Pitchfork (website)

1996–2003: early years Pitchfork was created in February 1996 by Ryan Schreiber, a high school graduate living in his parents' home in Minneapolis. Schreiber grew up listening to indie rock acts such as Fugazi, Jawbox and Guided by Voices. He was influenced by fanzine culture and had no previous writing experience. Schreiber initially named the website Turntable, but changed it after another website claimed the rights. and the record store Insound was Pitchforks first advertiser. Schreiber said the site's early period "was about really laying into people who really deserved it", and defended the importance of honesty in arts criticism. He said he wanted "to be daring, to surprise people and catch them off guard". He estimated that Pitchfork had published 1,000 reviews by this point. Around the turn of the millennium, the American music press was dominated by monthly print magazines such as Rolling Stone, creating a gap in the market for faster-moving publication that emphasized new acts. Pitchfork could publish several articles a day, greatly outpacing print media. New technologies such as MP3, the iPod and the file-sharing service Napster created greater access to music, and music blogs became an important resource, creating further opportunity for Pitchfork. One of the first Kid A reviews published, it attracted attention for its unusual style. Billboard described it as "extremely long-winded and brazenly unhinged from the journalistic form and temperament of the time". Writers were unpaid for their first six months, after which they could earn $10 or $20 for a review or $40 for a feature. Following staff tensions about Schreiber's advertising income, Pitchfork started paying writers from their first articles at a slightly improved rate. Pitchforks first professional editor, Scott Plagenhoef, was hired shortly afterwards. That year, Schreiber said he was uninterested in selling Pitchfork: "It would change into the antithesis of the reason I started it. This is something I am so in love with—this is my entire adult life's work." In the mid-2000s, Pitchfork expanded its operations. In 2006, it launched the annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. Kaskie said it was exciting to see acts Pitchfork had championed playing to large crowds: "We start to see these bands playing in front of audiences 10 times the size of their biggest show ever. That's the goal, man. To put fucking Titus Andronicus in front of 10,000 people." In November, it published a book, The Pitchfork 500, covering the preceding 30 years of music. By the end of the 2000s, Pitchfork had become influential in the music industry, credited for launching acts such as Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. Streaming services began to fulfill Pitchforks function of helping new artists find audiences, and independent music criticism moved to podcasts and YouTube. It began running news and features alongside reviews, coming to resemble a more conventional music publication. Schreiber said that "our tastes broadened with age and experience", and that Pitchfork could make a difference to social causes. On May 21, Pitchfork announced a partnership with the website Kill Screen, in which Pitchfork would publish some of their articles. Altered Zones closed on November 30. On December 26, 2012, Pitchfork launched Nothing Major, a website that covered visual arts, which closed in October 2013. Pitchfork launched a film website, The Dissolve, in 2013. It closed in 2015, citing "financial challenges". In 2017, Kaskie said he remained proud of The Dissolve and that it was "a huge success from the creative and editorial, design and everything else". About two thirds of the content would be original, with the remaining reused from the Pitchfork website. The Pitchfork Review ended after 11 issues in November 2016. As of 2014, Pitchfork was receiving around 6.2 million unique visitors and 40 million pageviews every month, with an expected annual revenue growth of 25 to 40 percent. Its primary revenue came from advertising. According to the media analytics firm Comscore, Pitchfork had 2.47 million unique visitors that August, more than the websites for Spin or Vibe but fewer than Rolling Stones 11 million. At this point, Pitchfork had about 50 employees, with editorial and video production staff in Brooklyn and advertising, sales and development staff in Chicago. With Schreiber aiming to create the world's best repository for music content, Pitchfork began creating videos and retrospective articles, covering classic albums released before its founding. He had been frustrated by his diminished role under Condé Nast and Pitchforks reduced autonomy. On September 18, 2018, Schreiber stepped down as the top editor. He was replaced by Puja Patel, who had worked at Spin and Gawker Media, as editor-in-chief on October 15. Schreiber remained as a strategic advisor. He said he later realized that Condé Nast had unrealistic expectations and did not understand Pitchfork. It abandoned experiments with Pitchfork paywalls following criticism from readers. Staff including Patel were laid off, leaving around a dozen editorial staff, including some working on multiple Condé Nast publications. As of that month, Pitchfork had the most daily active users of any Condé Nast publication. Tani and The Washington Post Chris Richards expressed disgust that Pitchfork, once independent and provocative, would be absorbed into an establishment men's magazine. The producer Dan le Sac, whose 2008 album Angles received a score of 0.2 from Pitchfork, said: "Pitchfork getting gutted is a net negative for musicians everywhere. And I say that as the proud owner of (potentially) the lowest score on the site. Whether you agree with a reviewer or not, music needs more journalism, not less." Schreiber said that commentators were "premature to eulogize Pitchfork", as it retained a skeleton crew continuing its mission, and said he was pleased with the work it had published since the announcement. That October, five former Pitchfork writers launched the music site Hearing Things, which aims to "capture the original independent spirit" of Pitchfork. On 20 January 2026, Pitchfork announced that it was moving to a subscription model; for $5 a month, readers will be able to add comments and scores to reviews and access archived reviews. Sundaresan wrote that "music and music criticism are inherently social" and hoped the change would "deepen our readers' connection to music and each other". == Style ==

In the 2000s, Pitchfork's unusual, passionate and stylized reviews differentiated it from the more scholarly and formal style of print magazines such as Rolling Stone. The journalist Dave Itzkoff described Pitchfork reviews as "defiantly passionate and frustratingly capricious" with an "aura of integrity and authenticity that made such pronouncements credible, even definitive, to fans ... insinuating themselves into the grand tradition of rock criticism, joining the ranks of imperious and opinionated writers". Pitchfork also switched to a more professional style. The editor Amy Phillips illustrated this by comparing her coverage of the announcement of two Radiohead albums, years apart; the first was excitable, whereas the second was more professional and factual. In 2014, the contributor Nate Patrin said Pitchfork had become "what publications like the Village Voice used to be in terms of letting writers go deep without feeling pressured to talk down to readers", with long-form articles and documentaries. By 2017, according to Bloomberg, its reviews had become "as erudite as those of the music magazines that Pitchfork had all but eclipsed in influence". In 2024, the critic Ann Powers wrote that Pitchfork had "nurtured many of the best and most influential writers working today". She felt that "great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else's creative work ... The best writing at Pitchfork or anywhere reflects that process and is as variegated as the human experience itself." In 2015, The Guardian credited Pitchfork for pioneering design techniques that combined print design and technical innovation to create the impression of a "forward-facing, vibrant title". == Review system ==

By 2021, Pitchfork had published more than 28,000 reviews. and in 2021 Pitchfork wrote that it was an "admittedly absurd and subjective" signature element. In The Ringer, Rob Harvilla wrote that a 10.0 from Pitchfork "carries all the historical weight of five stars in Rolling Stone or five mics in The Source ... with its maddening and theoretically precise approach to decimal places, such that an ocean of feeling separates an 8.1 from an 8.9". Pitchfork has awarded perfect scores to more than 50 albums, most of them in its "Sunday Reviews" feature, which publishes retrospective reviews of classic albums. Artists whose albums have received perfect scores on release include Radiohead, Fiona Apple, Kanye West, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and Wilco. According to Harvilla, a perfect score given to an album on release "qualifies as a seismic event for the rock-critic universe as a whole". Some reviews experimented with the score system. The 2005 Robert Pollard album Relaxation of the Asshole received a simultaneous 10 and 0; the review of the 2007 Radiohead album In Rainbows, which allowed fans to pay what they wanted to download, allowed readers to enter their own score. After Pitchfork changed its content management system to require a number, these albums were given fixed scores. == Criticism ==

Prose In the 2000s, Pitchfork reviews were criticized as pretentious, verbose and inaccurate. Similar criticisms came from Rob Harvilla of the East Bay Express and Claire Suddath of Time. Many scathing early reviews were by Brent DiCrescenzo, who wrote lengthy reviews that rarely addressed the music. For example, his critical review of the 2001 Tool album Lateralus included a lengthy list of equipment used by the drummer. Some Pitchfork reviews consist only of single images or videos, implying the record is beneath critical analysis. M.I.A. and the singer Björk argued that this was part of a wider problem of journalists assuming that female artists do not write or produce their own music. In 2024, the Pitchfork contributor Andrew Nosnitsky argued that hip-hop, not indie rock, was the "defining music" of his generation, but that Pitchfork was viewed as the defining music publication for "purely mechanical and straight-up white-supremacy reasons". In 2007, the satirical website The Onion published a story in which Pitchfork reviewed music as a whole and gave it a score of 6.8. == Influence ==

(pictured in 2005). Spencer Kornhaber of the Atlantic described Pitchfork as the most influential music publication to emerge in the internet age. The critic Carl Wilson said Pitchfork drove a "feeding frenzy about band discovery" in North American music journalism, with publications vying to discover new acts. The authors of the Phair and Sonic Youth reviews later changed their opinions and apologized to the artists. In Slate, Amos Barshad cited the band Black Kids as the most infamous example of Pitchfork "at its most deleterious". The influence of Pitchfork on musical careers declined with the onset of streaming and social media in the 2010s. In 2017, a senior editor for independent music at the streaming platform Spotify said that Pitchfork no longer had the same impact on music careers. However, according to Tani, "Even as its Gen-X and old millennial fans aged and tastemaking shifted to platforms and influencers, Pitchfork remained the premier publication for music criticism, its year-end lists synonymous with critical acclaim." ==References==