How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork
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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.
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.
As for Google: 'splain me why it wasn't just $150M down the drain? Minus the undisclosed amount:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat
On March 6, 2018, Google sold the company to restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation for an undisclosed amount
What does this mean?
In the evolution of popular tastes, being a foodie was not limited to a rarified minority who liked artisanal food.
In other words, dining out and reading about it had become a mainstream activity.
Watch the confusion.
AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.
"On September 8, 2011, the company was acquired by Google for more than $150 million, the 10th largest acquisition by Google as of that date, at the championing of Marissa Mayer, its Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services."
She introduced Tim and Nina and took full credit for it. If your point is that she must have gotten the OK from Larry, Sergey, and Eric -- no argument. Any big initiative has some champion, who depends on top management approval. That doesn't mean that the CEO is personally the driver of everything.
It would not have happened had she not pushed it. If you can't accept that, then we'll just have to call this discussion Done. I was there; you weren't.
Not to mention: I was there when she stood up and told us how she'd made the acquisition. I don't know who your information comes from, but stop listening to them.
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/
If Condé Nast eventually kills the site so be it, but its been 16y since their acquisition and still a daily read for me.
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.
The depth of articles or the decision to pull in Wired content is strictly an editorial decision made by Ars editorial leadership.
Go to the bottom of the Ars Technica page, behold the Conde Nast logo and the following text:
CNMN Collection WIRED Media Group © 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) ... blah blah, no more company names.
They publicly wave around the Conde Nast name. Not Advance. Not anything else except WIRED.
Take a minute and do some research. Advance owns Ars and the terms of the acquisition allow it to have total independence.
But again, I recommend you contact the Ars editors directly and share your theory that the Condé logo at the bottom of the page proves that they are in fact Condé stooges and have no editorial independence. See what they say. Their DMs are open.
And technically Condé does not own Ars, Advance does. Different leadership group.
Honestly I've felt Ars' community has been almost completely useless since the last update to the comments system. They removed the ability to tag comments with "Interesting" "Knowledgeable" "funny" whatever, I would just cut through the dunking on elon posts and get to the meat with top most knowledgeable.
Not to say that isn't a fun time to dunk on elon.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/never-before-seen-vi...
It scared the shit out of me. If it wasn't for Ars coverage, and specifically Beth Mole, I would have been caught up in the TP panic with everyone else. But I had stocked up early haha. What a weird time.
Does anyone remember a website with videos from China of people passing out in public and streets being cleared?
Regardless of the cause, health experts in China are optimistic that the outbreak will be contained and that response efforts will be better than they were during the SARS outbreak. Xu Jianguo, a former top Chinese public health official, noted to The Washington Post in a report today, "More than a decade has passed. It's impossible for something like SARS to happen again."
Comedy gold.
All his old articles had their byline removed.
To me, it seems that word came down from high that "you must do auto reviews at Ars" and they are complying with the least amount of effort possible.
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.
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."
Pitchfork's "review" does something completely different. It isn't really about Tool's music, it is about Tool's fans. The "review" is in two parts. The first part is some odd self-referential material that regular Pitchfork readers will recognize as signaling that a parody review is coming.
Then the second part is a parody review in the voice of a sixteen year old boy writing a class essay about his summer vacation for his high school English teacher. Except it isn't about his summer vacation, it is about how awesome this album released over the summer is compared to the pop and dance music that stupid girls listen to. It is intentionally parodying the most obnoxious teenage Tool fan you can think of, who thinks he is really smart and is a fan of music only intelligent people can appreciate, when in fact he is just attracted to an aesthetic at a surface level in the exact same way he criticizes of pop and dance music fans.
The review is so utterly positive about the album, but for reasons that have so little to do with the actual music. The positive review is positive for all the wrong reasons. It is not a commentary on the music, but on the fans of the music and the "I'm cool because I listen to something underground that most people would hate" attitude. It obsesses about the drummer's specialized technical equipment. It invents some ridiculous cosmic cycle that Really Good Music only comes once every 16 years, and we have been waiting for this album since Metallica released And Justice For All in 1987.
The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today.
1) Do you think there's nothing to say about this (or any other album) than "fans of the genre will like it and others will not"? There's plenty of insightful things to say both to familiar audiences and others.
2) Do you think this Tool review was the first (or even first larger scale) criticism of metal fans?
...
> The point of the review is that if you're a fan of metal, Tool's Lateralus is a 10.0. If you don't like metal, which most people don't like, it is a 0.0. What other commentary about the music do we actually need? So they decided to use it as an opportunity to criticize the fans. It got a ton of attention and sparked a whole wave of meta-criticism about metal and if it is or isn't appropriate to criticize an artist for their fans, which is an eternal question in criticism that we are still having today.
So Pitchfork's review conveys the same thing as other reviews, but in a more obtuse way, and this makes it better?
Now R&M is an immensely popular show, but we all know there is a subsets of its fanbase who are intolerable and who unironically speak about this cartoon as being for people with high IQs. Now imagine if a contemporary publication published a review of the latest season and chose not too focus on the content but rather parody these fans. Fans of the show will watch the new season regardless of the rating and people who hate it won't, but both would get a chuckle out of a parody of that intolerable fan and for R&M they benefit either way by being mentioned. Further, as stated by previous commenter, this type of review opened up a conversation about whether a fanbase becomes a legitimate reason to dislike an artist/creation.
Also, if unfamiliar with Tool, check out any of their songs on YT and read the comments, you will understand the need for the parody.
I hear this relentlessly but I can't say I have ever seen what this is first hand. If R&M comes up on r/television I don't see anything unusual. Where do people run into this fanbase?
>As fan communities now have endless forums and formats to debate and discuss, there’s been a shift from simply being a fan of something to somehow assuming ownership of it. The combination of Reddit boards and social media means internet die-hards begun viewing their roles not as passive viewers, but as active policers. Some critic doesn’t like the latest Marvel film that you’re pretty sure you’ll love? Get ’em.
>And this curious urge – worse in the sci-fi and superhero genres and infinitely worse in young male fans – has reached its nadir in the young, male sci-fi fandom of Rick And Morty.
>Even mentioning the show my colleagues at GQ provoked a response of mild disgust. They hadn’t seen it, one said, but had always been put off because of the fans. I know exactly what they mean. And it has only gotten worse.
>When, in a joke in the third-series premiere, Rick says his whole motivation isn’t to avenge anyone’s death, but was instead “driven by finding that McNugget sauce. That’s my series arc”, referring to a promotional Szechuan dipping sauce that McDonald’s used to sell in the late 1990s for a promotional tie-in with the movie Mulan, the fans took him at his word and the very next day began online petitions to demand its return. McDonald’s, never one to bypass free PR, announced a few months later the sauce would come back for a limited time. But it didn’t have enough for the demand, so the fans then protested – online and in person – and, in some cases, the police were called. To repeat: McDonald’s dipping sauce.
>If sauce entitlement is one thing, the fans took it to a whole new level by the end of the third series. The Rick And Morty writing room had always been a bro club and so creator Harmon had hired some new female comedy writers to even out the imbalance. The fans, convinced they were the cause of what they saw as a dip in quality in the third series, went after the new female writers online individually, abusing, threatening and slandering them on Twitter and creating Reddit threads just to smear them. They even doxed them, publishing their personal information online.
>And don’t just take my word for it. Even Harmon despises this sector of his own fandom.
>They want, he told Entertainment Weekly, “to protect the content they think they own – and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender… I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fucking sucks.”
The full article: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/rick-and-morty...
Despite all that it’s still the best single site for gaming criticism, sadly.
It's still the single gaming site I follow the most. But it's not quite as concentrated fun as it used to be.
Cannot speculate how much of that is due to being bought out and integrated a few years back. I think it's correlation as much as causation.
Some of the old gang have started their own things but they tend to be very niche.
With iTunes and similar services, users can buy individual tracks instead of a whole album and listen to previews before they buy. Why waste time reading a review if you can listen yourself and decide whether it's worth buying? And now with the broad availability streaming services like Spotify, written reviews are even less valuable; you pay the same regardless of what you listen to so there's no financial risk of trying new music.
This was my view of it, I constantly found the reviewers irritating and I rarely paid much attention to the scores, it was just a good source to check out new, interesting music that wouldn't get any exposure anywhere else
Is it really so implausible that a notoriously hip indie music blog would have been ahead of the curve on a cultural trend? Certainly some of the people who became big names in 2010s identity politics movements were writing on similar blogs a decade or more before their cultural moment (e.g. I didn't follow Pitchfork, but I remember Laurie Penny writing extensively for Freaky Trigger).
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
But eh, they're allowed to have "bad" opinions. Every critic I've remotely followed has strongly disagreed with me at times.
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.
"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/
Meanwhile, antipodeanally 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-...
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.
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
It laid off or lost most of its best tech policy writers, including Joe Mullin, Cyrus Farivar, David Kravets, and Timothy B Lee.
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
This has recently become true of pop as well, which is one of the defining qualities of the "poptimism" era. It's not that all the music critics simultaneously sold out and started giving undeservingly good reviews to pop, it's that the baseline standard of musical quality in pop became very high.
¹: There has always been, and continues to be, a subsection of rap that also succeeds on musical terms inherited from outside of hip hop, especially from jazz. This is usually what people who are not extremely into hip hop mean when they talk about "good rap." But someone who doesn't appreciate the role of eg lil wayne & young thug is frankly not informed enough about the genre & its conventions to have a useful opinion about quality within it.
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.
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.
Personally, I left after the whole Black Kids debacle, where they overhyped, and then trashed, a promising young band and destroyed their career.
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...
Perhaps that is closer than we think
Granted, Si Newhouse bought it in 1985 - the only time the magazine's ownership changed! - and so maybe it enjoys a sort of grandfathered status at Conde Nast even with Newhouse dead?
I mean, I say that, but they recently ruined the previously-excellent iPad app, which has resulted in me going back to paper issues, but if that's the extent of the tomfoolery I'll take it.
Fake comments, more pliable moderators, dead subreddits are everywhere now.
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.
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.
I’ll miss this site. If anyone has any YT channels or other similar music sites, I’d love some recommendations
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.
Not my experience at all. Turns out critics are actually decent at judging stuff, and good movies really are better than bad ones.
(I've seen some great films at film festivals, but I absolutely have had festivals that were a complete bust. So I took exception mainly to your "guaranteed" claim, which you seem to be stepping back from now)
Well then, to put it more bluntly, I once went to a film festival and didn't find anything that I enjoyed thoroughly. So your guarantee is bollocks.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
It does?
New Music Express still seems to be doing OK.
> 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.
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".
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-....
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.
There are other pale UK bands if that's your thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKNt_qq6N7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcbSOjIzjQ
I went through The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie article trying to guess your reference - B&S got the greatest wordcount IIRC.
Can't say I've heard of Dirty Projectors and their "use of attenuated 'afro' elements" - I'll chase it up, but often I prefer to see some back wash on the culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOValSt7YOY https://youtu.be/tvY31eN3gtE?t=41
Yeah, that’s not what happened.
I previously worked in music first at CMJ, UrbMag then Fader before working with a few indie and major labels on the digital side.
Don’t try to rewrite history to make this a political or “wokeness” thing because of the view of ONE of the many contributors to Pitchfork.
What happened to Pitchfork was pure economics.
Pitchfork got old just like the article said.
After indie, they attempted to pivot and become more accepting of “young hip-hop” and world music (latin, Afro beat) that younger audiences listened to in the way that Fader did.
This worked for awhile.
Until…
1. Old Millenials and GenXers aged out
2. Music discovery moved to TikTok and the streaming platforms themselves.
The bottom line is that young people could careless what a bunch of gatekeeping olds think is the “right music” anyhow.
The issue with that is it’s the same shift a lot of outlets made to try and keep pace too, which has resulted in a bunch of legacy outlets with little distinct editorial voice left. That’s not a barrier to keeping clicks, but it does feel like a failing strategy to retain cultural cache.
Though I digress, by all accounts Pitchfork had actually gone from losing money pre Puja to actually making money, so this was probably not about the outlet failing in some way. I personally agree with those noting how soon this has come after the staff unionisation vote
A big reason for Pitchfork was a simple heuristic for "should I buy this album".
Now that no one buys albums, that problem isn't such a pressing concern.
Steve Jobs had more to do with this than Condé Nast IMO.
#pitchforkmedia... "now with more rap."
https://twitter.com/akaspick/status/606803688888377344
As a reader since the early 2000's, I noticed the shift pretty quick.
“In my childhood, Hershey’s chocolate was a beautiful expression of the essential qualities of pure milk. But then the globalists changed the recipe to make it taste like unisex toilets and ESG investments. No wonder nobody eats Hershey’s anymore!”