from Hacker News

How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

by writeslowly on 2/5/24, 12:54 PM with 201 comments

  • by neonate on 2/6/24, 10:31 PM

  • by omar_alt on 2/5/24, 5:23 PM

    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.

  • by AlbertCory on 2/6/24, 11:09 PM

    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.

  • by xref on 2/7/24, 9:11 AM

    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 passion for it bleeds through in every article, Andrew Cunningham’s insane macOS reviews that he took over from John Siracusa. I could go on but would basically be copy-pasting from their staff directory…

    https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/

    If Condé Nast eventually kills the site so be it, but its been 16y since their acquisition and still a daily read for me.

  • by StopTheTechies on 2/7/24, 12:14 AM

    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.

  • by tptacek on 2/7/24, 4:48 AM

    Pitchfork was gone long before Conde. Back in 2011, they panned Childish Gambino's 4th release††, giving it a 16%†. Here's what Donald Glover had to say, 2 years before the Conde acquisition:

    If I worked for Pitchfork, I wouldn't give myself a 9.0 either. They're a brand, they sell tickets to a show they put on every year. They're not going to give a 1.6 to someone who can be at their show and sell tickets. They're not the same publication that I grew up with anyway. It's changed, and that happens. Any good idea starts with a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. And I'm not calling Pitchfork a racket, but they're a business.

    † I'm not dignifying 0.0-10

    †† I had called this his 4th album but this was his first LP

  • by phendrenad2 on 2/5/24, 4:28 PM

    This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?

  • by anthomtb on 2/7/24, 2:12 AM

    I 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

  • by ryanisnan on 2/7/24, 3:22 AM

    Did anyone but Spotify really kill Pitchfork?

    Pitchfork really served a purpose before streaming services got good at recommending new music.

    Once they got "good enough", the friction of visiting Pitchfork just became high enough for me to stop visiting.

  • by anonacnt on 2/7/24, 4:20 AM

    Was this not always the plan? Conde Nast is in the business of corporate influence across its portfolio. Indie music and Pitchfork placed all genres and labels on a roughly equal footing. Killing indie music and bringing back label music required that Pitchfork dissolves away.

  • by CodeWriter23 on 2/5/24, 7:42 PM

    Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.

  • by kderbyma on 2/5/24, 5:31 PM

    bad leadership strategy. Plain and simple. They like many once powerhouse IP controlling firms have failed to realise the very thing that gave those IPs any value in the first place..... individual identity that was not centralized by some corporate quarterly objectives.....

  • by anyfactor on 2/7/24, 7:00 AM

    I have been reading the Wikipedia articles on media and publication conglomerate M&A (mergers and acquisitions) for a while now. Media M&A is never foolproof, and my thesis is that M&As take into account the probability of failure, which represents the majority of the deals.

    The survival of most startup media/publication companies is focused on one thing: demographics. Millennials in their 20s are different from millennials in their 30s, or Gen Z in their 20s. Considering this limited shelf value, it often results in them shutting down or being acquired. The companies that do acquire them have gone through this same cycle of failures and know that there is a high likelihood that the userbase will age out and the acquired company will eventually fall. This is so frequent, I bet they even financial engineer deals that may lead to some kind of benefit upon failure.

  • by oregano on 2/7/24, 3:39 PM

    From roughly 2006-2012 this site greatly influenced my taste. I visited the site multiple times a day and read pretty much everything they published. I used to always check the site at 11pm when they reliably published a new set of 5 album reviews.

    At some point banner ads for big liquor companies started to show up. Then coverage for mainstream music became more frequent. This was a clear signal that they had sold out and their reputation was shot. I view them now as the new incarnation of Rolling Stone magazine. Still feel for the writers who got fired in this latest reorg.

  • by streamfunk191 on 2/7/24, 3:34 AM

    Some will say this is a casualty of the overall shift in how music tastes are made and spread, I disagree, Pitchfork always had an eclectic mix of music it reviewed. I didn’t like a lot of it, hated a chunk of it but loved some of it and it felt like you could discover incredible music that wouldn’t break through without pitchforks platform, alongside mainstream pop that was actually sonically worthwhile.

    I’ll miss this site. If anyone has any YT channels or other similar music sites, I’d love some recommendations

  • by throwawaaarrgh on 2/7/24, 3:09 AM

    Actually sounds like a good thing to me. Any organization that styles itself an industry taste maker is simultaneously repressing the organic creation of culture by the disorganized masses.

    Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you you do. Simultaneously, if that's your only outlet for finding culture, you'll miss all the rest.

    It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly.

  • by wombat-man on 2/6/24, 11:22 PM

    A shame they couldn't just run without a partner. Any recommendations for music news and reviews?

  • by yarg on 2/7/24, 6:15 AM

    Before their Conde Nast acquisitions, I used to visit both Ars Technica and Reddit reasonably often, both were sites were eventually stripped of their personality to the point where I no longer bother with either.

  • by jsz0 on 2/6/24, 11:01 PM

    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 to shift more and more of their focus towards hip hop and other genres that their traditional indie/rock readership didn't care as much about.

  • by whoomp12341 on 2/7/24, 1:49 AM

    hey, kinda like reddit. Sensing a pattern here

  • by nemo44x on 2/6/24, 11:05 PM

    > But she also faced pressure to cut costs as traffic from social media platforms declined and Spotify’s algorithms siphoned off more casual fans who’d used Pitchfork for music discovery.

    This is pretty much it. There’s no need for arbitrary tastemakers now. What’s good can emerge from what similar listeners happen to like right now. It takes even less effort for users as well and probably gives better results.

  • by bborud on 2/7/24, 10:23 AM

    Given that a lot of editors and writers are being let go; wouldn't this be a great opportunity for them to start a new publication?

  • by Animats on 2/7/24, 12:14 AM

    "Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention.”

    It does?

    New Music Express still seems to be doing OK.

    [1] https://www.nme.com/

  • by throwaway2037 on 2/7/24, 1:42 AM

    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".

  • by imwillofficial on 2/7/24, 1:02 AM

    Add arstechnica to that list

  • by l33tbro on 2/7/24, 4:32 AM

    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-correction began, with the publication championing what they felt was the 'right' kinds of music to promote.

    It never caught on. The old audience moved on, and the younger audience were left scratching their heads as to why they should like artists being lauded by the reviewers as being of high cultural significance.

    [1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-....