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How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#171

Post by AlexandrB »

imbnwa wrote: post #163
xref wrote: post #142

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…

When did Peter Bright leave?

In 2019, after some pretty shocking charges: https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/ex-conde-nast-tech-reporter-pe...

All his old articles had their byline removed.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#172

Post by AlexandrB »

l33tbro wrote: post #98

Pitchfork died because it developed a problem with music itself. Prior to 2014, the site thrived because it took music at face value, and ranked new releases based upon what artists were contributing to the overall canon of progressive independent pop music. Everything changed in 2015. There was a drastic editorial shift, where the publication became repulsed by its own "unbearable whiteness" [1]. A kind of over-corr…

I was an avid pitchfork reader in the 2000s, but by 2015 I hadn't used the site in years. I didn't even know this had happened. The last thing I remember on pitchfork was their crappy redesign in 2009.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#173

Post by AlexandrB »

jsz0 wrote: post #10

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…

> 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].

[1] https://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/richdork/

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#174

Post by demondemidi »

AlbertCory wrote: post #78
demondemidi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then. What does this mean?

Wasn't clear, sorry. In the evolution of popular tastes, being a foodie was not limited to a rarified minority who liked artisanal food. In other words, dining out and reading about it had become a mainstream activity.

Ah thanks. I agree. And I think this led to the subsequent devaluation of the term “artisanal” due to its wild overuse. I don’t remember seeing “artisanal” TV dinners when I was a bachelor in the 1990s!

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#175

Post by ghaff »

demondemidi wrote: post #174
AlbertCory wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't clear, sorry. In the evolution of popular tastes, being a foodie was not limited to a rarified minority who liked artisanal food. In other words, dining out and reading about it had become a mainstream activity.

Ah thanks. I agree. And I think this led to the subsequent devaluation of the term “artisanal” due to its wild overuse. I don’t remember seeing “artisanal” TV dinners when I was a bachelor in the 1990s!

I always have to laugh when there's a cheese plate at some midrange business hotel that describes it as artisinal.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#176

Post by tiptup300 »

nottorp wrote: post #145
xref wrote: post #142

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…

Well there are signs. There have been less in depth articles in the past years. And they have started pulling in the occasional Wired article, most of the time digital security fearmongering with zero to negative value. They're clearly marked as Wired on the front page now, I think because people complained, but I'm guessing Conde Nast is forcing them to keep pulling them, which is worrying. I'm still paying for a su…

Do you have any opinions on the retro game value pumping scheme that ars had a few articles involved in it. I've only seen half sided pieces from them on those sorts of articles, I mentioned in the article having been made aware from a Karl Jobst video but they just tore me to shreds about the Karl getting canceled/nazi stuff. Like sure, he may or may not be whatever, but the information he put together was pretty convincing and didn't have anything to do with that.

Honestly I've felt Ars' community has been almost completely useless since the last update to the comments system. They removed the ability to tag comments with "Interesting" "Knowledgeable" "funny" whatever, I would just cut through the dunking on elon posts and get to the meat with top most knowledgeable.

Not to say that isn't a fun time to dunk on elon.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#177

Post by secretsatan »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #42
StopTheTechies wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

This was my view of it, I constantly found the reviewers irritating and I rarely paid much attention to the scores, it was just a good source to check out new, interesting music that wouldn't get any exposure anywhere else

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#178

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ckozlowski wrote: post #68
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think so. Like OP, I would browse Pitchfork's reviews every so often, and often come away with things I never considered. That's the difference between looking at music reviews and following the algorithm. The latter points you to things that sound like what you're listening to, but the former opens your eyes to radically different sounds, or interpreting them in ways you hadn't considered.

Fair enough. I think it's two different search methods - it seems you're looking for breadth of musical experience while I'm looking for depth. I want to find that indie band with 3 followers, you want to see what's popular enough to be in Pitchfork but in a totally different genre.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#179

Post by mjmsmith »

AlbertCory wrote: post #81
mjmsmith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vindigo with Zagat was peak mobile internet. It's been downhill since 2002.

I'm not getting the connection. This says Zingy, not Zagat. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vindigo-inc

Early versions of Vindigo showed Zagat reviews in restaurant info, later versions used Gayot.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#180

Post by giraffe_lady »

Solvency wrote: post #92
Gimpei wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since day one, Pitchfork (all white nerds) used to love to throttle good music but they'd always give a pass to mainstream rap, praising even the most generic mass produced hip hop, like they always secretly wanted to fit in with that crowd.

This is because the production value and musical vision & execution of mainstream rap has been very high for a long time. Combined with the extremely low cost of entry (a microphone), most bad rap is solo indie production and most stuff that gets picked up by labels is high quality on the genre's terms¹.

This has recently become true of pop as well, which is one of the defining qualities of the "poptimism" era. It's not that all the music critics simultaneously sold out and started giving undeservingly good reviews to pop, it's that the baseline standard of musical quality in pop became very high.

¹: There has always been, and continues to be, a subsection of rap that also succeeds on musical terms inherited from outside of hip hop, especially from jazz. This is usually what people who are not extremely into hip hop mean when they talk about "good rap." But someone who doesn't appreciate the role of eg lil wayne & young thug is frankly not informed enough about the genre & its conventions to have a useful opinion about quality within it.

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