pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i want to email everyone i know who got fired and im realizing ive only ever used their pfork emails in the vast majority of cases. gonna have to hope they weren’t immediately nuked or at least end up forwarding to another address. idk, fucked!

I've had a number of longterm gigs, the best of which were with Stylus and SPIN, but the line editing I got at Pitchfork and The Pitchfork Review was more rigorous than the legit complaints posted earlier in this thread suggest. I hit my stride at Pitchfork as the pandemic, actually, although I'd started a few years earlier.

My sincere condolences to all ilxors with personal and/or professional connections there. This sucks. It's been unfashionable to like pitchfork since the late 00s in my world (though this faded a bit as people grew up), but I've always appreciated it--you just had to learn how to read it for your own purposes and not freak out if you saw a name you didn't like in a headline. I'm genuinely a bit worried how this affect my capacity to track certain kinds of new music!

Kinda funny that it's Taylor Swift some keep mentioning as a sign of decline, when two of the biggest music nerds I know irl are both nuts about her. I'm not a fan, but ignoring her was v dubious.

also just realized that Anna Wintour wrote the email that was posted on twitter...something very odd about that.

As a friend of mine put it somewhere, "the actual apotheosis of ad funded services is just a sea of robots creating 'content' for other robots to consume, cutting the pesky humans out of the loop." That's the true singularity of late stage capitalism.

also just realized that Anna Wintour wrote the email that was posted on twitter...something very odd about that.

― rob, Thursday, January 18, 2024 9:25 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i do not think it was wintour, pfork has a staffer named anna

could’ve been wintour, she’s the “chief content officer” for conde nast and these messages usually come from high up

The articles on this that I've read are attributing it to Wintour

oh lol what do i know then

By volume, Pitchfork has the highest daily site visitors of any of our titles; their higher consuming segments generate more unique page views by volume than any title. This despite scant resourcing, esp from corporate. Well-placed in a post-scale era (or was)

— Claire Willett (@clairedwillett) January 17, 2024

re: visitor stats

is that English

Was definitely Wintour

p4k gets (or i guess got) the most daily visitors of any conde nast publications & has dedicated readers who generate more unique page views than their other publications, despite conde nast giving it less resources?

lol everything about this is so surreal and wrong

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

Arguing over whether Pitchfork was too populist or not populist enough is pointless. Music publications went out with the ark (unless you have a boomer fueled readership like RS or Mojo)

Realized this morning that Pitchfork is easily the longest running site I've checked at least weekly, if not daily. Predates even ILX by several years. Can't remember exactly when I first discovered it, but I would guess Fall of '98, which would mean at least a quarter of a century. Kind of amazing to realize that.

Not to say I didn't get annoyed and/or frustrated by their focus and approach many times, but there were always just enough great writers popping up to make it worth the visit.

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

Depends.

Most of the criticism Triassic-era Pitchfork received was earned! Homophobic and clueless. I didn't read them semi-regularly until at least 2006 and even then at Stylus I thought we were their superiors by a margin of a 100 (it made sense that when Stylus went under Pitchfork hired several of our best). But impressions become adamantine. 2018 Pitchfork wasn't even 2014 Pitchfork.

So they did post a new review today (Bruiser Wolf album) which I'm sure was ready to go already. I'm wondering, since so many here are talking about Pitchfork in the past tense, whether anyone thinks it's going to continue in any kind of recognizable form? They didn't lay off the entire staff after all. Will those of you who have written for them keep sending them pitches?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Thursday, January 18, 2024 9:54 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean the two ppl i primarily pitched to and have been edited by are still there, so idk! but the entire structure around them has been deleted and is getting replaced by gq people so that's a wildly different environment in which my pieces go up. obv i'm grieving bc writing for a pitchfork without amy phillips on the masthead seems inconceivable to me, even though i never wrote for the news section

I assume one of those is Jeremy Larson?

i figure it just hobbles along as a shell of what it was for a while and gradually turns into just being gq's music section that no one cares about

https://x.com/Marcissist/status/1747745164024766546?s=20

Marc Masters 🌵
@Marcissist
If yr bummed about P4k news today one thing you could do is stop paying for or using streaming services. It’s all connected. If there were more money in making music there would be more in writing about it. And in human recommendation rather than algorithms.
5:18 PM · Jan 17, 2024
·
68K
Views

sorry for weird formatting, but this is the take I am here for

Eric Harvey waxes nostalgic:
https://ericdharvey.substack.com/p/pitchfork-and-me

UFO’s prediction is what will probably happen

maybe it the brand basically stops existing eventually and someone else buys it. that's probably the most positive outcome for the idea of p4k lol

*it as a brand

Nonprofit, subscription-based site with commitment to independence — “We will never sell!” — I think that’s the most likely model for somebody to put together a good music-writing site. Cheap subscriptions, like $5 a month/$40 a year. Get some good names on board as contributors, launch with a GoFundMe or whatever, add more talent as revenues allow. It’s doable I think, for the right five people with good leadership. (lol I know there are a whole lot of ifs in that equation.)

For all the criticisms of Pitchfork I’ve voiced in this thread (and some I haven’t), it the only (non social media) site I visit daily, and have done for years. I’ve discovered artists & gotten into entire genres from it; I genuinely wonder what else (if anything) that exists now could do the same, and as rob said above, I'm unsure how this will impact my discovery of music (i.e., my life may genuinely be poorer without Pfork). I also do/did love some of the writing.

I don't really want to call them out by name, but I had to unfollow a certain one person niche review site that had a heroically bad take about this that was disappointing to see.

i('ve) visited pitchfork daily for over a decade (had it been born earlier it would be longer no doubt). definitely had a huge impact on my life ever since - discovering artists and, early on, probably really streghtening my enthusiasm for music writing at the right age. this is a miserable one.

Even as the site expanded its coverage beyond indie music (a transition that began 20+ years ago, fwiw), it retained a distinct editorial perspective. Sure, it was more likely to review mainstream artists, but it didn't just uncritically embrace anyone on the pop charts. For me, the site was a great way to discover which mainstream artists were worth paying attention to. And anyway, in Pitchfork's world, someone like Caroline Polachek was considered as big of a star as Olivia Rodrigo. That kind of curation, across genres and levels of fame, was incredibly valuable.

I started reading pitchfork in ‘02 or ‘03 — likely ‘02 based on what I’ve since seen on the wayback machine, haha. It took me a couple years to realize that I deeply despise the type of indie rock it promoted — anything along the lines of Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, the Microphones I really can’t stand — but it was exciting to be a teenager and realize that there was an entirely alternate musical world out there that offered something different than what classic rock could. They did always review more interesting stuff as well even if it didn’t always take the top headline under the reviews.

That said, Pitchfork has felt as corporate, consumerist, and vapid as anything else out there for at least a decade, so other than the layoffs, I’m surprised that this is causing such an upheaval in the music world. It doesn’t really even feel like it presents itself as a place to learn about music anymore — you get the same major artist news updates that Rolling Stone etc probably cover and the reviews seem a mix of radio garbage, payola publicity, and hopeless attempts to appear relevant in a changing digital landscape.

Maybe this news will prompt the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews guy to come out of retirement?

That said, Pitchfork has felt as corporate, consumerist, and vapid as anything else out there for at least a decade,

This attitude is strange to me considering the number of experimental artists reviewed daily.

"the reviews seem a mix of radio garbage, payola publicity, and hopeless attempts to appear relevant in a changing digital landscape."

This is false. The percentage of their reviews of mainstream artists is still pretty small.

yeah i usually go to it most days and i'm finding a weird dichotomy between what people think of pitchfork in recent years and what it actually was

Slim IS an alien.

i mean just look

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/

even just the hip hop - Bruiser Wolf, Conway the Machine, AZ, Czarface, these ain't exactly Drake

how many more garbage takes like "Olivia Rodrigo broke Pitchfork!" will we keep reading, I ask you

corporate, consumerist, and vapid as anything else out there for at least a decade

Tell me you don't actually read Pitchfork without saying you don't actually read Pitchfork.

i'm finding a weird dichotomy between what people think of pitchfork in recent years and what it actually was

I have a friend who genuinely and confidently beleived 00s pitchfork shunned anything on a major label, like an indie rock maximumrocknroll or something. and he was doing this in a video about pitchfork. obviously that must mean he never actually went the site but i feel like the dichotomy between what it is-what people think it is has been with pitchfork in numerous guises.

(forgive typos this new laptop keyboard is punishing)

Pitchfork had also been doing metal reviews of bands that didn't have Mastodon-level notoriety. i read quite a few of Grayson's metal reviews

Alphonse Pierre's The Ones column is amazing, no one is documenting new (mostly non backpacker) hip hop better

A lot of how I feel has already been said: devastated for the hardworking, talented writers and journalists who were affected.

On a personal note (and I know this will sound silly to some of you), Pitchfork has been for me what MTV was for the generation before mine. I started getting into music around the time Pitchfork became relevant, and as a Chicago kid, it was exciting to see this local shop become a nationally recognized brand that could move the needle in music. It would be hard to overstate how many artists I discovered from their reviews and lists; I have checked the site nearly every day for 20+ years. In the mp3 era, I would collect their Top 100 tracks of the year list into zip files that were widely shared in the comments of many other sites. I attended the first Intonation fest, the first official Pitchfork fest (and many since), and the winter fest they put on at the Art Institute. Ugh.

Of P4k's top 50 albums of 2023, only 11 were released by labels that are subsidiaries of the three majors (Sony, Warner, Universal).

1. Top Dawg Entertainment/RCA
2. Perpetual Novice
3. Backwoodz Studioz
4. Dead Oceans
5. Scenic Route
6. Asthmatic Kitty
7. Interscope
8. Mute
9. Secretly Canadian
10. Ninja Tune
11. Interscope
12. Mexican Summer
13. Self-released
14. Geffen
15. XL
16. Interscope
17. Warp
18. Dog Show/Atlantic
19. September
20. Fire Talk
21. Ghostly International
22. Interscope
23. Dead Oceans
24. Ninja Tune
25. Verve
26. Awe
27. Matador
28. International Anthem
29. FXHE
30. Another Dove
31. Warp
32. 10K Projects/Capitol
33. True Panther
34. Fat Possum
35. Navy Wavy LLC
36. Hessle Audio
37. Jagjaguwar
38. Matador
39. In Real Life
40. Milan
41. Open Shift Distribution/Gamma
42. Fat Possum
43. Geffen
44. Mexican Summer
45. 20 Buck Spin
46. Tonal Union
47. Poclanos/Topshelf
48. Peak Oil
49. Feel It
50. Epic

Was expecting this take:

Pitchfork Media might be the best example of a once-decent publication being ruthlessly hollowed out by woke shit. They went from breaking legitimately great bands like Animal Collective and MGMT 15 years ago to producing nothing but an endless stream of vapid thinkpieces about…

— Lo-fi Republican (@LoFiRepublican) January 17, 2024