At the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.
This reminds me of Google under Marissa Mayer buying Zagat. Remember them?
Big company buys small company, dismembers it into little pieces controlled by managers who weren't fans of the acquisition and don't respect it -- it's an old story. The founder of the acquiree quits in frustration, etc. etc.
There's a difference between buying a media property to try to sell more content(/advertising) into its subscriberbase(/userbase), vs keeping it as a going concern. Or sometimes, companies acquire into newer markets to try to boost their valuations based on P/E ratio.
AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.
I see Ars Technica taking a lot of flak in the comments but lawdy, they’re still pretty great and one of the news sources I actually pay for (full-text rss feeds are a nice bonus).
Just to pick a few of their writers who still kill it: Lee Hutchinson for anything sysadmin related, Eric Berger does the best space/rocket coverage on the entire internet, Jonathan Gitlin does a ton of in-depth automotive coverage and his passion for it bleeds through in every article, Andrew Cunningham’s insane macOS reviews that he took over from John Siracusa. I could go on but would basically be copy-pasting from their staff directory…
TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.
I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music.
If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On").
Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall.
You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.
Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.
Pitchfork was gone long before Conde. Back in 2011, they panned Childish Gambino's 4th release††, giving it a 16%†. Here's what Donald Glover had to say, 2 years before the Conde acquisition:
If I worked for Pitchfork, I wouldn't give myself a 9.0 either. They're a brand, they sell tickets to a show they put on every year. They're not going to give a 1.6 to someone who can be at their show and sell tickets. They're not the same publication that I grew up with anyway. It's changed, and that happens. Any good idea starts with a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. And I'm not calling Pitchfork a racket, but they're a business.
† I'm not dignifying 0.0-10
†† I had called this his 4th album but this was his first LP
A year or two I was browsing the Pitchfork "best songs of the 10's" and was rather confused that "This is America" wasn't on it. A long running feud explains it.
But eh, they're allowed to have "bad" opinions. Every critic I've remotely followed has strongly disagreed with me at times.
This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for personal care products("What I'm obsessed with this week!").
Would these magazines have survived without Conde Nast? I don't know. I know I stopped buying/reading/visiting websites of all of them soon after because I got bored seeing the same things regardless of the title. I guess the counterpoint would be any niche publication that is still doing well in today's publishing environment.
Exactly. We always tend to blame the purchaser, but why not the seller? If their business was good and they cared about the product, why sell? And if the business was bad, can't blame they buyer, either.
I guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40.
For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z
I’m not a fan of their embrace of pop music. Music publications are useful to the extent that they introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. You can’t avoid hearing pop music all the damn time. Why anyone would want to read about it as well is beyond me.
Do we even need that anymore? I play games of "follow the recommendation algorithm" around my streaming service and I've been very successful in what I've found. Been able to surface a lot of artists I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Between that and Reddit's genre-specific offerings I'm golden.
Pitchfork is not dead ass now but close. 15 years ago we were in lockstep. I find Gorilla vs Bear best of playlist retains that OG Pitchfork vibe the best.
A very bizarre subset of the population enjoy reading reviews for some reason. Either to: tell them how to feel about something, to validate their own opinion because they lack social company in real life to do so, or because they enjoy it as a weird form of content in and of itself.
But if you're just looking for new music, PF's old curated playlist on their site was obsolete the second Spotify started curating it's own genre playlists.
Was this not always the plan? Conde Nast is in the business of corporate influence across its portfolio. Indie music and Pitchfork placed all genres and labels on a roughly equal footing. Killing indie music and bringing back label music required that Pitchfork dissolves away.
Every year they don't ruin the New Yorker, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Granted, Si Newhouse bought it in 1985 - the only time the magazine's ownership changed! - and so maybe it enjoys a sort of grandfathered status at Conde Nast even with Newhouse dead?
I mean, I say that, but they recently ruined the previously-excellent iPad app, which has resulted in me going back to paper issues, but if that's the extent of the tomfoolery I'll take it.
Much to my surprise, they have managed to avoid killing Reddit so far. (Well, technically Reddit is owned by Conde's parent Advance, not Conde itself.)
bad leadership strategy. Plain and simple. They like many once powerhouse IP controlling firms have failed to realise the very thing that gave those IPs any value in the first place..... individual identity that was not centralized by some corporate quarterly objectives.....
I have been reading the Wikipedia articles on media and publication conglomerate M&A (mergers and acquisitions) for a while now. Media M&A is never foolproof, and my thesis is that M&As take into account the probability of failure, which represents the majority of the deals.
The survival of most startup media/publication companies is focused on one thing: demographics. Millennials in their 20s are different from millennials in their 30s, or Gen Z in their 20s. Considering this limited shelf value, it often results in them shutting down or being acquired. The companies that do acquire them have gone through this same cycle of failures and know that there is a high likelihood that the userbase will age out and the acquired company will eventually fall. This is so frequent, I bet they even financial engineer deals that may lead to some kind of benefit upon failure.
From roughly 2006-2012 this site greatly influenced my taste. I visited the site multiple times a day and read pretty much everything they published. I used to always check the site at 11pm when they reliably published a new set of 5 album reviews.
At some point banner ads for big liquor companies started to show up. Then coverage for mainstream music became more frequent. This was a clear signal that they had sold out and their reputation was shot.
I view them now as the new incarnation of Rolling Stone magazine. Still feel for the writers who got fired in this latest reorg.
Some will say this is a casualty of the overall shift in how music tastes are made and spread, I disagree, Pitchfork always had an eclectic mix of music it reviewed. I didn’t like a lot of it, hated a chunk of it but loved some of it and it felt like you could discover incredible music that wouldn’t break through without pitchforks platform, alongside mainstream pop that was actually sonically worthwhile.
I’ll miss this site. If anyone has any YT channels or other similar music sites, I’d love some recommendations
Actually sounds like a good thing to me. Any organization that styles itself an industry taste maker is simultaneously repressing the organic creation of culture by the disorganized masses.
Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you you do. Simultaneously, if that's your only outlet for finding culture, you'll miss all the rest.
It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly.
The Wire is quite good if you’re willing to pay for it. It’s a print monthly first and foremost so the news isn’t up to the minute, but digital subscriptions are reasonable and the reviews are best in class imo
I still go to Pitchfork a couple times a week to see what's new. Stereogum has a ton of posts and music to discover but they also lean too much into celebrity music and gossip. Also, they aren't nearly as critical on bad music.
Before their Conde Nast acquisitions, I used to visit both Ars Technica and Reddit reasonably often, both were sites were eventually stripped of their personality to the point where I no longer bother with either.
Yeah here in the Netherlands there was a similar community called Tweakers that's similarly been ruined by a takeover by a huge Belgian media company. It's so commercial now :(
Condé Nast might have helped run it into the ground but the unrecoverable dive started a long time ago. Pitchfork's content slowly turned into something more like a parody of pretentious music criticism. Paragraph after paragraph of drivel with seemingly no relation to the music. More like someone's journal entry repurposed as an album review. Maybe because they realized how stale their content had become they seemed to shift more and more of their focus towards hip hop and other genres that their traditional indie/rock readership didn't care as much about.
> Paragraph after paragraph of drivel with seemingly no relation to the music. More like someone's journal entry repurposed as an album review.
That was the best part! I found myself losing interest and moving onto cokemachineglow.com once they started doing more straightforward reviews. It's not for everyone, of course[1].
[+] [-] neonate|2 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20240205170646/https://www.semafo...
[+] [-] omar_alt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dv_dt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeeter2020|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
Big company buys small company, dismembers it into little pieces controlled by managers who weren't fans of the acquisition and don't respect it -- it's an old story. The founder of the acquiree quits in frustration, etc. etc.
[+] [-] gkanai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcin|2 years ago|reply
AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.
[+] [-] mjmsmith|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xref|2 years ago|reply
Just to pick a few of their writers who still kill it: Lee Hutchinson for anything sysadmin related, Eric Berger does the best space/rocket coverage on the entire internet, Jonathan Gitlin does a ton of in-depth automotive coverage and his passion for it bleeds through in every article, Andrew Cunningham’s insane macOS reviews that he took over from John Siracusa. I could go on but would basically be copy-pasting from their staff directory…
https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/
If Condé Nast eventually kills the site so be it, but its been 16y since their acquisition and still a daily read for me.
[+] [-] StopTheTechies|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cheer2171|2 years ago|reply
If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On").
Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall.
You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.
[+] [-] babyshake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
If I worked for Pitchfork, I wouldn't give myself a 9.0 either. They're a brand, they sell tickets to a show they put on every year. They're not going to give a 1.6 to someone who can be at their show and sell tickets. They're not the same publication that I grew up with anyway. It's changed, and that happens. Any good idea starts with a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. And I'm not calling Pitchfork a racket, but they're a business.
† I'm not dignifying 0.0-10
†† I had called this his 4th album but this was his first LP
[+] [-] drawfloat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|2 years ago|reply
But eh, they're allowed to have "bad" opinions. Every critic I've remotely followed has strongly disagreed with me at times.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phendrenad2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sybercecurity|2 years ago|reply
Would these magazines have survived without Conde Nast? I don't know. I know I stopped buying/reading/visiting websites of all of them soon after because I got bored seeing the same things regardless of the title. I guess the counterpoint would be any niche publication that is still doing well in today's publishing environment.
[+] [-] gs17|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itsoktocry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthomtb|2 years ago|reply
For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z
[+] [-] Gimpei|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnnnnnnngggggg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanisnan|2 years ago|reply
Pitchfork really served a purpose before streaming services got good at recommending new music.
Once they got "good enough", the friction of visiting Pitchfork just became high enough for me to stop visiting.
[+] [-] Solvency|2 years ago|reply
But if you're just looking for new music, PF's old curated playlist on their site was obsolete the second Spotify started curating it's own genre playlists.
[+] [-] anonacnt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fruffy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|2 years ago|reply
Granted, Si Newhouse bought it in 1985 - the only time the magazine's ownership changed! - and so maybe it enjoys a sort of grandfathered status at Conde Nast even with Newhouse dead?
I mean, I say that, but they recently ruined the previously-excellent iPad app, which has resulted in me going back to paper issues, but if that's the extent of the tomfoolery I'll take it.
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kderbyma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anyfactor|2 years ago|reply
The survival of most startup media/publication companies is focused on one thing: demographics. Millennials in their 20s are different from millennials in their 30s, or Gen Z in their 20s. Considering this limited shelf value, it often results in them shutting down or being acquired. The companies that do acquire them have gone through this same cycle of failures and know that there is a high likelihood that the userbase will age out and the acquired company will eventually fall. This is so frequent, I bet they even financial engineer deals that may lead to some kind of benefit upon failure.
[+] [-] oregano|2 years ago|reply
At some point banner ads for big liquor companies started to show up. Then coverage for mainstream music became more frequent. This was a clear signal that they had sold out and their reputation was shot. I view them now as the new incarnation of Rolling Stone magazine. Still feel for the writers who got fired in this latest reorg.
[+] [-] streamfunk191|2 years ago|reply
I’ll miss this site. If anyone has any YT channels or other similar music sites, I’d love some recommendations
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|2 years ago|reply
Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you you do. Simultaneously, if that's your only outlet for finding culture, you'll miss all the rest.
It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly.
[+] [-] wombat-man|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milgrum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lancesells|2 years ago|reply
I still go to Pitchfork a couple times a week to see what's new. Stereogum has a ton of posts and music to discover but they also lean too much into celebrity music and gossip. Also, they aren't nearly as critical on bad music.
[+] [-] yarg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecshafer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
That was the best part! I found myself losing interest and moving onto cokemachineglow.com once they started doing more straightforward reviews. It's not for everyone, of course[1].
[1] https://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/richdork/
[+] [-] whoomp12341|2 years ago|reply