Pitchfork (website)
Pitchfork (formerly Pitchfork Media) is an American online music publication founded in 1996 by Ryan Schreiber in Minneapolis. It originally covered alternative and independent music, and expanded to cover genres including pop, hip hop, jazz and metal. Pitchfork is one of the most influential music publications to have emerged in the internet age.
Type of site
English
1996
United States
Ryan Schreiber
Yes
No
1996
Active
In the 2000s, Pitchfork distinguished itself from print media through its unusual reviews, frequent updates and coverage of emerging acts. It was praised as passionate, authentic and unique, but criticized as pretentious, mean-spirited and elitist, playing into stereotypes of the cynical hipster. It is credited with popularizing acts such as Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens.
Pitchfork relocated to Chicago in 1999 and Brooklyn, New York, in 2011. It expanded in the 2000s, launching projects including the annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago in 2006, the video site Pitchfork.tv in 2008, and a print publication, The Pitchfork Review, in 2011. It also began covering more mainstream music and issues of gender, race and identity. As of 2014, Pitchfork was receiving around 6.2 million unique visitors every month.
The influence of Pitchfork declined in the 2010s with the growth of streaming and social media. In 2015, it was acquired by the mass media company Condé Nast and moved to One World Trade Center. After the acquisition, the former co-owner Chris Kaskie left in 2017, followed by Schreiber in 2019. In 2024, Condé Nast announced plans to merge Pitchfork into the men's magazine GQ, resulting in layoffs. The merge drew criticism and triggered concern about the implications for music journalism.
History[edit]
1996–2003: Early years[edit]
Pitchfork was created in February 1996 by Ryan Schreiber, a high school graduate living in his parents' home in Minneapolis.[1] Schreiber grew up listening to indie rock acts such as Fugazi, Jawbox and Guided by Voices.[2] He was influenced by fanzine culture and had no previous writing experience.[3]
Schreiber initially named the website Turntable, but changed it after another website claimed the rights.[4] The name Pitchfork was inspired by the tattoo on the assassin Tony Montana in the film Scarface. Schreiber chose it as it was concise and had "evilish overtones".[2] Schreiber wrote the first review, of Pacer (1995) by the Amps.[5] The record store Insound was Pitchfork's first advertiser.[4]
Early Pitchfork reviews focused on indie rock and were often critical. The Washington Post described them as "brutal" and "merciless", writing: "The site's stable of critics often seemed capricious, uninvested, sometimes spiteful, assigning low scores on a signature 10-point scale with punitive zeal."[6] Schreiber said the site's early period "was about really laying into people who really deserved it", and defended the importance of honesty in arts criticism.[7] In 1999, Schreiber relocated Pitchfork to Chicago.[8] He estimated that Pitchfork had published 1,000 reviews by this point.[9]
Around the turn of the millennium, the American music press was dominated by monthly magazines such as Rolling Stone, creating a gap in the market for faster-moving publication that emphasized new acts.[10] Pitchfork could publish several articles a day, greatly outpacing print media.[11] New technologies such as MP3, the iPod and the file-sharing service Napster created greater access to music, and music blogs became an important resource, creating further opportunity for Pitchfork.[11] The contributors Mark Richardson and Eric Harvey said this was an important part of Pitchfork's early popularity, as music fans could share and listen to recordings while reading daily updates.[9]
In 2000, Pitchfork's 10.0/10.0 review of the new Radiohead album, Kid A, written by Brent DiCrescenzo, generated a surge in readership and was one of the first signs of Pitchfork becoming a major publication.[3][4] It attracted attention for its unusual style and the speed of its publication following the album review.[12] Billboard described it as "extremely long-winded and brazenly unhinged from the journalistic form and temperament of the time".[12] While it was widely mocked, it boosted Pitchfork's profile.[12] Schreiber said he understood the review would make Pitchfork subject to ridicule, but "wanted Pitchfork to be daring and to surprise people".[12] In 2001, Pitchfork had 30,000 daily readers.[2]
2004–2005: Growing influence and professional growth[edit]
In 2004, Pitchfork hired its first full-time employee, Chris Kaskie, formerly of the satirical website The Onion, to run business operations.[8] Kaskie later became the company’s president and co-owner.[13][14] Pitchfork's first professional editor, Scott Plagenhoef, was hired shortly afterwards.[9][8] Kaskie and Plagenhoef are credited for turning Pitchfork into a professional operation. It began to scale quickly; the more money it made, the more resources it had for reviews and articles.[13][9]
As of 2004, Pitchfork had eight full-time employees and about 50 freelance staff members, most of whom worked remotely and co-ordinated through phone and internet.[15] Pitchfork writers were unpaid for their first six months, after which they could earn $10 or $20 for a review or $40 for a feature. In 2004, following staff tensions about Schreiber's advertising income, Pitchfork started paying writers from their first articles at a slightly improved rate.[15]
That year, Pitchfork published a positive review of the debut album by Arcade Fire, Funeral. It became a bestseller and is cited as the first major example of Pitchfork's influence on independent music, attracting coverage of Pitchfork from outlets such as the Los Angeles Times.[9] The contributor Jess Weiss said the review "changed everything".[9] By 2005, Pitchfork was attracting around one million readers a month, with an annual revenue of around $5 million.[4][16] That year, Schreiber said he would refuse any offer to buy Pitchfork: "It would change into the antithesis of the reason I started it. This is something I am so in love with — this is my entire adult life's work."[15]
Criticism[edit]
Prose[edit]
Pitchfork reviews have been criticized as pretentious, verbose and inaccurate.[46][47] Itzkoff wrote that Pitchfork was overwrought and sometimes hard to understand, with an abundance of adjectives, adverbs and misused words.[2] Shaer identified examples of "verbose and unreadable writing ... dense without being insightful, personal without being interesting".[47] In City Pages, Thomas Lindsay wrote that its prose was florid and sometimes impenetrable, and contained factual errors.[51] Similar criticisms came from Rob Harvilla of the East Bay Express and Claire Suddath of Time.[46][20] Responding to criticism in 2006, Schreiber said he trusted his writers' style and opinions.[51]
Elitism[edit]
In its early years, Pitchfork was criticized as mean-spirited and elitist, and for publishing reviews that do not meaningfully discuss the music, playing into stereotypes of the cynical hipster.[46] In 2018, the music journalist Robert Christgau described the early years of Pitchfork as "a snotty boys' club open to many 'critics' ... Too many amateur wise-asses and self-appointed aesthetes throwing their weight around."[52]
Many scathing early reviews were by Brent DiCrescenzo, who wrote lengthy reviews that rarely addressed the music.[53] For example, his review of the 2001 Tool album Lateralus consisted mostly of a list of the equipment used by the drummer.[53] Some reviews consist only of single images or videos, implying the record is beneath critical analysis.[53] Schaer wrote in 2006 that Pitchfork typically triumphed acts it had "discovered" and attacked beloved legacy acts and bands popular on music blogs.[47] Some believed that Pitchfork deliberately waited for excitement to build around an act before dismissing it with a critical review.[47]
Itzkoff argued that the obtuse and confrontational style was part of the Pitchfork business model and made their reviews memorable.[2] He suggested that the writers' lack of training or experience, and the fact that they worked for low or no pay, created a sense of authenticity and undermined the authority of traditional media.[2] Schreiber conceded that Pitchfork had a reputation for snobbery, but said its writers were "really just honest, opinionated music fans".[46]
Race and gender[edit]
In the 2000s, Pitchfork was criticized for focusing on music made by white men.[21] In its early years, its staff comprised almost entirely white men.[30] In 2007, the female rapper M.I.A. criticized Pitchfork for assuming that her album Kala had been produced entirely by the male producer Diplo. Another Pitchfork writer described the error as "perpetuating the male-led ingenue myth".[54] M.I.A. and the singer Björk argued that this was part of a wider problem of journalists assuming that female artists do not write or produce their own music.[55][56] The Pitchfork contributor Andrew Nosnitsky argued that hip-hop, not indie rock, was the "defining music" of his generation, but that Pitchfork was viewed as the defining music publication for "purely mechanical and straight-up white-supremacy reasons".[9]
Parodies[edit]
Pitchfork has attracted multiple parodies.[47] In 2005, Pitchfork invited the comedian David Cross to write a list of his favorite albums. Cross wrote that he was surprised by the invitation, citing several insulting Pitchfork reviews of his comedy albums, and instead wrote a "withering and absurdist" article titled "Albums to listen to while reading overwrought Pitchfork reviews".[53][57] In 2007, the satirical website The Onion published a piece in which Pitchfork reviewed music as a whole and gave it a score of 6.8.[49] The music blog Idolator ran a feature asking readers to guess which lines came from Pitchfork reviews and which were fabricated.[20] In 2010, the writer David Shapiro started a Tumblr blog, "Pitchfork Reviews Reviews", which reviewed Pitchfork reviews and assessed their arguments. It attracted more than 100,000 followers and a profile in the New York Times.[58]
