Pitchfork wrote the book on having an opinion. The site’s absorption into the mainstream lifestyle title GQ says more about Condé Nast’s focus on the bottom line than it does about finding a sustainable future for passionate publishing with a point of view.
Magazine megalith Condé Nast is on a mission to become sustainable.
Big boss Roger Lynch has been pushing change in the group for some time now, and he’s had some success, not least shifting the business back into the black over just five years. His vision for a sustainable future rests on a number of pillars that are hard to argue with:
- Controlling the ad sales process
- Leaning into digital culture
- Valuing intellectual property
- Incorporating diverse talent
- Focussing on the consumer
That last bullet – consumer focus – is especially important. So why is the company folding its iconic music-review website Pitchfork into men’s lifestyle magazine GQ?
The announcement brought howls of protest from music fans, many viewing the merger as the first nail in Pitchfork’s coffin. Others saw the move inside a men’s title as further proof that, when it comes to music, women don’t matter.
However good GQ’s features are, there is no question that bundling Pitchfork’s acerbic music criticism with online quick hits on style, grooming and wellness will dilute its customer focus. And letting go of editor-in-chief Puja Patel unticks a number of diverse talent boxes.
Still, money talks, and it’s clear that over the almost 10 years since Condé acquired Pitchfork, its commercial voice has grown quieter. Inconsistencies in Condé Nast’s sustainable publishing strategy aside, when there aren’t enough paying customers, consumer focus takes a back seat.
“This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” said Anna Wintour, Chief Content Officer at Condé Nast.
Failure to thrive
Why Pitchfork failed to thrive as a music-review website within Condé Nast interests me way more than any blow-by-blow account of how it all went down.
If you’re not familiar with Pitchfork’s bona fides, have a read of the first section of Casey Newton’s excellent analysis of How platforms killed Pitchfork. Young Casey read its output religiously. He relied on it to place new music in the context of a band’s previous output, the genre in which they operated and “possibly the entire history of recorded music”.
Interestingly, in the following three sections of his newsletter, Casey turns his analysis away from Pitchfork and on to the platforms that he says killed it.
The triopoly has a walk-on part in his pre-emptive Pitchfork whodunnit, just like they do in every story of digital ad revenue decline. But the lead role, for me at least, goes to the streamers, Spotify in particular.
Casey makes the point that since Apple introduced single-song purchases with the iTunes Store in 2003, Pitchfork’s iconic album reviews began to lose relevance. Music fans who had relied on review sites like Pitchfork to mitigate the not-insignificant financial risk of album buying, could suddenly buy a track at a time… cutting their exposure to pennies rather than pounds.
Fast forward 20 years and caveat emptor is an irrelevance for music fans on Spotify; their only investment in new music is time. Throw in a best-of-breed recommendation algorithm and Pitchfork’s looming demise seems almost inevitable.
“Spotify clearly understands how old I am, what music I listened to in high school, what genres I love the most, and what gaps exist in my musical knowledge. Each week it works gently but relentlessly to fill those gaps,” writes Casey.
Falling in love again
It’s really easy to be pessimistic about what happened to Pitchfork. Platform reach, clever algorithms and – sooner rather than later – cleverer AI will kill more great publishing brands.
However, there’s a but…
In the final section of Casey’s Pitchfork analysis he says that while Spotify is his dream product, he can’t remember the last time it surfaced something he never expected he would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with. He says: “For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.”
It’s mind-boggling to consider the scale of the change in how we’ve come to consume content over the last 10 years. And it’s truly terrifying to think what the publishing landscape might look like in another 10 years. There’s no doubt we will see lots and lots of mainstream mediocrity created by AI positioned to keep the algorithms happy.
Writing about Pitchfork in the Guardian, Quietus co-founder John Doran pointed out that if you were to listen to all of the 3.6 million new songs uploaded to streaming services every month you would need to have started listening in 1997 to catch up.
“Everyone needs help sorting through the insanity-inducing avalanche of new music,” he says. “And that’s where I’m optimistic – people need help sorting through the insanity inducing avalanche of everything.”
I find it relatively easy to imagine a thriving ecosystem of much-loved, well-respected expert publications – like Pitchfork was – that aren’t chasing scale, but that are commercially right-sized for their niche. They monetise directly from their audience and attract advertising from brands that want to be seen as part of the community they sell to rather than just more producers of programmatic pap.
Pitchfork failed in a corporate context. John says, “This narrow-shouldered, bottom-line-obsessed attitude towards music is the mirror of what is unfolding at Condé Nast: saving a few bucks today, regardless of the financial catastrophe it will undoubtedly cause further down the line.”
I know it’s not easy to make money as an independent. But amidst the looming ‘tsunami of crap’ and even ‘dream’ products like Spotify there will always be space for expertise, opinion and humour.
Whatever the beancounters think, independent publishing is actually more attractive than ever.
