Pitchfork (website)

Previous Pitchfork logo

In 1996, Ryan Schreiber, a recent high school graduate, influenced by fanzine culture and with no previous writing experience, created the website.[8][9] Initially called Turntable, the site was updated monthly with interviews and reviews. In May 1996, the site began publishing daily and was renamed Pitchfork, alluding to Tony Montana's tattoo in Scarface.[10] Schreiber wrote the website's first review, of Pacer by The Amps.[11]

In early 1999, Schreiber relocated Pitchfork to Chicago, Illinois. By 2004, Schreiber brought on Kaskie as his partner in Pitchfork and they moved from sporadic updates and an unpredictable schedule to an expanded offering of four full-length album reviews daily, as well as interviews, features, and columns--designed to model a magazine for the internet age. The site also added a daily music news section by year's end through the work of its expanding staff and resources. By the end of 2004, Pitchfork had also begun garnering a following for its extensive coverage of underground music and its writing style, which was often unhindered by the conventions of journalism.

Pitchfork has launched a variety of subsidiary websites. Pitchfork.tv, a website displaying interviews, music videos and feature-length films, launched in April 2008.[12] In July 2010, Pitchfork announced Altered Zones, a blog aggregator devoted to underground and do it yourself music.[13] On May 21, 2011, Pitchfork announced a partnership with Kill Screen, in which Pitchfork would publish some of their articles.[14] Altered Zones was closed on November 30.[15] On December 26, 2012, Pitchfork launched Nothing Major, a website that covered visual arts such as fine art and photography.[16] Nothing Major closed in October 2013.[17] On October 13, 2015, Condé Nast announced that it had acquired Pitchfork.[3] A key aspect of its image, Pitchfork was previously entirely independent, with only two owners: Schreiber and Pitchfork president Chris Kaskie.[9][18] Following the sale, Schreiber remained as editor-in-chief while Kaskie stayed on as president/publisher.[19]

On March 13, 2016, Pitchfork was redesigned. According to an announcement post during the redesign, they said:[20]

We last redesigned in the fall of 2011. A lot about the online world has changed since then. This iteration, more than a year in the making, brings Pitchfork into a new era, improving functionality and inviting deeper exploration while simplifying the experience to make browsing, searching, reading, listening, and watching easier.

In July 2017, Pitchfork's co-owner and president Chris Kaskie, who also co-created the Chicago and Paris editions of its festival, stepped down. Not too long after Kaskie's departure, Pitchfork's longtime executive editor Mark Richardson stepped down. He began writing for the site in 1998[21] and was employed full-time in 2007.[22] On September 18, 2018, founder Ryan Schreiber stepped down as the site's top editor. He was replaced by Puja Patel as editor-in-chief on October 15, 2018.[23] On January 8, 2019, Schreiber announced he would be exiting the company.[4] In January 2019, Condé Nast announced it would put all its titles, including Pitchfork, behind a paywall by the end of the year, though this did not occur.[24]

In the 2000s the website's journalism favored independent music, favoring lo-fi and often obscure indie rock and giving only cursory treatment to other genres.[31] The website had a reputation for publishing reviews early and for being unpredictable, often strongly dependent on which reviewer was writing. In a 2006 article in Slate, Matthew Shaer accused Pitchfork of deliberately writing provocative and contrarian reviews in order to attract attention.[32] Cynicism and elitism have been points of critique.[12]

The website was sometimes criticized in those years for the quality of its writing. A 2006 article in City Pages noted the large discretion the site gave to its writers, arguing it was "under-edited" and that the prose was often "overly florid".[31] Shaer singled out some examples of "verbose and unreadable writing".[32] In response, Schreiber told City Pages that "I trust the writers to their opinions and to their own style and presentation. The most important thing to me is they know what they're talking about and are insightful."[31]

A 2007 review of the album Kala by M.I.A. inaccurately said that Diplo had produced the tracks, when he had produced 3 out of 11 tracks and M.I.A. had produced the rest. Another Pitchfork writer described the error as "perpetuating the male-led ingenue myth".[33] M.I.A. and later Björk argued that this was part of a wider problem of music journalists making the assumption that female singers do not write or produce their own music.[34][35]

• When Pitchfork asked comedian David Cross to compile a list of his favorite albums, he instead provided them with a list of "Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews". In it, he satirically piled over-the-top praise on fictional indie rock records, mocking Pitchfork's reviewing style.[37]
• In 2004, comedy website Something Awful created a parody of Pitchfork's front page. Entitled "RichDork Media", the page makes reference to nonexistent, obscure-sounding indie-rock bands in its reviews, news headlines and advertisements. The rating system measures music on its proximity to the band Radiohead.[38] A similar, more light-hearted parody was created by Sub Pop, a record label whose musical artists Pitchfork has reviewed (often favorably).[39]
• On September 10, 2007, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a story in which founder Ryan Schreiber reviews music as a whole, giving it a 6.8.[40]
• In 2010, writer David Shapiro started a Tumblr called "Pitchfork Reviews Reviews", which reviews Pitchfork reviews.[41]
• In 2013, the IFC sketch comedy television series Portlandia satirized the publication in a sketch in which a collective of children run a website entitled "Pitchfork Kids!" and give a highly favorable review to an album by the fictional children's music band Defiance of Anthropomorphic Sea Mammals.[42]
• In 2016, in the RiffTrax comedy commentary for the film Icebreaker, Mike Nelson quipped about the ticking of a Geiger counter, "This Geiger counter released an album of just this; Pitchfork gave it an 8.3."[43]

Logo of The Pitchfork Review

In December 2013, Pitchfork debuted The Pitchfork Review, a quarterly print journal focused on long-form music writing and design-focused content.[44] J. C. Gabel, its first editor, had been the publisher of The Chicagoan and founding publisher of Stop Smiling.[45] Pitchfork planned a limited-edition quarterly publication of about 10,000 copies of each issue, perfect bound, and printed on glossy, high-quality 8-by-10¼ paper.[46] It was expected that about two-thirds of the content would be original, with the remaining one-third reused from the Pitchfork website.[46] The International Business Times likened the publication's literary aspirations to The New Yorker and The Paris Review.[47] It ended after 11 issues[48] in November 2016.[49]

Pitchfork's music reviews use two different rating systems:

• Individual track reviews were formerly ranked from 1 to 5 stars, but on January 15, 2007, the site introduced a new system called "Forkcast". In it, instead of assigning tracks a particular rating, reviewers simply label them one of the following categories: "New Music", "Old Music", "Video", "Advanced Music", "Rising", "WTF", "On Repeat" (the category of their most favorably regarded songs), and "Delete" (for the least favored songs). As of 2009, the site had officially removed this system, opting to instead simply review tracks, while giving some a label of "Best New Track".
• Album reviews are given a rating from 0 to 10, specific to one decimal place.

On October 24, 2003, Pitchformula.com[51] made a survey of the 5,575 reviews available on Pitchfork at that time, showing that:

• 6.7 was the average rating
• 2,339 reviews had been awarded a rating of 7.4 or higher
• 2,362 reviews had been awarded a rating of between 5.0 and 7.3
• 873 reviews had been awarded a rating of less than 5.0[30]

British Sea Power's 2008 album Do You Like Rock Music? was initially awarded a tongue-in-cheek rating of "U.2", however the page now gives a rating of 8.2, seemingly at odds with the critical review.[52] Their rating of Run the Jewels' remix album Meow the Jewels (2015) was a pictogram of a cat's head with hearts for eyes – highlighting the pictogram and right-clicking on it reveals that the actual score is 7.0.[53] Their review of Pope Francis' album Wake Up! featured the rating "3:16", though using the same method of revealing Meow the Jewels' actual score reveals the score to be 5.0.[54] Rather than give a traditional review to Jet's Shine On, the site simply posted an embedded video of a monkey urinating into its own mouth and a 0.[55]

• The Pitchfork 500

• Official website