Some thoughts on Pitchfork and music media.

The Pitchfork news bummed me out. I felt bad for the people who lost jobs and the music fans with one less place to consume excellent music writing. I was a daily reader starting in the early ‘00s and learned about a ton of new bands from them. Being introduced to new music is one of the greatest gifts, and it’s hard to name another publishing entity that did that for so many for so long.

The 2015 acquisition by Condé Nast always struck me as odd. I can’t imagine it was a smooth merging of cultures - and I’ve seen some really bad ones up close. Generally how these things go is either the acquired company becomes a shining star and their growth is accelerated, or the new toy is tinkered with then forgotten, or at worst shut down and subsumed by the parent company.

While Conde execs were vocal about Pitchfork’s millennial male audience being the reason for the acquisition, that business strategy clearly didn’t get communicated to the editorial team, as one of the laid-off staff mentioned they had been “trying to make it a less dude-ish place” for 8 years, while lamenting that GQ Magazine would now be taking over.

So what happened? Maybe about 10 years ago Pitchfork started to broaden its scope, grow their reach by going pop and expanding their coverage. Naturally, they lost the audience that supported them for years. Rather than embrace the niche, they disregarded it as a relic of the past.

Around that time it wasn’t for me anymore, and my daily visits became less and less frequent. And that’s okay. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. Not everything should appeal to everyone. But that’s also where they missed the mark. They sacrificed quality on the altar of scale. Like 99% of digital media, they became too revenue reliant on day-trippers and the clicks created by generic news coverage. Aside from the reviews and some great essays, what did they really do that you couldn’t get elsewhere?

And other than their well-curated festival, the brand never transcended beyond the site. When’s the last time you saw someone wearing a Pitchfork shirt? Did they ever produce a TV show or a podcast? Maybe, but I never tuned in and bet you didn’t either. The business suits did the brand wrong. The day the shutdown news broke, the only indications of revenue on Pitchfork.com were a solitary American Express campaign, and some 谷歌 AdChoices. For a business that relies on clicks, it didn’t exactly scream “we’re doing great.” We all should have seen this coming.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably expecting the CREEM sales pitch. There isn’t one. We’re just America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine. Creem.com doesn’t host digital ads as we don’t care about the daily-content-traffic-hamster-wheel-race-to-the-bottom. When we relaunched, we decided not to have record reviews in the mag, mainly because digital publishers like Pitchfork did it faster, and who wants to read about a record that came out a month ago? Turns out, a lot of people do. “Put record reviews in the magazine” was our #1 piece of reader feedback. We realized while being the first word drives clicks, being the last word builds your brand, and thus we’ve been working on our first record review section, which will debut in our March issue. I’m excited for it, and I hope some former Pitchfork writers pitch us.

While writing this I was listening to The Jesus Lizard, an ostensibly Chicago ‘90s band who released 4 critically acclaimed albums (Pitchfork scores: 8.1, 9.3, 9.2, 7.9) on Touch & Go, before signing with Capitol Records . Once on a major label they hired a new producer, had some lineup changes, released two more decent albums (no Pitchfork reviews) which were good but didn’t hit like the first four, and then broke up. A decade later they staged a successful reunion tour, published a beautiful coffee-table book, and reissued all their records. They still play every now and then, and I buy a ticket every time they do. Aside from the obvious parallels, I hope there's a similar future path for Pitchfork.

The brand isn’t gone, but don't believe any "the brand is not going away" bromides from the execs. It’s likely living as zombified dead weight at Conde, a logo to drop in a sales pitch if needed, a social handle to be trotted out to scale branded-content deals. And it’s ripe for unloading. A smart buyer would refocus it on its core audience and embrace the niche.

I bet someone will.