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How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#51

Post by tialaramex »

ethbr1 wrote: post #47
Cheer2171 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, a good review clearly explains why . If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully…

Sure, for example Roger Ebert's review of "Shallow Grave" complains that nobody he knows is anything like these characters. I'd watched and greatly enjoyed the movie by the time I read that review, but he's probably right. However all the people I lived with at the time were way too much like those characters.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#52

Post by Ghos3t »

whynotminot wrote: post #21
rsingel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling. It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998. The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago

And Ars is still great!

Press X for doubt

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#53

Post by resolutebat »

AlbertCory wrote: post #12

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.

The Zagat acquisition was not driven by Marissa, but another exec at Google Travel. When he was turfed out, that signaled the end for Zagat as well.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#54

Post by throwaway2037 »

I will be downvoted for this comment: This article is classic naval gazing. TL;DR: "Indie" music review magazine/website sells out to giant corporation (GC). Then "outraged" fan writes piece using their other/new indie news platform.

Rinse and repeat. We see this over and over again. How about the deeper question: Why did they sell out? Money and/or power.

> the most important music publication of its generation

What does this even mean? Is AllMusic less influential or important? This whole article reads like a bitter fanboi's sayonara to "the better, olden days".

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#56

Post by mc32 »

dv_dt wrote: post #48
omar_alt wrote: post #3

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.

So the business model missed the inequality of the commons problem. Seems like a widescale problem.

But this was vetted by the editor of The New Yorker...

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#58

Post by ledauphin »

whynotminot wrote: post #21
rsingel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling. It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998. The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago

And Ars is still great!

it really isn't. but to be fair, it got a lot worse many years after the acquisition (2008), so it's hard to be certain whose fault it was.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#59

Post by Cheer2171 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #47
Cheer2171 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, a good review clearly explains why . If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully…

I still think you might be missing the point of Pitchfork. Pitchfork is more about the cultural conversation around media than the content of that media. Take their 1.9 review of Tool's Lateralus [1], which was very positively reviewed at the time by most people who liked metal and prog rock, and has since become one of the most influential metal/prog albums. Most reviews of the album went something like: "If you don't like metal and prog rock, then you probably will hate this album, because it is a tour de force of these relatively unpopular genres. If you like metal and prog rock, then you probably will love it." Because that's pretty much all a reader needs to know.

Pitchfork's "review" does something completely different. It isn't really about Tool's music, it is about Tool's fans. The "review" is in two parts. The first part is some odd self-referential material that regular Pitchfork readers will recognize as signaling that a parody review is coming.

Then the second part is a parody review in the voice of a sixteen year old boy writing a class essay about his summer vacation for his high school English teacher. Except it isn't about his summer vacation, it is about how awesome this album released over the summer is compared to the pop and dance music that stupid girls listen to. It is intentionally parodying the most obnoxious teenage Tool fan you can think of, who thinks he is really smart and is a fan of music only intelligent people can appreciate, when in fact he is just attracted to an aesthetic at a surface level in the exact same way he criticizes of pop and dance music fans.

The review is so utterly positive about the album, but for reasons that have so little to do with the actual music. The positive review is positive for all the wrong reasons. It is not a commentary on the music, but on the fans of the music and the "I'm cool because I listen to something underground that most people would hate" attitude. It obsesses about the drummer's specialized technical equipment. It invents some ridiculous cosmic cycle that Really Good Music only comes once every 16 years, and we have been waiting for this album since Metallica released And Justice For All in 1987.

The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today.

[1] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#60

Post by dj_gitmo »

babyshake wrote: post #43
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.

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 the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.
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