Pitchfork “0.0”
It’s been a couple of weeks since Condé Nast’s decision to reorganize and downsize Pitchfork, a move that drew head scratching disbelief and foot stomping ire from seemingly everyone with an opinion on the matter. As with all corporate shake-ups, the full implications won’t be understood for some time. But what is knowable now — and for certain — is that (a) lots of people lost their jobs, (b) Pitchfork was one of the first Condé Nast titles to successfully unionize and (c) the writing at Pitchfork was never better than it was recently, under Puja Patel. Meanwhile, what should have been known to Anna Wintour (Condé Nast Chief Content Officer), Roger Lynch (Condé Nast CEO) and Nick Hotchkin (Condé Nast CFO), is that nobody under the age of fifty gives a shit about G.Q. (the title that Pitchfork was reorganized into) and that many people give many shits about Pitchfork.
To even the most casual observers, this decision looks like a historically dumb one. One brand is old and distressed while the other is still vital. One brand is regressing while the other is still developing. One has equity value only insomuch as its archives have value. The other is still central to the zeitgeist, creating new products and setting trends. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. And yet, I cannot say it was altogether surprising. Or, really, surprising at all.
So why? Why was I not shocked to hear this news? Best I can describe it, my unshockedness was the result of three factors: First, media companies — and especially publishing companies — have been doing dumb stuff forever, and increasingly since the late Nineties, when the internet broke their model. With the possible exception of The New York Times (debatable), The Wall Street Journal (less debatable) and New York Magazine (not very debatable), most publishers have foundered mightily in the internet age. Second, it’s inarguable that Condé Nast would prefer non-union staffers to the alternative. And so, it would follow that, given the chance, their C-suite would eventually move to suppress their unionized unicorns. And then, finally — and probably most of all — there’s the unshakable conclusion that I landed on years ago. The thing that, until now, I’ve never really articulated. Which is that I always assumed that Pitchfork was a bad business. In fact, I always wondered whether it was a business at all.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Pitchfork doesn’t have revenue or that it is not legally incorporated or anything like that. I’m speaking more existentially — that I assumed Pitchfork was not a for profit enterprise. I first started reading Ryan Schreiber’s music reviews on Pitchforkmedia.com in early 1997, which was — depending on who you ask — before the term “blog” or “weblog” was popularized. Pitchfork ‘97 was just a “website.” A place where a guy — possibly two guys — wrote and uploaded music reviews. About a year after I stumbled onto Pitchfork, I reached out to Ryan to share the news about my own “website” — an online indie music store called “Insound.” Since it was 1998 and I knew almost nothing about nothing — including business and especially internet business — I declared that Insound was going to be more than just a store. That it would be a (wait for it) “community.” And, in pursuit of said community, we were going to have a section for music reviews from esteemed zines, magazines and — yes — websites. In pursuit of my grand mission, I asked Ryan if we could republish Pitchfork reviews on our website in our “zinestand.” And guess what? Ryan quickly, generously and casually agreed. And so, by early 1999, Pitchfork reviews were proudly (re)displayed alongside content from legendary print titles like “Hit It or Quit It,” “Punk Planet,” “Rollerderby” and “Magnet.”
Although I didn’t consider it at the time, that was probably my first sign that Pitchfork was not particularly interested in being a business — that they would give away their content for free. But, in fairness, that was also before Pitchfork was a business — when it was just a hobby, with no revenue in sight. In time, of course, Pitchfork grew and professionalized. More reviews. More writers. Actual editors. Better design. Eventually, some banner ads started floating around. And for the better part of a decade — long after the Insound “zinestand” was retired for the obvious reason that zine publishers figured out how to make their own websites — Pitchfork and Insound were close buds. They linked reviews to purchase at our store. We advertised on their site and paid them affiliate fees. We’d co-sponsor events. We’d share record release dates. They’d give us heads up on “Best New Music” reviews so that we had sufficient stock. And, conversely, we’d alert them to top sellers, so they could get a pulse on what they might be overlooking. It was exactly what you’d expect — a bunch of (mostly) twentysomething (mostly) dudes talking about music from Matador, Sub Pop, Merge, Touch and Go, Jade Tree, Discord, etcetera, etcetera. It was silly and it was hard work and a lot of fun and about as right as it was wrong.
But here is where it was most wrong. Pitchfork was structurally — economically — flawed. Even when Pitchfork started selling ads. Even when they started selling lots of ads. Even when they started selling lots of ads to giant corporations. Even then, I knew it was not a viable business. For one thing, I knew that Insound was desperately trying to be a viable business. We were a plainly commercial enterprise — just not a very good one. We struggled to eke out a profit. We never could get our customer service or inventory management in shape. Our margins were razor thin. We tried everything — selling ads, selling subscriptions, selling posters, t-shirts, turntables — and we still couldn’t get over the hump.
By comparison, Pitchfork had one revenue stream (ad sales) and kinda, sorta part of a second one (event sponsorships). And from my back seat view, they appeared only half-heartedly interested in either. Which is not to say that they didn’t earnestly sell ads and sponsorships, or that they did not employ talented, hard working salespeople. But rather that they were so much more obsessed with their writing than their profitability. Pitchfork did not sell their “products” with the vigor or acumen of The Fader or Vice, much less G.Q., much less Yahoo! Nevertheless, they were able to sell boatloads of impressions. As it turned out though — and as I intuited even then — the risk to their business was not a lack of ad sales — it was the market value of those ads and the cost to serve them.
Back then, internet ad impressions were multiplying at a breathless pace. Supply began to outpace demand and web denizens began to ignore all of those 468 x 68 pixel banners. For a while, when brands were moving their budgets from print to online, the commoditization of banner ads was not considered to be a problem. When all arrows were pointing up, why worry? But inevitably, when Google and Facebook realized that they could offer a better, more targeted, less expensive product, the party was over. The perceived value of impressions regressed while the expectations for performance grew. This made it hard for Pitchfork — or really any ad-based web business not named Google of Facebook — to flourish. Unless, that is, they could really keep costs down. Way down. Which was something that Pitchfork could absolutely handle.
The dirty secret about the music business — which is not really a secret anymore — is that it has relied on the inordinate good will and cheap labor of young people. Unpaid, unofficial music internships were the norm throughout the industry for decades. They were pervasive throughout major labels, indie labels, management companies and magazines. I say this as both a former, serial, unpaid intern and as the “employer” of many unpaid (or unfairly paid) interns. In select cases, internships might lead to entry level positions which were also poorly compensated. Throughout the music industry, org charts look like misshapen pyramids, with a handful of (often extravagantly) well compensated executives up top and reams of quasi-exploited youngsters at the bottom. Below the bottom, at the foundation, are the interns. All companies depend on compensation pyramids. But few industries have leveraged the good will and boundless passion as the music industry.
Now, I have zero first hand knowledge of Pitchfork’s financial statements. Also, I am not casting aspersions — when it comes to crappy internships, I’ve got dirt all over my hands. But I can reasonably posit that — until very recently — Pitchfork did not pay its employees, freelancers — and certainly not their interns — their fair market value. I bet, like the rest of us, that cheap and free labor was essential to the survival of Pitchfork. Which would have made Pitchfork a lot like a lot of other music businesses — even the well intentioned Indie ones — in that it survived because people loved music so much they would financially suffer to work in its proximity.
Fortunately, that cheap labor scheme could not last forever. As they aged and developed, Pitchfork writers became more valuable. Which begat higher costs. Which coincided with the flattening of impression growth and the commoditization of impression value. Which is why, in 2015, it made perfect sense to me that the company was sold to Condé Nast. The buyer needed fresh blood and more impressions. The seller needed a bigger bank account. I say this both dispassionately — as somebody who also sold his small, independent minded music website to a large corporation in 2007. And very empathetically — as somebody who spent the first decade of his working a hundred hours per week without much to show for it and who needed something in the math to change if he was ever going to take a day off or start a family or (lo and behold) pay people what they actually deserved.
But here’s the thing: once you sell your company, you give up control of it. I know this sounds obvious, and yet — in so many mergers and acquisitions — the seller loses sight of this fact. Most mergers and acquisitions are unsuccessful. The acquirer gets some short term value — a little revenue, a bunch of talent — and then everything goes south. That’s absolutely what I expected in 2015, when Pitchfork’s sale was announced. Amazingly, though, in the years after the purchase, Pitchfork seemed to be the exception to the rule. The staff became more diverse. The writing got better. New products and features were added. For a little while, Pitchfork was a bright beacon in an otherwise dulling media conglomerate.
And then, in 2019, Pitchfork staffers unionized. On social media, and among the rank in file, it was thrilling — a moment of progress and celebration. Publicly and earnestly I cheered along. But privately I knew that it was probably a death knell. Pitchfork’s new distinction meant more cost and less control in an already tenuous business in an already decimated media environment. Pitchfork had survived on the basis of many smart and creative people making decisions that were not economically motivated — or at least not profit motivated. This was likely both spoken and deeply unspoken, ingrained into its system and origin. But unionizing — the move towards fairness and equity — was speaking turth to power. And that truth undeniably changed the equation. Profits are brutally hard to attain, much less grow. Costs, on the other hand, are easy to manage. Once Pitchfork’s costs became harder to manager, the decision was no doubt an easy one — move them someplace more manageable.
If the fate of Pitchfork is inevitably what I suspect it will be — a mismanaged shell of its former self, struggling to attract and maintain talent — it will not simply be the fault of Condé Nast. It will be because the model was broken from the outset. Commoditized product with compressed margins on top of underpaid labor. That is not a business. Or at least not a viable for profit business model. But, what is it then? What is Pitchfork? If I don’t believe that it was ever really designed to be a business — that no matter how professional or popular it would never be able to sustain itself financially — what do I believe?
From the very start and up to present day, Pitchfork has been a service. It has been an unintentionally not for profit service. But it has been a tremendous service. A necessary one. In fact, Pitchfork has provided many critical services over the years,.
Consumer Guider. When Robert Christgau invented the form in the early Seventies, he earnestly intended to write music reviews about every commercially available album. Aside from Christgau, however, no one else has ever dared to imagine a definitive marketplace guide. In retrospect, the premise sounds almost ludicrous. Publishing cycles were too slow. Supply was too great. Rolling Stone was too in the bag for men of a certain type and too disinterested in the alternatives. Spin struggled to make a business from those Alternatives. And fanzines lacked the resources. But Pitchfork, because they were daily and online only and focused (at least initially) on sub and semi-popular music and, also, not really a business, functioned as a consumer guide. Say what we want about their grading system, it absolutely and unabashedly correlated to sales. For as many people who have rolled their eyes at Pitchfork’s decimals, many more have appreciated the guidance.
Community Organizer. Whereas, before the internet, Indie music was just an idea — a set of vague principles and fragmented micro-organisms bound together in our imagination by fanzines, music venues, record stores and tiny labels, Pitchfork was the place where all of Indiedom could unite. In 1997, I had almost no idea what records were coming out from which Indie bands and who was touring where and what people like me were or were not listening to. Moreover, I had no idea if and how any of it was related. But, by 2004 I knew almost everything about all of those things. I was connected to all of these hubs of creative activity — thanks to Pitchfork.
Conversation Starter. While I would not say that Pitchfork was a trendsetter, they were absolutely a reflection of a certain zeitgeist — the “this is it” for impassioned, college educated music fans living on the coasts, Chicago, Minneapolis and Austin. In that way, most musical “have you heard this” discussions over the last two decades originated somewhere on Pitchfork. Top albums of the year. Top songs of the year. Permission to love (or hate) Lana Del Ray. These conversations start on Pitchfork, and though they might spread into social media or startup office kitchens, they end up on Pitchfork as well.
News Supplier. Twenty-five years ago, when Pitchfork was two years old and Insound was just born, nobody had any information about anything. Release dates. Tour dates. New label signings. Nothing. It was a time when most, but not all, people had email addresses. Faxes were still very much a thing. Modems were the norm. Zip drives could store one hundred megabytes of files (imagine that). And the expectation was that music news ran on monthly cycles — not daily or hourly. Music news was the domain of Kurt Loder and, to a lesser extent, Spin and Rolling Stone. A quarter century later, Pitchfork is a legitimate source of music news, breaking stories and premiering announcements.
Talent Developer. While many great writers arrived at Pitchfork already great, many more arrived as simply talented and impassioned but left as distinct voices. I’m pretty sure that Elizabeth Nelson, Jenn Pelly, Amanda Petrusich, Ian Cohen, Steven Hyden and Sean Fennessey would all have gone on to do great things without Pitchfork. I know for sure that Jessica Hopper, Douglas Wolk, Stephen Erlewine and many other writers were mostly finished products by the time Pitchfork engaged their services. But even still — in all of those cases and for the hundreds in between — Pitchfork provided an opportunity for (a) competent editing and (b) voluminous reader feedback. Pitchfork can claim more than a little responsibility for some of the finest music and arts writers working today.
Platform Provider. It was common around 2003 for people to talk about “The O.C. Effect” — the surging tailwind propelling bands who appeared on the soundtrack to the TV show, “The O.C.,” starring Adam Brody, Mischa Barton, Rachel Bilsson and that Benjamin guy who was actually the star of the show. But “The O.C. Effect” was really just “The Pitchfork Effect.” As the retailer on the receiving end of The Pitchfork Effect, I can confirm what happened after that Broken Social Scene review. After that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Review. After that Hold Steady review. The sales acceleration was unmistakable. Up until the mid-Nineties, the biggest Indie bands in the world might sell sixty to seventy thousand copies of an album. Within a decade, Modest Mouse, Death Cab, Spoon, The Arcade Fire and The National would lap those figures. No small part of this was on account of e-commerce — geography and inventory no longer mattered in a world where websites could take orders from anywhere. But, as much as e-commerce (and then digital distribution) were critical in the mainstreaming of Indie music, so was Pitchfork. Without Pitchfork, all those Indie stars who moved to L.A. would still be rooming together in Ditmas Park.
Because, once upon a time, they were designed like a media company and because they were acquired by a media company, Pitchfork has never been valued for the services they actually provide. Which begs the question: can they reinvent themselves now? Sadly, I think the answer to that question is “nope.” My pessimism has nothing to do with G.Q.’s leadership — who I assume to be competent and well intended. But it has everything to do with Condé Nast, who will not tolerate a union and who are not up to the task of first downsizing, then reorganizing and, finally, reinvigorating the niche brand they once coveted. Maybe in twenty years. But not anytime soon.
But even if they could — even if Condé Nast somehow pulled it off — could Pitchfork make the shift from ad-dependent to subscription-driven? I think the time for that transformation has passed. People don’t suddenly pay for the thing they’ve been getting for free for decades. Not without some massive added value. And, I cannot imagine how Condé Nast could provide sufficient value — new features, products or benefits — while also affording a talented, unionized staff. The math doesn’t work.
While I am not hopeful for the fate of Pitchfork, I am oddly bullish on the future of music writing. For one thing, there are legions of excellent music writers — some of whom cut their teeth at Pitchfork — now free to write about music elsewhere. Or, more likely, on their own — for books, podcasts, newsletters and startups that I cannot yet fathom. At the same time, interest in music has not waned. In America, we listen to more music than ever before — more than we watch TV or play video games or go to the movies. So, while the old magazines have disappeared (which means the old jobs have disappeared) and while the core object of music criticism (the album) teeters between relic and construct, we still have these basic forces at work: (1) there is still demand for music content, (2) there is still desire to write about music and (3) there is still a supply of talent. What’s missing is the model. I suspect that the model might not be called Pitchfork. But I also suspect that it will have a lot in common with services that Pitchfork has provided.
In her excellent NPR Music feature, entitled “With Pitchfork in peril, a word on the purpose of music journalism,” Ann Powers made an astute point about the “uselessness” of music criticism:
While the role of music writing as a form of discovery, promotion and gatekeeping is undeniable within popular music's history, I also want to push back against the well-intentioned attempts to assert its productive role within the entertainment biz. To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it's relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects. And as those Pitchfork scores both assert and satirize, many people enjoy the game of trying to quantify art, to judge it as performance or product.
What I love about music writing, though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else's creative work. To really listen. The best writing at Pitchfork or anywhere reflects that process and is as variegated as the human experience itself.
Her observations are as true and beautiful as they are ultimately (and knowingly) incorrect. In her next paragraph, Powers clarifies that what she is really talking about — the thing that music writing really provides — is what she calls “pleasure.” And while pleasure may not, technically speaking, be an essential product, that doesn’t mean it is not useful. Pleasure is extremely useful. Radically so. And more than it is useful, pleasure is valuable. Which means that it has value. Which means that, theoretically, it can be profitable, Which means that there’s hope for us yet.