Everyone Was Wrong Declaring Pitchfork Dead
Layoffs have had little impact on the website.
Many of life's most consequential benchmarks, from quarterly earnings to pregnancy’s trimesters, occur in three-month segments. Perhaps it is the changing of the seasons (another three-month chunk of time) but we’ve been thinking about where things were three months ago as opposed to where we’re at right now.
Three months ago, Coachella was at the start of its flop narrative, the vastly overblown media arc that portrayed the world’s biggest music festival on the backfoot. Now, with Coachella behind us, we’re wondering if any of the 200k people who attended the annual event had anything less than an awesome time. Our timelines say no.
Another plotline that began three months ago was Universal’s move to make superfans the center of its 2024 ambitions. That announcement launched a three-month surge of reporting on various superfan initiatives that promise to be the next big thing, although nothing material has emerged so far.
But the biggest news from three months ago was the announcement of layoffs at Pitchfork, which was followed by no less than a dozen articles in mainstream publications that read like obituaries for both the beloved website and music journalism at large. It seemed like decades of diminishing returns for music media had finally reached its final breath.
But then a funny thing happened. Pitchfork kept publishing new content, every day. Week after week, month after month. So here were are three months later wondering if anything actually changed. So we decided to find out.
Our first thought was to compare the number of news posts on the site. So we randomly sampled the first week in April and compared it to the first week in December 2023. And guess what? Pitchfork published 41 news articles written by seven writers between Apr 1-5, compared to 45 news articles by eight authors between Dec. 4-8. A minor reduction that indicates no real change.
Of course, news blogging is easy. Pitchfork made its reputation with in-depth album reviews that could make or break a release. So we ran the same tally and discovered that the site surprisingly published more reviews post-layoffs (15) than in the pre-layoff era (14). We also decided to gauge if those reviews possessed the same critical discernment and learned that in March 2024, Pitchfork gave 18 releases a score of 8.0 or higher, compared to 15 albums earning above 8.0 in November 2023. So, are albums released after the alleged death of Pitchfork being graded on a curve? Or is the explanation that the sort of non-mainstream music that still makes up a vast majority of Pforks content tends to get released in the spring instead of the weeks leading up to the holidays? That definitely seems like the more likely reason.
So is there any difference between Pitchfork before and after the layoffs? We did notice that the site published 13 features in Nov ’23, compared to just 9 features in Mar ’24. So that’s a noticeable reduction but not a sign of pending doom.
In other words, as is often the case in today’s 24-7 grievance-driven news cycle, it’s not just that bad news travels faster than good. It’s that the good news never even makes it out the gate. The good in this case is that Pitchfork, for whatever reason, has been able to maintain the same level of consistency even three months after the supposed death knell.
Approximately three months ago, the term “Enshitification” entered the lexicon thanks to tech commentator Cory Doctorow, becoming a “breakout” search term on Google. In case you haven’t seen it in the wild yet, Enshitification is a theory that the tech platforms that once provided some degree of value to our lives have now reached the apex of growth and have switched to a more and more extractive model where the service becomes gradually worse for the users in order to wring out more money for the investors.
Broadly speaking, this seems true of most platforms. But that doesn’t mean every piece of bad news is the canary in the enshitification coal mine. From where we stand, Pitchfork, Coachella and plenty of other things we love are doing just fine. And while such sentiments might not make for viral copy, it’s still worth pointing out when the sky isn’t falling.
Nope — it’s still there.
TAKEAWAYS
Salient statements from this week’s music news.
1. Bandcamp Improves Its Music Discovery
Six months after Epic Games sold off the beloved alternative to music streaming, the new owners unveiled a long-requested improved music discovery system through robust tagging. Oh, and also dark mode.
Takeaway: None, because, like we said, these sorts of improvements are never given any in-depth coverage.
2. How High Can Hipgnosis Songs Fund Bidding Go?
Concord and Blackstone have entered into a bidding war to acquire HSF’s catalog, although both bids are well below last month’s reduced valuation.
Takeaway: Investors who want to capitalize on an eventual acquisition will buy HSF shares up to — but not equal to — their expected deal price. If investors thought the deal would happen at $1.30, they could bid up to $1.29 per share and make a small yet quick profit.
The primary purpose of social media (I'm including Substack in this) is to amplify and then disseminate hysteria concerning recent occurrences, and then forget these reactions once life moves on. Always keep this in mind when one is experiencing "commentary".