Pitchfork’s homepage attracts far more visitors than those of GQ or Vogue, three people familiar with Condé’s traffic told me. As referrals from social media and Google decline, a loyal audience is more important than ever — but only if you’re smart enough to cultivate one. Anna Wintour, global chief content officer of Condé Nast, doesn’t care about music and doesn’t understand the internet, two former Pitchfork staffers told me. She didn’t even take her sunglasses off when she fired Pitchfork’s employees. I have seen some discussion about whether Pitchfork lost its focus under Condé. The site began writing about mainstream pop artists, the kind of undifferentiated commodity news you might find on any culture website.

But How to buy efinity coin the biggest impact that she would have on the decade that followed would be in her manifestation of a future in which being Extremely Online would be elevated to a way of life. Animal Collective had been on a steady upward trajectory since the release of their fifth album, Sung Tongs, in 2004. The band started as a deeply weird and experimental noise-folk outfit, but with each record their songs were getting catchier and more accessible, if still pretty odd in the grand scheme.

Influence

In that time, its voice moved from snarky to incisive (often both at once) and the scope of its coverage adapted to meet the current moment. Reznor sounded at times sheepish, as though he was worried he sounded like an old man yelling at a cloud. (Reznor is 57.) But in order to remember the changes that the music industry has been through in the last 30 years, you do actually need to be older than 30. As I have been writing about Pitchfork, I have been thinking about how we evaluate art. I enjoy a lot of criticism, even when I disagree with it — sometimes especially when I disagree with it, because I have to think about why.

The Print Edition

Where the visual album was not entirely new, Whack World was a rare, surprising  statement that felt complete despite and because of its purposeful brevity. As the accolades piled up, Balvin released Vibras, his third studio album. The narrative surrounding the Colombian star was understanding technical analysis that he was re-introducing reggaeton to the Anglo music industry, which had largely neglected the movement since the mid-2000s despite its massive popularity outside of the U.S. Latinx artists had long been overlooked by Pitchfork and this album’s appearance on the site was an early marker of just how much brilliant music it had been missing. By the humble standards of indie rock, Broken Social Scene— a Toronto collective with a fluctuating lineup of more than a dozen members that includes two trumpet players and a trombonist—has made it.

Trail of Dead had parlayed the notoriety of their instrument-trashing live show and the underground success of their 1999 Merge Records album Madonna into a deal with Interscope, still a fraught leap for a young rock band in the early 2000s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Pitchfork is being nibbled at by tiny MP3 blogs that are so below the radar that they can directly link readers to all the tracks they write about without worrying as much about music clearance issues. Though none of these diary-like blogs may ever have enough traffic to challenge Pitchfork, there may come a day when every niche audience has a blogger that speaks directly to it. “The only way we would be in trouble,” says Jason Dietz, music editor at Metacritic.com, “is if there’s so many people posting their opinions on the Web that people totally stopped caring about what professional critics have to say. Which may have already happened.”

Takeaways From Kendrick Lamar’s Surprise New Album GNX

One laid off writer, Matthew Ismael Ruiz, estimated that “half the staff” was laid off. Shortly after a glowing Pitchfork review came out in September, the Arcade Fire’s label, Merge Records, was hounded by nearly two dozen publications asking for copies of the album. Pitchfork didn’t fit with Lynch’s business focus, which made it ripe for his efforts at cost-cutting.

Even if Pitchfork’s exhaustive and in-depth reviews can be overwrought and hard to understand at times, the site’s genuine enthusiasm is infectious. It treats the unheralded Pittsburgh cut-and-paste artist Girl Talk as importantly as old-guard arena-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers. “The priorities of the mainstream media are to give the audience what they believe they want,” says Matthew Perpetua, who writes about indie rock at Fluxblog.org.

I was at pitchfork when kid a hit napster, i asked redacted to tell me in what way is it weird, like are their unorthodox time signatures? “I find myself in a place now where I don’t have a good place to discover new music,” Reznor said. I used to steal stuff from the torrent site, because I wanted to hear it … Now I often don’t know it even came out.” I don’t think he’s alone. Stereogum got bought out in 2007; Idolator in 2008; Spin packed in its print magazine in 2012; Vibe did the same in 2013.

“A Very Passionate Audience of Millennial Males”

David Hyman spent those years trying to build the Web sites Addicted to Noise and, later, SonicNet into one-stop destinations for music news, only to see them sold off to MTV Networks and shut down after the dotcom bubble burst. “I get the sense that a lot of their writers have never written before,” says Hyman, who’s now chief executive of the music-themed networking site Mog. It gives Condé Nast a stand-alone music publication with a strong editorial voice, said Fred Santarpia, the company’s chief digital officer, who led the acquisition. It brings “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster,” he said. Pitchfork didn’t reign for long; the changes in technology that brought it to prominence quickly undercut it.

1. So though April Fool’s 2002 didn’t come close to landing as a joke, it marked a kind of turning point for the Pitchfork review section.
2. Over the years, the comment section slowly gravitated towards social media, where both longtime readers and fans of artists celebrated or critiqued reviews.
3. Featuring contributions from Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart (who curated the set for now-defunct print publication “Arthur”), Vashti Bunyan, and more, the comp crystallized a post-Y2K, post-9/11 moment when rustic reigned supreme.
4. Something was happening in 2009, and everybody had a silly name for it.
5. I used to steal stuff from the torrent site, because I wanted to hear it … Now I often don’t know it even came out.” I don’t think he’s alone.
6. In hindsight, chillwave may have been the sound of early, idealistic internet culture staving off a panic attack just long enough to enjoy one last season in the sun.

Near the beginning of a global pandemic that had the world on lockdown, Fiona Apple released an album that sounded like a woman ready to break free. It was right there in the title, in the sound of her clattering around her house with her friends, dogs, and collaborators, in the occasional recording shagginess and slip-ups that made it to the final cut. Readers loading Pitchfork on April 1, 2002, found a note from the editor in a banner at atfx trading platform the top of the page.