Media holding Conde Nast has decided to merge the authoritative music site Pitchfork with GQ magazine

The media holding Conde Nast decided to reorganize the influential resource Pitchfork, from which millions of music fans around the world obtained information about current music trends. What this says about the media and music industry Igor Gavrilov.

The authoritative site with a 30-year history will not be closed, but it will be optimized, namely, it will be merged with GQ magazine. Pitchfork staff learned about this from none other than the great and terrible Anna Wintour.

Conde Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue sent a letter to her music media staff saying, “This decision was made after a thorough evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and our projections for the brand.” The media manager believes that the merger with GQ will contribute to the prosperity of the music theme within the company. “Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable approaches to music journalism, and together we are excited about new opportunities,” Ms. Wintour wrote.

Conde Nast’s announcement was followed by a response from journalists’ union NewsGuild: “Conde Nast has provided no additional information about the future of the music publication, further demonstrating its disrespect for the workers who have contributed to the company’s success.”

Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber also responded to the news: “I am extremely saddened by the news that Conde Nast has decided to restructure Pitchfork and lay off the majority of its employees, including those who have been an integral part of its operations for many years and even decades.”

Ryan Schreiber founded Pitchfork (that is, “Tuning Fork”, if translated from English into Russian) in 1996, when he was only 16 years old. In the mid-1990s, he worked at a record store on the outskirts of Minneapolis and launched Pitchfork as a music blog consisting of reviews of new albums. The blog focused on alternative and independent music. Since the mid-2000s, after Ryan Schreiber began running the site with Chris Caskey, at least four reviews appeared on Pitchfork every day, as well as news, interviews, and opinion columns from critics.

In the 2000s, a single Pitchfork review could trigger a sales surge. Reviews of debut albums in Pitchfork became turning points in the careers of Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Interpol, and others. Excerpts from Pitchfork reviews were included in press releases, and printouts of them were posted by record store clerks.

The online resource has become a full-fledged competitor to glossy paper publications about music. Young bloggers, it turns out, can compete in authority with prestigious traditional media, just as video hosting sites can compete with music TV channels. All this inspired young musicians and infuriated the old ones. Readers of Rolling Stone and Q hardly knew even a tenth of the artists whose work was promoted by Pitchfork. The owners of the portal constantly experimented with formats, either creating an aggregator of underground blogs, or opening a site dedicated to visual arts, or launching their own music festival in Chicago and Paris. Many of the projects were closed, but the innovative spirit lived in the very essence of the brand.

The site has always been characterized by a snobbish, as they would say in its golden era, hipster view of music.

It was hard to imagine Pitchfork giving high ratings to several albums by mainstream artists or old rock stars in a row, although the resource had its favorites among them. Pitchfork’s main focus was on the rising stars of indie, lo-fi and new hip-hop. In this, Pitchfork has become a reference point for many music media around the world, including in Russia. Pitchfork’s signature approach to casting characters was fascinating. Pitchfork’s style, which opponents called wordy, florid and unreadable, did not prevent the site from remaining a barometer of independent music.

In 2015, Conde Nast, captivated by Pitchfork’s brash image, decided to buy the site. Formally, the era of its independence thus ended at that moment. By 2018, Pitchfork no longer had any of the founders or their associates. And in 2019, Conde Nast announced its intention to make Pitchfork pay for readers. This model is still not implemented.

Commentators have noted that Pitchfork’s reorganization may be part of a campaign to lay off 300 Conde Nast employees to cut costs. The general director of the publishing house, Roger Lynch, announced it last year. Anna Wintour promises to announce details of further reforms to Pitchfork by the end of the week.

Music lovers who daily follow the latest releases from Pitchfork express doubts on social networks that, under the control of the male glossy media, their favorite brand will be able to maintain its status as a trendsetter in music fashion, discovering new names.

It’s much more profitable to depict business exploits Taylor Swift and sell photos of Kanye West’s girlfriends. And the script for a film about a teenage record seller who began to dictate to the whole world what to listen to is most likely already being written.