The Death Of Music Journalism

As Pitchfork announces its closing, the world of music journalism suffers an existential crisis.

This past week, legendary online music mag Pitchfork announced that it would be closing its own masthead and would be folded into the men’s fashion magazine, GQ. The move comes as Pitchfork has struggled to meet economic projections and as GQ’s parent company Condé Nast has continued to navigate a very tricky media landscape.

Pitchfork began in 1996 as an online space for indie music reviews. The site, started by record store employee, Ryan Schrieber, quickly grew to become one of the major voices in music culture. Pitchfork came to be known for its sardonic review style, and its vaunted decimal system rating scale that could be ruthless.

Throughout the late 90s and the first few years of the oughts, Pitchfork became a leading voice of culture as it expanded its coverage beyond the scope of indie, and started covering hip hop and pop stars as well. Its heft in the small pool of indie music was massive. A good Pitchfork review could launch a new band or sink one before it even began. Over the last several years, Pitchfork has also hosted their own multi-day music fest attended by tens of thousands of fans each year.

As the algorithm and digital streaming have taken hold of the way we listen to music, Pitchfork has morphed as well. Schreiber sold Pitchfork to Condé Nast in 2015 and then continued working closely with the company until his exit in 2019. Five years later as Pitchfork ends its nearly two decade run as a leading voice in music, much of the music world is left wondering what’s next for independent music journalism.

The news is both good and bad.

The bad news is that music coverage on a large scale is almost non-existent now, at least when compared to previous eras. Relatively recently, we had weekly mags from Rolling Stone, NME, Melody Maker and monthly mags like Magnet, Spin, Alternative Press, and Amplifier. Most of these outlets have either scaled back significantly, shuttered completely, or have shifted their coverage away from music and have begun to focus on other parts of culture.

As guitar based music and indie-rock have become a less fashionable form of music making, coverage for artists has also gone back underground. I recently spoke with author and Substack writer S.W. Lauden for the pod. In our chat, Lauden mentions that rock needs to go back underground to get truly important again. I think he might be right. This is a moment like punk where the table must be reset both by musicians and the journalists who cover them.

I had not visited Pitchfork in years until I heard the news they were closing up shop. A quick visit to the site left me cold, frankly. I remembered instantly why I had stopped paying attention to their work, important as it may be.

First, the vast majority of the music being covered at Pitchfork is not that interesting to me. Second, it’s largely become a news aggregator and its reviews haven’t really matured much in the time that I have been away. There is still good writing, but it is tough to find and seems buried in a mountain of news-based updates designed to flood the reader with tons of info and very little context. The truth is it is not the same outlet that it once was, nor am I the same reader.

The world of music in which I travel has long stopped listening to Pitchfork, for better or worse. It’s a vessel for much younger, and much more fashion conscious kids than this ragged middle aged writer. Still, this is a loss. I think of old Pitchfork in the early aughts now the way I reminisce about early online forums for music nerds and the heady days of MySpace. It is a time that has largely passed, and it is a fool’s errand to attempt to summon it once more.

Still, this closure leaves a huge hole in the world of online music coverage. The choice of GQ as the landing spot for Pitchfork also feels very much like a death knell. It’s likely we will now see music treated as a fashion accessory and not the lifeblood of culture that it is. A new record will get two sentences and a thumbnail on a page opposite a new set of scarves for the fashionable dude. Gentleman’s Quarterly is also not a great moniker for a mag in this day and age even if you acronym that shit. Will their music coverage now skew solely toward their demo of males 24-40 with disposable income? The world does not need more bro-influence in the world of music.

We need to have outlets like Pitchfork thriving in our journalistic spaces, but we can survive and find new music without this one until a new one arises. These ebbs and flows of culture are constant and certain, but we still find them shocking. In a day and age when many cities with 100,000 residents no longer have a daily newspaper, it shouldn't come as a big surprise when a bougie independent music magazine has to be folded into a larger corporation.

The good news is that Substack has a thriving ecosystem of music journalism. You can find great writing from Kevin Alexander , S.W. Lauden , Penny Kiley ,Matt Berenson, Steve Goldberg, Brad Kyle , Michael Maupin , Ted Gioia and so many more. There are literally hundreds of very good writers covering music here on a daily basis, including yours truly.

While these much smaller voices on Substack and other independent blogs will not have the overarching cultural impact of a force like Pitchfork in its heyday, they can add up to an impressive collection of perspectives on the music being made today and the music that has filled our lives.

The are also still some very reliable sites that write about music and culture on a national level and still carry a fair amount of influence and heft with their coverage, including Stereogum and Consequence of Sound.

The closure of Pitchfork also speaks to the waning power of music at this moment, at least in the larger culture. Younger fans do not listen or engage with music the same way that earlier generations have. Their attentions are focused in new areas and they’re finding new pathways of cultural absorption. These are largely not young people reading about music in the way that they did even five or ten years ago. As music and our cultural relationship to it changes, so too does our music journalism.

There is still a bunch of great music and writing out there, but this feels like a nadir moment in the cultural spectrum. Music has less monetary value than at any time in history. Journalism is struggling deeply to find its economic footing in an ever-changing digital landscape. Our culture has also become much more siloed as our access to content increases, seemingly reducing the need for large scale coverage of culture. We are splintering , and the coverage of that further splintering culture is in the dearth of great writing about music on a national scale.

For now, outlets like Substack and independent blogs will need to become the bastion of music writing that matters. As the culture shifts, I hope we will see a return to larger outlets like Pitchfork or a model like Rolling Stone where great writing about music is the focus, and not an add-on. Until then, I will be here writing every day along with a slew of talented writers. Let us carry the torch for a bit, and we’ll make sure it stays alight.

Cheers,
Matty C

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