pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

the solution staring us all in the face: p4k crossword

love that Laura Snapes piece

6 Across: GAPDYX

The Music Review, 1966-2024, R.I.P., basically

xp to the tweet jaymc posted

i think part of the problem pitchfork had is that if you're writing a check to spend a lot of money advertising with conde nast, why would you want your ad to appear on pitchfork vs vanity fair, vogue, the new yorker, gq, bon appetit etc? maybe your brand is after an audience that you can narrowly define as being pitchfork's strictly, but i don't think that can be an entire business at the scale that conde nast requires.

but it used to be! it's important to remember the context of what was happening in 2015 when conde bought pitchfork. this was the peak of brands pouring money into some vague idea of (hipster runoff voice) "alt" music, music as culture etc -- red bull music academy events all over the globe, sxsw brand activation culture, chipotle writing huge checks to fiona apple and frank ocean etc. there were scores of journalists whose jobs were directly subsidized by one time ad spends... one was the vice brisk bodega, which was a festival series w/ a new web vertical attached that required hiring a handful of journalists, including the guy who would go on to run noisey and then fader before being me too'd. conde bought into a bubble, frankly, and when it popped they still had a healthy website but not one that was part of a culture that was going to make apple (or converse or...) raise their hand and say "we're writing a multi million dollar check to pitchfork". i want to emphasize again how much of this is related to broad cultural trends that far transcend any decisions pitchfork made about its editorial direction, anything directly related to poptimism as a critical framework etc

so what is left of that culture now? the answer, essentially, is music festivals. what part of pitchfork can survive w/o an editorial staff producing journalism? right. it's all connected

paging carles

― nxd, Thursday, March 8, 2018 9:28 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't kill the whale

I was part of the entire staff of XLR8R being let go in 2011– in 2010 I had forfeited my in-office position because I was being pressured to “clean up” my reviews to please advertisers, and my interests were being drawn elsewhere.

I can honestly say that writing about music professionally was the best job I ever had, at least in terms of satisfaction and learning that occurred. Just like I feel pity for younger generations who don’t have to search and seek for “the weird stuff,” I also pity those would-be music writers who will never get started now. It really sucks.

That said, young people love zines and esoteric website, at least the art school kids that I teach tend to like these things, so there’s some hope beyond the broad reach that P4k embodied. That is to say— I don’t think music or album reviews are over. But a clearinghouse website like P4k might never be in the cards ever again.

i mean if we're gonna really go digital diy and create the new generation of zines, angelfire still exists.

how's yall's html game?

(wonder if i can still log in to my old one??)

Lol @ the pic

I write about the collapse at Pitchfork—which will be merged into GQ magazine.

Link in the thread below. pic.twitter.com/C83tKeZLJN

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) January 18, 2024

Terrifying AI turntable/typewriter

I don't know if this means anything, but https://pitchfork.com/ad/ says that the site receives "more than 7 million monthly unique visitors," which is a more significant data point in the digital ad business than the total number of site visits.

A version of that line has existed on the page ever since 2009 (I think that's when they acquired the pitchfork.com domain), when it said there were 1.8 million monthly unique visitors. After that, it climbed a little bit each year, reaching 5 million at the time of the Conde Nast sale in October 2015. By the end of 2015, the figure had been updated to 7 million ... and it hasn't been updated since.

Meanwhile, the Pitchfork media kit for advertisers on the Conde Nast site says that Pitchfork has 4 million monthly uniques as of 2022.

So, that figure seems to have either plateaued or declined since the sale. Not trying to make a point one way or another, just thought that was interesting.

It's a useful metric for thinking about potential audience size. Like, what if you could convert 1/2 of 1 percent of 4 million to a paid monthly subscription? That's 20,000 people, if you got them to pay $5 a month each that's $100k a month. You can't conquer the world on $100k a month, but you could sure start something.

Working out for Elon

Fuuuuuck Ted Gioia.

As you were.

ted gioia can fuck off, and no, i haven’t read what he wrote.

Fuuuuuck Ted Gioia.

As you were.

Working out for Elon

lol well it helps to not start $44 billion in debt

Bob Lefsetz + Jeff Jarvis = Ted Gioia.

Racket MN does annual reports, probably the most detail, transparent financials and metrics you could find for any subscription based website

https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july-2023

Marc Hogan's piece here is key

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/pitchfork-music-gq-1234949447/

Also in there with Racket is Defector's

https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-three

people don't sleep on dusted

https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/

“In 2020, Condé Nast let go then-executive editor Matthew Schnipper, who was fresh off parental leave, and then-features editor Stacey Anderson, who —coincidentally — was unit chair of the Pitchfork Union. For the rest of that awful Covid year, I approached every piece I wrote for Pitchfork as if it could be my last. One irony amidst all of this is that I now finally have my first byline in Rolling Stone — another lifelong dream come true, albeit twisted by 21st-century capitalism.”

Had no idea Dusted was still active!

me neither, and I wrote for them (very briefly a very long time ago)

It's always seemed sociopathic to me to take something that clearly had a devoted audience and then basically gut it or kill it because you couldn't make it fit whatever bullshit financial parameter you had (the right demographic, whatever). At minimum, if it could stand on its own two feet before you bought it out, the least you can do is sell it or spin it off and give it the chance to do so again.

that's why folding it into gq feels particularly stupid, that seems like the best way to destroy whatever remaining value it has as a brand which is clearly the only part they care about

xp ...paging factcheckingcuz ;)

Helluva Hogan piece. This guy is one of the good ones, one of the sweetest in the biz.

Those bad takes (about "woke" or pop coverage or anything content-based) are just variations on what people who have no idea how media economics work have been saying for years about the declining fortunes of legacy print media in general — big announcement of newspaper layoffs followed by online dummkopfs saying "It's cuz they went so liberal!"

Forever ass-y.

It was that Experimental Jet Set review which started the P4k curse

— Thurston Moore (@nowjazznow) January 18, 2024

Oh, Thurston, shut the fuck up

Hah, he deleted it either from backlash or a moment of clarity/embarrassment.

paging factcheckingcuz ;)

sigh. the more things change...

both the Hogan piece and the Snapes piece are terrific. essential reading, if you haven't.

anyone else get prompted to sign in/create an account while trying to read a review?

if almost all music writing and curation is going the way of algorithmic recommendations and small snippets between clickbait, then how do you figure out how to populate music festivals? is it all a matter of who figures out how to do media stunts and juice their play counts? labels paying for playlist inclusion and we’re stuck with a combination of recycling existing acts and whoever’s popular on the “indie showgaze beats to study to” spotify micro genre?

it’s always been a battle to get past gatekeepers or get your music to tastemakers who can book shows or promote your album, but the lack of curation and writing just depresses me

Casey Newton on algorithms vs. criticism:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too.

sorry to everyone here impacted by this. i'm in the 20+ year reader club too and as naive as it is to think these things will always be around, it felt like pitchfork was always going to be around

I sent a note to our writers today about how we are going to keep publishing reviews on Pitchfork like we’ve been doing. Don’t expect everyone to believe that right away, but so far it’s true and I will try to hold up my end of the deal. Cruel times, I’m sorry, thanks for reading

— Jeremy D. Larson (@jeremydlarson) January 19, 2024

xp - while I’d like to hope it was the backlash or clarity that caused Thurston to delete that tweet, I’m afraid it was because he realized he’s referring to the wrong album (he was surely thinking of the notorious NYC Ghosts & Flowers pan)

was gonna say- pfork were just a daydream in young ryan's most impure thoughts in 95.

The fact that Thurston still remembers/ cares enuff for a catty tweet speaks volumes…

thought experiment: how much did pfork cement+perpetuate sonic youth's legacy?

(in other words: jfc show some respect, thurston. i know he deleted it, but what a pab.)

what was the tweet?

The fact that Thurston still remembers/ cares enuff for a catty tweet speaks volumes…

I mean, David Berman talked about the Lookout Mountain Pitchfork review contributed to his losing faith in Silver Jews being worth the effort, and Edith F. blogged about the It's A Game review basically being hurtful as well (ridiculing the person who made the music vs. critiquing it).

*contibuting

he was surely thinking of the notorious NYC Ghosts & Flowers pan

Did Pitchfork pan that album? Because as far as I remember, the most infamous review (in which the writer advised the band to break up) was in the Village Voice. But of course, it was by Amy Phillips, who eventually spent two decades at Pitchfork.

i think pitchfork gave nyc ghosts and flowers a rare zero point zero