Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.
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.)
They’re working on it.
How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
61–70 of 213 posts
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#62TBH, 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.
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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#63I 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
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then. As for Google: 'splain me why it wasn't just $150M down the drain? Minus the undisclosed amount: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat On March 6, 2018, Google sold the company to restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation for an undisclosed amount
> This was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then. What does this mean?
offal, I guess
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#65Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#66TBH, 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…
When Apple launched iTunes in 2001 it destroyed the value of music reviews. Buying physical albums used to be expensive, and sometimes you would kind of get cheated. You would hear a banging single on the radio and buy the whole album only to realize that the other tracks were just filler. So, a review by a good critic could save you from wasting money on a low-effort album.
With iTunes and similar services, users can buy individual tracks instead of a whole album and listen to previews before they buy. Why waste time reading a review if you can listen yourself and decide whether it's worth buying? And now with the broad availability streaming services like Spotify, written reviews are even less valuable; you pay the same regardless of what you listen to so there's no financial risk of trying new music.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#67I 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
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.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#68I 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
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.
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#69Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.
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…
I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t blame Condé Nast for this. But I’m sick of the New Yorker writers basically making shit up and pretending it’s true. Ragebaiting autofiction, but within the boundaries of acceptable Ivy League New York 23 year old discourse. Is that not ruined?
Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
#70I 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
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.