 12 staffers were laid off” from the permanent editorial staff. If you were subscribed to at least a few music critics on social media, it was likely hard not to pay attention to the hundreds of tweets and stories from laid-off staff and their colleagues from all over the industry. The key message of this discussion is how sad it is to lose such a professional, dedicated, and well-established team, and what a big loss it is for music journalism.
Pitchfork’s editorial was a well-coordinated mechanism with its own high work standards and clearly established workflow for the production of high-quality texts that set the level for all music writers for decades to come. “We’re going to come back, and all of these absurdly talented people are going to keep writing about music. You watch,” Jayson Greene, contributing writer of P4K, wrote on X, giving room for optimism at this bleak time.
Home for indie music is ruined, long live home for indie music
Pitchfork always was the major support service for indie musicians and raisers from all genres. Even considering the great emphasis on mainstream music in recent years, heroes of indie folk, post-punk, independent hip-hop, and all kinds of underground music were always among it. Bar Italia, Joanna Sternberg, and Militarie Gun were next to Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, and The Weeknd, while Phoebe Bridgers with her peers had been growing from humble indie talent to a self-confident, stadium-worthy, bona fide star right before their eyes.
“My album rollout would’ve been nothing without the thoughtfulness and consideration of Pitchfork writers,” wrote Kara Jackson on Twitter/X, one of the main folk finds of last year. “I remember wanting to give up on having a music career, and I had a long talk with my mom about it the night before Urban Driftwood came out. Then at 2 am, I read Sam Sodomsky’s amazing review of my record… I wept & changed my mind,” added Yasmin Williams, another beautiful folk discovery of Pitchfork editors.
Of course, there are a lot of music blogs that specialize in up-and-coming musicians, but Pitchfork managed to become the crucial, even vital, platform, the influential institution which connected indie and mainstream, highbrow and lowbrow. It was helping artists to easily transit from rags to riches, from SoundCloud and Bandcamp to Spotify, from basement recording studios and bedrooms to Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio.
However, without their domination in the industry, an opportunity opens up for a lot of other publications to pay more attention to new music in different ways. Until now, most of them were covering this topic mostly accidentally through annual lists of the best rising artists and rare interviews. “Why even bother if Pitchfork guys do that on an everyday basis and on a damn good level,” many music journalists probably were thinking. Now, when there’s no one to cover this gap, it’s a green light for other publications to step in.
The overall state of reviews may decrease or even increase
The most disturbing problem consequent to this “evolving,” as Anna Wintour called it in her memo, is the general state of reviews because, let’s admit it, almost every music critic was aspiring to Pitchfork’s PhD-level essays humbly called reviews. It was hard not to notice the crucial difference between most of the pieces on every album page at AOTY and the ones which came (and still continue even in these “cruel times”) under the helm of P4K’s reviews director Jeremy D. Larson.
Whether you want it or not, if you work in this tough business, all your writings are affected by this immense body of work, in one form or another, even if you try to convince us that you have never seen any of these articles. It was not appropriate in music critics circles to open up about reading their reviews as a music bible, but who do we want to fool — I personally have read last year probably more Pitchfork texts than novels. So, without such an example of great writing to aspire to, the general quality of music criticism may begin folding and fading away.
Yet, I have some good tidings for you. Before the news of GQ-isation, Pitchfork was perceived by other journalists as a competitor, and it was somehow shameful to mimic, imitate, repeat after its writers. Now, it’s an all-time classic that must and will be quoted. To write in a pitchfork-esque style and to carry it on will be considered an honor. Every music writer will be more willing to reference and repeat every one of its pieces. In this way, the remembrance of it will live in other articles and in its hyperlinks. Sounds very sad, doesn’t it?
Wiping away a tear, I’ll allow myself to quote one of the best review leads ever: “My grandparents were Russian immigrants who spent their lives working in factories; when they got too old for that, they graduated to the cafeteria of a Queens high school. Visiting them as a kid, the thick accents of their incomprehensible language were, to me, the music of the so-called “motherland,”” wrote Brandon Stosuy in his piece about Beirut’s debut. See, now we can use P4K’s heritage and it will make our texts better.
Attention of millions of readers will switch to…what publications?
When I don’t do Google Sheets, I like to check music websites’ metrics… and to put it into my tables, of course. If you ask me which publications are most visited or how it is going with bounce rates there, it’s all in my head. I call it a statistical private investigator. And here is a bit of entertaining numerology.
Similarweb tells us that Pitchfork had around 12 million total visits per month and ranked 24th among the biggest music websites like NPR and Genius, according to its traffic. These are very good numbers. Especially for a music blog. For example, NME has around 9 million total monthly visits, Stereogum — 3 million, The Line of Best Fit — 300 thousand, Loud and Quiet — around 100 thousand. The only higher rank I know of is Rolling Stone with its gigantic 23 million visits.
You will laugh, but GQ, into which P4K is being absorbed, has the same 12 million total visits per month! Only their bounce rate is worse than Pitchfork’s: 71.46% against 55.22%. The same goes for average visit duration: 01:03 against 02:12 minutes. Whoops.
“By volume, Pitchfork has the highest daily site visitors of any of our titles… despite scant resourcing, esp. from corporate,” stated Condé Nast audience development editor on X, in an already deleted post.
In other words, there are only a few music magazines with such high numbers. And now, imagine what all those readers, who used to rely on their reviews, will do if there’s no longer new material available, or if the content is significantly reduced. They will likely start seeking other sources of similar entertainment within the music press. Thus, this is a good opportunity for them to lure a new audience and boost their metrics. As a result, the 12 million visits that once went to P4K could be spread among its former competitors.
Internet patterns breakdown and a big sigh of relief
The possible extinction of Pitchfork means a shift in favorite habits for many music lovers. It’s hard to deny that for many of us, every release Friday started with P4K’s legendary 0.0 to 10.0 scores, and it was always fun to see what rank, let’s say, the new Kid Cudi album would receive, and to discuss how rude it is not to give the Best New Music achievement to Amy Winehouse. That was a time of memes, Reddit conspiracy theories, fun, and hatred. It’s funny how they managed to cause a lot of discussions, disputes, and even swearing for almost 30 years with just one number alongside a review. So, that time might be gone very soon.
Despite all the sadness, it’s a big relief for some musicians and readers who don’t have such dignity and wisdom as Dan le Sac, who still believes in the usefulness of the publication despite owning “(potentially) the lowest score on the site.” Because so many people will stop worrying about numbers and will live a healthier life without endless ruminating about how a 7.1 score instead of a 6.9 could change their careers and improve living conditions. It’s hard to even imagine how many lives of readers and musicians have been destroyed by these acerbic reviews. Dobby is free! So, get a life and keep on rockin’ in the free world.
This is the bitter end and the new beginning at the same time
As we already established, Pitchfork was (sorry, still is… so far) an exceptional music publication of its kind because it managed the best way to connect indie and mainstream, and remained the only one big website that continued to write exclusively about music. NME covers movies, TV, and even games. Rolling Stone goes politics. And so on. It’s hard to be big and write only about musicians, especially with a strong emphasis on indie. That being said, it’s an irreparable loss for the industry. All the same, it’s still a possibility.
The most wet and long-time dream of all Pitchfork stans is a new digital entity, or fanzine, or even some nice little blog from its former staff. Kind of a New Order or, er, Obsidian Entertainment, which would do the right Fallout, free from all that corporate rubbish. “A little candle factory,” as Ilf and Petrov put it. And now is the most appropriate time for that. It can be a small humble beginning on Substack similar to The New Cue and Drowned in Sound, or even a new massive project that some kind philanthropist millionaire will agree to finance. Because why not.
“It’s a transcendent, beautiful, deceptively simple moment. She extends a diamond-encrusted, gloved hand—an invitation to a better kind of party,” wrote Julianne Escobedo Shepherd about Beyoncé’s album, but this phrase perfectly suits this paragraph.
Now we have a strong argument to be more careful with corpos
Not that we didn’t have it before. We saw a lot of layoffs last year and already this year in the game industry and in music too. NPR, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Universal Music Group, just to name a few. We already had some awareness and heard voices of different experts, in the manner of Tony Scott’s Unstoppable veteran railroad engineer, played by Denzel Washington, yelling that this train will go off the rails if we don’t address the problem and don’t at least try to fix it.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m sure that Ryan Schreiber pondered a lot over the decision to sell his brainchild to a media conglomerate. Was it worth it, or might it have been better to die trying to operate this humble but cheeky publication in the era of streaming services and paid subscriptions? Or perhaps it’s better to heroically acquire it back, as founder and editor-in-chief of Stereogum, Scott Lapatine, did a few years ago. At least he is upset by this decision. Who knows, maybe right now Schreiber is counting his coins to do the same trick.
What we can say for sure is that this news of “Pitchfork getting gutted,” as Dan le Sac put it, became a great example of corporate hypocrisy and a warning to every small music blog, and it says, “Yeah, you can sell your life’s project, but don’t be surprised if it will be thrown overboard from the ship of modernity without any hesitation” by corporate guys in sunglasses (not even at night). This tragic event will be remembered in the history of journalism, and many representatives of the industry will act with that in mind in the future.
We all were “sunk into my tunnel vision,” as Torres sings. And, as Ted Gioia writes, “the smartest thing music writers could do in the year 2024 is stop trusting the system.”
This setback to a GQ-ish men’s world will cause the thriving of diversity
If you’ve read Pitchfork’s reviews, for example, on Beyoncé’s Renaissance or Romy’sMid Air, or if you were into their features like The Secret Gay History of Indie Rock, The Invisible Work of Mothers in Music, and many others,you may know that it was one of the most devoted to diversity music magazines in the Milky Way.
Considering their rich heritage in this direction where zeitgeist topics were told by queer journalists, women writers, and people of color, this move under GQ’s umbrella looks like a big step back, to the 2000s, when guys from big media conglomerates considered music alongside other men’s typical topics like cars, watches, sports, etc. Every music fan in 2024 knows that, say, Caroline Polachek, Marika Hackman, or Anohni can be listened not only by “stylish dudes” from Manhattan with their highly groomed beards, but by every human being from every part of the world, even without a high-speed internet connection.
This may sound paradoxical, but I rest my case: diversity in music journalism will grow even stronger after a big company has dispersed one of the most committed to diversity issues in music publications. “It’s a fucking miracle that a woman of color is the editor-in-chief of Spin,” said Puja Patel a long time ago before taking the helm of Pitchfork. Under her patronage, the magazine began to cover a wide range of topics by the hands of not only white male writers in well-fitting jackets. And if at that time this approach raised questions from some conservative readers, now it will be evident that they have a common enemy, a big conglomerate.
This decision will make people related to this industry a little angrier and more devoted. So, if a big corporation doesn’t give a F about the basic values of modern society, music writers and their readers will push these topics even harder.
Current suffering will guarantee them a cult status
Let’s admit that in recent years, Pitchfork was not noted for any breakthroughs or even scandals and started to become just another big music-specific publication with a rebellious past. Judging by music subreddits and comments on social media, there was a feeling that readers, despite Adam Remnant’s wish, were taking it for granted.
And if P4K had ended up just in oblivion, or even with a proper brand closure by CN’s management, there would have been no good story in it for anyone in the industry. That would have been a sad and silent end to just another music blog.
This story about a barbaric merger with major layoffs, accompanied by “absolutely bizarro” stories about the process of communication by company representatives, gave Pitchfork and its staffers a cult aura. Right now, everyone sees them exclusively as the good guys, experienced professionals, from a legendary media outlet, who suffered from the soulless machine of capitalism. Over the long term, it will do good for them and for music journalism in general. Because everyone will remember them as heroes of the industry who lost the fight to the money colossus. The story of Pitchfork’s unfair demolition is already in the annals of history.
If I were Walter Isaacson, I’d already be working on a book called something like “The Rise and Fall of Pitchfork” or “How Pitchfork was Demolished Without Taking Sunglasses Off.” Hm… Siri, how busy is my calendar for the next two years?
Eventually, it helped all of us to say and hear so many kind words
When was the last time you heard something nice from people of the industry who you don’t even know? How often do you write how the work of one of your colleagues matters to you? Yes, I totally agree that it sounds weird… when the guy is talking to himself in the middle of an article. But I’m sure that there are a lot of kind music writers on the other side of this screen, and we all sometimes need to address each other’s merits to continue doing our work better. Just without a reason. For example, I believe that Brandon Stosuy was writing very smart reviews and he needs to get back to it.
As befits any sad event, “the demolition of Pitchfork,” as Ted Gioia put it, has united the professional community much more. Someone might have secretly considered Pitchfork as nothing special. Someone might have just praised its staff silently. Someone might have not even thought about it at all. In general, there was no reason to open up your heart, but thanks to Condé, dozens of journalists have written a lot of very kind and supportive words to each other. Right now, X is the sweetest place it has ever been since I don’t even remember when. This merger showed the community that it exists and it’s strong.
All in all, Pitchfork was a great school of music journalism for its staff and for every music writer (yeah, for their readers too), and when school years are over, as we know, kids go into the adult world and make it a more fun place to live. The author of this piece is also among many of them: I feel like a schoolkid left by teachers alone, but at the same time wondering what’s next and confident that it will be alright. Right?
