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How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
- phendrenad2 3y agoThis is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
- gs17 3y agoThere's web-based readers that work in Chrome. After Google Reader died, I moved to Feedly which seems to still work alright.
- CountHackulus 3y agoThere's also TheOldReader which is the same UI as Google Reader and works great.
- njroute22 3y agoI use InoReader - excellent and works quite nicely (even the free version).
- sybercecurity 3y agoPartially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for personal care products("What I'm obsessed with this week!"). Would these magazines have survived without Conde Nast? I don't know. I know I stopped buying/reading/visiting websites of all of them soon after because I got bored seeing the same things regardless of the title. I guess the counterpoint would be any niche publication that is still doing well in today's publishing environment.
- rsingel 3y agoConde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling. It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998. The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago
- whynotminot 3y agoAnd Ars is still great!
- teh_infallible 3y agoArs used to have interesting articles about novel intersections between technology and the law. Now it’s like a Sharper Image catalogue.
- Ghos3t 3y agoPress X for doubt
- ledauphin 3y agoit really isn't. but to be fair, it got a lot worse many years after the acquisition (2008), so it's hard to be certain whose fault it was.
- dlivingston 3y agoI read Ars multiple times a week. It's not Pulitzer-winning stuff, but certainly more thoughtful than The Verge. Can someone help me understand why it's being panned as losing quality?
- rsingel 3y agoIt has monthly page view quotas for writers, which changes what gets covered. It laid off or lost most of its best tech policy writers, including Joe Mullin, Cyrus Farivar, David Kravets, and Timothy B Lee.
- 3y ago
- itsoktocry 3y agoExactly. We always tend to blame the purchaser, but why not the seller? If their business was good and they cared about the product, why sell? And if the business was bad, can't blame they buyer, either.
- Loughla 3y agoTo your second question: ethics, it turns out, aren't as powerful as a mountain of cash to ski down like Scrooge McDuck.
- omar_alt 3y agoAt the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.
- skeeter2020 3y agogreat TL;DR
- dv_dt 3y agoSo the business model missed the inequality of the commons problem. Seems like a widescale problem.
- mc32 3y agoBut this was vetted by the editor of The New Yorker...
- kderbyma 3y agobad leadership strategy. Plain and simple. They like many once powerhouse IP controlling firms have failed to realise the very thing that gave those IPs any value in the first place..... individual identity that was not centralized by some corporate quarterly objectives.....
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCondé Nast is where awesome goes to die.
- egberts1 3y agoEven Ars Technica is getting stale.
- Scoundreller 3y agoHrm, acquired in 2008. I thought it was earlier. For an alleged $25m per crunchvase, if they are to be trusted (probably not).
- CodeWriter23 3y agoProbably correct. The top contributors were some internet.nerds that were top notch on the tech side and rose on merit and the trust they built with their audience. Splitting $25m among the 5-7 of them probably seemed like winning the lottery.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoThey still have a couple of decent writers. But CN’s business model is buy publications with lots of eyeballs and increase the revenue per eyeball while decreasing the total number of eyeballs per publication but firm-wide across all properties eyeballs are on an upward trajectory. It’ll last as long as it does then there will be nothing but crap. Like SciFi turning into the wrestling channel at scale.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>But CN’s business model is buy publications with lots of eyeballs and increase the revenue per eyeball while decreasing the total number of eyeballs per publication but firm-wide across all properties eyeballs are on an upward trajectory According to Wikipedia, their last acquisition was Pitchfork in 2015. That's almost 10 years ago. Prior to that, the last popular property appears to be Ars in 2008 and reddit, in 2006. They don't actually seem to be buying many properties...
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.ph/XCRpa https://archive.ph/XCRpa http://web.archive.org/web/20240205170646/https://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchfork http://web.archive.org/web/20240205170646/https://www.semafo...
- jsz0 3y agoCondé Nast might have helped run it into the ground but the unrecoverable dive started a long time ago. Pitchfork's content slowly turned into something more like a parody of pretentious music criticism. Paragraph after paragraph of drivel with seemingly no relation to the music. More like someone's journal entry repurposed as an album review. Maybe because they realized how stale their content had become they seemed to shift more and more of their focus towards hip hop and other genres that their traditional indie/rock readership didn't care as much about.
- ecshafer 3y agoConde Nast acquisition is literally what made Pitchfork shift into Hip Hop and Pop music abandoning their indie rock roots.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> Paragraph after paragraph of drivel with seemingly no relation to the music. More like someone's journal entry repurposed as an album review. That was the best part! I found myself losing interest and moving onto cokemachineglow.com once they started doing more straightforward reviews. It's not for everyone, of course[1]. [1] https://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/richdork/ https://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/richdork/
- nemo44x 3y ago> But she also faced pressure to cut costs as traffic from social media platforms declined and Spotify’s algorithms siphoned off more casual fans who’d used Pitchfork for music discovery. This is pretty much it. There’s no need for arbitrary tastemakers now. What’s good can emerge from what similar listeners happen to like right now. It takes even less effort for users as well and probably gives better results.
- xbar 3y agoMy small-sample research into Spotify user satisfaction with new music discovery is that it is a mixed bag. I have not tried it, but the common Spotify dissatisfaction was enough for several of us to investigate novel new music discovery ideas. Nothing forthcoming.
- Spivak 3y agoSpotify's algo for discover weekly can be incredible but you have to give it a fuckton of data to work with. My liked songs is >8k I follow probably 1000 artists (the UI doesn't give me a count). It will surface bands with <20k listeners and songs with <1k plays out from nowhere tailored to exactly what makes the brain go burr. For small sample sizes Pandora is still king.
- mrguyorama 3y agoExcept Spotify's discover weekly is stupendously dumb and desperate. I've put 10 years of my music listening into Spotify and it still has no damn clue what I enjoy, and anytime I listen to a song more than a few times, Spotify spends the next 4 weeks trying to cram songs with the same "tags" down my throat. I had to spend three weeks clicking the "Don't like this" button on EVERY song in my discover weekly before the algorithm figured out "hey, maybe this guy from rural america doesn't actually like songs that are exclusively japanese meme songs" Like everything in ML, Spotify recommendation works great if you have average or unspecial tastes, because it's just regurgitating the average of your cohort back at you.
- class3shock 3y ago
- AlbertCory 3y agoThis reminds me of Google under Marissa Mayer buying Zagat. Remember them? Big company buys small company, dismembers it into little pieces controlled by managers who weren't fans of the acquisition and don't respect it -- it's an old story. The founder of the acquiree quits in frustration, etc. etc.
- gkanai 3y agoThe Zagats were paid $150M for their business. Whatever frustration they may have is cushioned by that payout.
- AlbertCory 3y agoThat's them. For Conde, wasted money. As with Google. As for Zagat, Tim told us he wanted a secure job for his people after he was gone. The jury is out on that one.
- ghaff 3y agoZagat was pretty small potatoes. It sorta made sense at a time when foodies was sort of an artisanal thing. Not sure Google even lost out on the buy.
- AlbertCory 3y agoThis was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then. As for Google: 'splain me why it wasn't just $150M down the drain? Minus the undisclosed amount: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat On March 6, 2018, Google sold the company to restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation for an undisclosed amount
- demondemidi 3y ago> This was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then. What does this mean?
- wombat-man 3y agoA shame they couldn't just run without a partner. Any recommendations for music news and reviews?
- milgrum 3y agoThe Wire is quite good if you’re willing to pay for it. It’s a print monthly first and foremost so the news isn’t up to the minute, but digital subscriptions are reasonable and the reviews are best in class imo
- lancesells 3y agoFor a lot of music I listen to I like The Quietus: https://thequietus.com https://thequietus.com I still go to Pitchfork a couple times a week to see what's new. Stereogum has a ton of posts and music to discover but they also lean too much into celebrity music and gossip. Also, they aren't nearly as critical on bad music.
- Animats 3y ago"Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention.” It does? New Music Express still seems to be doing OK. [1] https://www.nme.com/ https://www.nme.com/
- mellosouls 3y agoI think it's a bland corporate shadow of the lively print weekly of a generation ago.
- lmm 3y ago> "Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention.” > It does? It does. Music is, for most regular people during most of their regular lives, a 3- or 4-minute phenomenon that happens in the background while they're doing other things. To write about music (especially regular, popular music) at all is to invite people to slow down and pay attention, like writing about breathing, or about balance and proprioception.
- Fluorescence 3y agoWhen I read the music press in the 90s it was to get the latest news on tours, learn what was cool, chase the cool myself and read lurid accounts of whoever was injecting heroin in they eyeballs or whatever. It was to press the accelerator pedal of consumption and novelty instead of waiting for it to trickle through from other sources.
- StopTheTechies 3y agoTBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.
- Cheer2171 3y agoI disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music. If you're familiar with pro wrestling / kayfabe, then Pitchfork was the heel. They provide something for fans to root against. Look at how much sympathy artists get from their fans when Pitchfork published a bad review. If they didn't think an album was worth talking about, they ignored it. It is worse to be ignored by Pitchfork than it is to get a 0.0 review consisting entirely of a video of a monkey urinating into his own mouth (Jet's 2006 "Shine On"). Music criticism had been corrupted and corporatized and in the way video game reviewing still is. Everything from the big labels got an above-average but not perfect score, so nothing really stood out. You couldn't really be all that critical. Music reviews were boring. Pitchfork shook that up precisely because they printed controversial reviews. And as you just admitted, that was there from the start, so it is not a reason for the fall. You never knew what to expect out of Pitchfork, and that was why people followed it so closely. But nobody read Pitchfork the way HNers probably read Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. Neither reviewers or readers were trying to objectively identify the best music. The 0.0 to 10.0 rating is not intended to be a scalar vector or even quantitative; it is an opening to a conversation, expressed as a float.
- ethbr1 3y agoTo me, a good review clearly explains why. If Cheer2171 gives Casablanca a 2/5... okay? But if it gets a 2/5 and an explanation that you thought the cinematography was hacky and the drama overwrought... that's cool. I might like the cinematography and over-dramatic dialog! 110% agreed that too many reviews/critiques these days are milquetoast. Have an opinion that the reviwer is passionate about! And argue it fully and well! There is no "right" in "like."
- imwillofficial 3y agoAdd arstechnica to that list
- throwaway2037 3y agoI will be downvoted for this comment: This article is classic naval gazing. TL;DR: "Indie" music review magazine/website sells out to giant corporation (GC). Then "outraged" fan writes piece using their other/new indie news platform. Rinse and repeat. We see this over and over again. How about the deeper question: Why did they sell out? Money and/or power. > the most important music publication of its generation What does this even mean? Is AllMusic less influential or important? This whole article reads like a bitter fanboi's sayonara to "the better, olden days".
- whoomp12341 3y agohey, kinda like reddit. Sensing a pattern here
- anthomtb 3y agoI guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40. For over a decade now, anything Pitchfork rates 7.0 or above gets a listen from me, 6.0 or higher for preferred genres. This may not find the best music (whatever that is…) but it finds a lot of good stuff that I would never have known about otherwise z
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoDo we even need that anymore? I play games of "follow the recommendation algorithm" around my streaming service and I've been very successful in what I've found. Been able to surface a lot of artists I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Between that and Reddit's genre-specific offerings I'm golden.
- ckozlowski 3y agoI think so. Like OP, I would browse Pitchfork's reviews every so often, and often come away with things I never considered. That's the difference between looking at music reviews and following the algorithm. The latter points you to things that sound like what you're listening to, but the former opens your eyes to radically different sounds, or interpreting them in ways you hadn't considered.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoFair enough. I think it's two different search methods - it seems you're looking for breadth of musical experience while I'm looking for depth. I want to find that indie band with 3 followers, you want to see what's popular enough to be in Pitchfork but in a totally different genre.
- mrguyorama 3y agoI listened to the catalog of ONE (very good) parody band and Spotify spent the next four months presenting me only meme songs so yeah, those recommendation algorithms aren't very helpful IMO
- 3y ago
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoActually sounds like a good thing to me. Any organization that styles itself an industry taste maker is simultaneously repressing the organic creation of culture by the disorganized masses. Culture is best discovered by accident, and considered on its merits by the individual. When some critic tells you what's good and what isn't, you'll never know if you actually like it, or you just like it because someone told you you do. Simultaneously, if that's your only outlet for finding culture, you'll miss all the rest. It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly.
- lmm 3y ago> It's like with movies: you can watch whatever trends on Rotten Tomatoes, or you can watch a whole bunch of random stuff at a film festival. Guaranteed you will find something at the festival that will never trend on RT but that you'll enjoy thoroughly. Not my experience at all. Turns out critics are actually decent at judging stuff, and good movies really are better than bad ones.
- vonjuice 3y agobut sometimes bad movies are more interesting than good ones (good, not great)
- lmm 3y agoMeh. Occasionally you get a movie that failed in an interesting way, but most bad movies are just bad in the same handful of ways, and I lost interest in watching that fairly quickly. I know some people enjoy hate-watching as a social experience but I don't.
- vonjuice 3y agoTo be fair I also lost interested in "okay" movies. If I watch one it better be great or baffling.
- ryanisnan 3y agoDid anyone but Spotify really kill Pitchfork? Pitchfork really served a purpose before streaming services got good at recommending new music. Once they got "good enough", the friction of visiting Pitchfork just became high enough for me to stop visiting.
- Solvency 3y agoA very bizarre subset of the population enjoy reading reviews for some reason. Either to: tell them how to feel about something, to validate their own opinion because they lack social company in real life to do so, or because they enjoy it as a weird form of content in and of itself. But if you're just looking for new music, PF's old curated playlist on their site was obsolete the second Spotify started curating it's own genre playlists.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoA well-written critique can help you put into words how you feel about a subject.
- rospaya 3y agoAs if reviews are some obscure niche subject for weirdoes. Someone tell Letterboxd, Rolling Stone Magazine, Stereogum, IMDB.
- KingMob 3y agoI think it's the combination of the rise of accessible playlists AND P4k's review style. Many who read P4k just to find new bands, viewed the review style as an impediment, not a benefit, and left once there were better alternatives. Personally, I left after the whole Black Kids debacle, where they overhyped, and then trashed, a promising young band and destroyed their career.
- whoswho 3y ago[flagged]
- streamfunk191 3y agoSome will say this is a casualty of the overall shift in how music tastes are made and spread, I disagree, Pitchfork always had an eclectic mix of music it reviewed. I didn’t like a lot of it, hated a chunk of it but loved some of it and it felt like you could discover incredible music that wouldn’t break through without pitchforks platform, alongside mainstream pop that was actually sonically worthwhile. I’ll miss this site. If anyone has any YT channels or other similar music sites, I’d love some recommendations
- anonacnt 3y agoWas this not always the plan? Conde Nast is in the business of corporate influence across its portfolio. Indie music and Pitchfork placed all genres and labels on a roughly equal footing. Killing indie music and bringing back label music required that Pitchfork dissolves away.
- l33tbro 3y agoPitchfork died because it developed a problem with music itself. Prior to 2014, the site thrived because it took music at face value, and ranked new releases based upon what artists were contributing to the overall canon of progressive independent pop music. Everything changed in 2015. There was a drastic editorial shift, where the publication became repulsed by its own "unbearable whiteness" [1]. A kind of over-correction began, with the publication championing what they felt was the 'right' kinds of music to promote. It never caught on. The old audience moved on, and the younger audience were left scratching their heads as to why they should like artists being lauded by the reviewers as being of high cultural significance. [1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-of-indie/#:~:text=Whiteness%20is%20a%20mark%20of,the%20scene%20for%20too%20long https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-....
- oldtownroad 3y agoYou’re arguing that a younger audience would never care for what critics have to say, in which case, Pitchfork was doomed to die regardless of the choices they made: if you’re not bringing in a new audience, you’re dying, because of churn. Perhaps wokeness hastened the loss of the old audience but evolving to meet the changing tastes of your potential audience is important, otherwise, you’re setting a date for your death. That said, I don’t think it was a cynical attempt to ride a trend but rather evolution in response to the writers and editors evolving in their understanding of music and the world. After all, Pitchfork was always a representation of the tastes of the writers and editors. Of all the people you’d expect to be at the forefront of cultural evolution, writers about culture are up there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 3y agoThe writing in the Semafor article oddly made me not care one bit for Pitchfork's fate. Something about the talking up of it's importance was off-putting, or maybe there just isn't an interesting story there.
- 3y ago
- tptacek 3y agoPitchfork was gone long before Conde. Back in 2011, they panned Childish Gambino's 4th release††, giving it a 16%†. Here's what Donald Glover had to say, 2 years before the Conde acquisition: If I worked for Pitchfork, I wouldn't give myself a 9.0 either. They're a brand, they sell tickets to a show they put on every year. They're not going to give a 1.6 to someone who can be at their show and sell tickets. They're not the same publication that I grew up with anyway. It's changed, and that happens. Any good idea starts with a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. And I'm not calling Pitchfork a racket, but they're a business. † I'm not dignifying 0.0-10 †† I had called this his 4th album but this was his first LP
- boomboomsubban 3y agoA year or two I was browsing the Pitchfork "best songs of the 10's" and was rather confused that "This is America" wasn't on it. A long running feud explains it. But eh, they're allowed to have "bad" opinions. Every critic I've remotely followed has strongly disagreed with me at times.
- tptacek 3y agoIt's not that they didn't like Childish Gambino (I don't either), but rather that the idea that Pitchfork had long since sold its soul for access was already floating out there in the air years before the Conde buyout. On the other hand, "If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I’m guessing it’ll be Camp." is a sick burn.
- defrost 3y agoI circled back to the source, the italic stress on one "If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I’m guessing it’ll be Camp." really sticks the landing. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16074-camp/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16074-camp/ Meanwhile, antipodeanally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo never made it to Pitchfork just NME https://www.nme.com/en_au/reviews/album/king-stingray-album-review-yothu-yindi-3282059 https://www.nme.com/en_au/reviews/album/king-stingray-album-...
- yarg 3y agoBefore their Conde Nast acquisitions, I used to visit both Ars Technica and Reddit reasonably often, both were sites were eventually stripped of their personality to the point where I no longer bother with either.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah here in the Netherlands there was a similar community called Tweakers that's similarly been ruined by a takeover by a huge Belgian media company. It's so commercial now :(
- anyfactor 3y agoI have been reading the Wikipedia articles on media and publication conglomerate M&A (mergers and acquisitions) for a while now. Media M&A is never foolproof, and my thesis is that M&As take into account the probability of failure, which represents the majority of the deals. The survival of most startup media/publication companies is focused on one thing: demographics. Millennials in their 20s are different from millennials in their 30s, or Gen Z in their 20s. Considering this limited shelf value, it often results in them shutting down or being acquired. The companies that do acquire them have gone through this same cycle of failures and know that there is a high likelihood that the userbase will age out and the acquired company will eventually fall. This is so frequent, I bet they even financial engineer deals that may lead to some kind of benefit upon failure.
- xref 3y agoI see Ars Technica taking a lot of flak in the comments but lawdy, they’re still pretty great and one of the news sources I actually pay for (full-text rss feeds are a nice bonus). Just to pick a few of their writers who still kill it: Lee Hutchinson for anything sysadmin related, Eric Berger does the best space/rocket coverage on the entire internet, Jonathan Gitlin does a ton of in-depth automotive coverage and his passion for it bleeds through in every article, Andrew Cunningham’s insane macOS reviews that he took over from John Siracusa. I could go on but would basically be copy-pasting from their staff directory… https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ If Condé Nast eventually kills the site so be it, but its been 16y since their acquisition and still a daily read for me.
- nottorp 3y agoWell there are signs. There have been less in depth articles in the past years. And they have started pulling in the occasional Wired article, most of the time digital security fearmongering with zero to negative value. They're clearly marked as Wired on the front page now, I think because people complained, but I'm guessing Conde Nast is forcing them to keep pulling them, which is worrying. I'm still paying for a subscription though.
- ordinaryperson 3y agoThe terms of the Conde's acquisition state they are not allowed to interfere with the operation of the site. The depth of articles or the decision to pull in Wired content is strictly an editorial decision made by Ars editorial leadership.
- nottorp 3y agoGot a bridge to sell to you then. Or if you live at the north pole, a refrigerator?
- ordinaryperson 3y agoVery insightful piece of analysis. Why don’t you email the Ars editors your theory that they are corporate Condé stooges and see what they say? As I mentioned in a sibling comment it’s actually Advance that owns Ars, not Condé, and it’s a different leadership group.
- bborud 3y agoGiven that a lot of editors and writers are being let go; wouldn't this be a great opportunity for them to start a new publication?
- oregano 3y agoFrom roughly 2006-2012 this site greatly influenced my taste. I visited the site multiple times a day and read pretty much everything they published. I used to always check the site at 11pm when they reliably published a new set of 5 album reviews. At some point banner ads for big liquor companies started to show up. Then coverage for mainstream music became more frequent. This was a clear signal that they had sold out and their reputation was shot. I view them now as the new incarnation of Rolling Stone magazine. Still feel for the writers who got fired in this latest reorg.