The fall of Pitchfork

0:27Hey, pals. It's Andrea and Emily here with The Culture Journalist. So 2024 continues to be just an absolutely brutal year for culture media. You might have heard that last week Vice scrapped what little was left of its editorial staff in favor of pivoting to a studio model, whatever that means. R.I.P. Vice. However you feel about it, just want to remind you that there would be no culture journalist if it weren't for Vice. It's where Emily and I met. And then, of course, there's Pitchfork, which is what we're going to talk about today. That's because in January, as you may recall, Condé Nast somewhat inexplicably announced that it was slashing the majority of the long-running music publication staff and folding what remained of it into GQ.

1:17It's brutal on so many levels. Emily, you worked at Pitchfork for a while, right? Yeah, it was actually my first job. I worked as an editor for Pitchfork's defunct underground music sister site, Altered Zones, back when the company was still independent. There's one bizarre detail that I can't get out of my head, and it really feels like a metaphor for the blind profit above all else, like raising of media that's happening right now. It's the fact that Anna Wintour apparently never removed her sunglasses while telling the Pitchfork staff that they were all about to lose their jobs. Are they an inscrutable protector?

1:56Because you wear them in the front row of fashion as well. You wear them sitting next to the queen. They're incredibly useful because you avoid people knowing what you're thinking about. They help me when I'm feeling a bit tired or sleepy. And I don't know, maybe they've just become a crutch and part of who I am. But today I really did need them. There is no way of knowing exactly how Condé Nast arrived at this decision. We do know that Anna Wintour wrote a note to staff, and this is a quote from it. This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork's performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company.

2:40And, you know, that doesn't tell us very much. Others have accused Condé Nast of doing layoffs as a form of union busting. And it's also safe to say that Pitchfork, like so many digital media publications, was wrestling with many of the larger structural forces that we discuss a lot on this show. Like Google and other distribution platforms deprioritizing news, streaming services, having a monopoly on music discovery, and declining programmatic advertising revenues. Needless to say, there are a lot of takes floating around about this right now. But one of them by writer, editor, and philosopher Robin James really caught our eye, especially for the head-on way in which it dealt with the dissonance of Pitchfork being folded into a men's publication, which, you know, really weird for me being a woman who worked there.

3:31I don't know about you. Definitely gave me pause. It's titled Pitchfork, Broified Alt-Rock Radio and the Structural Issues in the Financialized Media Industry. And it frames the move as one in a long line of examples of corporations turning to male audiences in order to save, in quotes, distressed music media properties. Not because men are actually more likely to care about music or music writing, but because it's a logic that sort of just plays into the gendered biases of the executive and ownership class. And because in today's heavily financialized economy, business leaders tend to be more concerned with creating the perception of future growth, especially among people like advertisers and potential investors, than coming up with solutions that actually work.

4:18So, on today's episode, Robin joins us to talk about what the Pitchfork News can tell us about the persistence of gendered stereotypes around music fandom and consumption, and how media's current woes are a reflection of a larger business landscape where exponential scalability takes precedence over sustainability and even profitability. We also discuss how the financialization of everything has changed the nature of musical fame, and how the age-old poptimism-rockism binary may be increasingly obsolete as a framework for discussing power differentials in music. We'll be right back with Robin after the break.

5:11I'm a little girl at the picnic But what's up for me? I dress up, it doesn't matter Cause it gets torn up It doesn't matter, I got to listen to the radio

5:29The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners If this pod adds something meaningful to your life please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our sub stack. Paid subscribers receive full access to bonus episodes, along with culture recommendations, occasional essay, and more goodies. Look, we don't have like a big staff or cushy sponsors to fall back on like most corporate podcasts do. So every listener who subscribes actually makes a big difference. Hey guys, we're back with Robin James. Robin, thanks so much for joining us.

6:06Thanks so much for having me. Let's start with the Pitchfork of it all. What was your reaction when you heard that Condé Nast was laying off most of Pitchfork's staff and folding it into GQ? My first thought was, I've seen this before. I wrote a book that came out last year. It's about a particular modern rock radio station, but it's also kind of about the history of alternative rock and alt rock radio. And one of the things that happened to alt-rock radio in the late 90s was basically there was a market bubble. And I'll get into that a little more later. But basically, they were having trouble retaining listeners and the format pivoted to narrow cast directly and only to men listeners.

6:47Because they were perceived to be more reliable and less likely to leave the format for other audiences. And the reason why I made this connection between what happened to Alt-Rock Radio in the 90s and what's going on with Pitchfork and sort of media more generally now is radio was one of the first media industries to financialize itself in the late 90s because of the Telecom Act of 1996, which deregulated radio ownership. That meant any company could own as many number of stations in whatever market that it wanted. Right. So what happened was you got these big, huge conglomerates like Clear Channel, which is now iHeart Media or CBS Radio, just sort of gobbling up stations and then syndicating canned program across the country.

7:34And because Alt-Rock was the trendy format of the time, that's what, you know, if you already had a country station in a market and you bought this other station, well, you turn it to Alt-Rock. So that kind of created this like market bubble in alt rock radio stations. So by the late 90s, they're bleeding listeners. And the people that financialized media industries serve aren't really audiences or artists, it's investors, right? Because the point for Clear Channel was not to, you know, sort of run profitable radio stations, it was to cultivate a good stock price. And so what they need to do then is, you know, if there's sort of trouble with alt-rock as a format, they need to show investors that they're doing something to keep the stock price afloat.

8:19And what they did then was they sort of said, well, OK, we we somehow think that men are more reliable rock radio listeners than women. So we're going to pivot to what Chris Malamfy calls bro-ified alt-rock radio. And it really seemed to me that the move that Condé Nast was making was very similar, right? It's also, you know, this huge conglomerate, many verticals and brands. And I was looking around trying to see like what justification Condé Nast gave for the, you know, sort of folding Pitchfork into GQ. And it was all kind of like empty answers, right? Like to improve its performance or whatever.

8:58So it just really seemed to me that there was a real analogy between kind of what happened with Pitchfork and Condonast and what happened with Alt Rock Radio and Clear Channel in the 90s. Condonast is technically a private company owned by a single family, the Newhouse's. But I'd say it doesn't really make a difference if offset owners are shareholders or private owners, because the current model of market success is the same across the board. Assets need to exponentially appreciate in value in order to be considered a success. Were you surprised at all? I think a lot of people were with it, you know, it being folded into GQ specifically.

9:35And, you know, I guess there being this underlying implication that the company maybe saw music and music journalism as a men's pursuit. Because it does feel we just got into that a little bit like for the past. But, you know, one would think that with all of sort of the cultural shifts that we've seen in recent years, like women are actually a pretty ripe market right now. So I'm wondering, what were they going off of, if that was kind of the motivation? Or did it maybe have to do with the broader media picture of GQ is much more of this like legacy publication and just maybe stands a chance of being around a little bit longer, or maybe it's some combination of the two?

10:12I don't know. What do you think? I think that's a good question. And I think there's probably a lot of things going on, because as you're correct to note that like in the last 20 years, right, like we've had optimism, we've had popular feminism, You know, one of the things that changed most about Pitchfork in the last couple decades has been its sort of diversification of both staff members and kinds of music that it covers. And that's, you know, in trend with the rise of what some sociologists call omnivorous listening, right? There's not the sort of policing of genre boundaries tied to like the policing of who's in the genre or who it's for that we saw sort of in the 20th century.

10:51So on the one hand, like, why would we think that men are a more reliable audience for coverage of, quote unquote, serious music when the music industry has changed so much in the last 20 years? But on the other hand, again, I would say it's not about serving actual readers or listeners. It's about managing investor perceptions, right, of what kinds of publications are more successful than others. And I just kind of wonder if there's a sort of playing into investor biases about perhaps themselves or about masculinity or, you know, just things associated with masculinity always being overestimated in their capacity to perform, things like that.

11:34So, yeah, I'm not sure exactly what motivated it, but it's curious that in both cases in the past and now, men are somehow seen to be a more attractive audience. Right. But that was also the agenda from the beginning, right? Like when the announcement happened that Connie Nast was acquiring Pitchfork, they said like, oh, this is going to be like really important for tapping into the millennial, affluent millennial audience. Right. The subtext being, I mean, whether or not it's like sort of deliberately, I think, about gender or not, or there was data on that. The fact of the matter is like, historically, who has tended to have more wealth and more disposable income to spend on something like a magazine subscription, you know, or to buy something like GQ, which is also advertising like luxury watches and like aftershave and silk ties.

12:28You know what I mean? I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about this and I've like written, I've tweeted, not written, but done some writing on Twitter about how, first of all, male demographics is like super, super reductive and besides the point. But even if you were to say, okay, we want to go after the GQ demographic or whatever, that's a completely different demographic from even like a male indie music listener demographic. So it all feels just like very fake and arbitrary to me. Yeah. And I think also, if you think about they're looking at historically what works or we think about historically what works, I mean, real talk like you haven't seen a legacy women's publication.

13:06I don't know, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, be devoted to music and music journalism the same way that we've seen GQ or Playboy or these others be over time. You know, it's unfortunate. But like, when you think about like, what are audiences familiar with? Where are they familiar with finding this kind of content? It's unfortunately like not going to be in legacy women's magazines, which sucks. Teen Vogue is doing a great job of subverting that right now. But yeah, and it's interesting because the music industry, or at least the radio industry tended to understand women as more fickle listeners, right?

13:40They would flip between different format of radio stations. I think there's also the stereotype that like, mothers are in the car with their kids listening to whatever their kids want to. So I think there's a lot of sort of legacy stereotypes in here about women as media consumers or women as consumers of music. So Robin, where have we seen this idea before in the history of popular music that men are a more reliable and monetizable media audience than other quote unquote demographics? Where does that come from and what function does it serve? I honestly have no idea exactly where it comes from.

14:15I mean, other than like patriarchy. But like I said, radio programmers in the 90s thought that men were a more reliable rock audience than women were. And I'm sure that has to do with sort of rock aesthetics being about kind of the purity and authenticity of the genre and masculinity, especially white masculinity, also being a sort of constructed around ideas of purity, right? I think in the case of rock in particular, that's a reason why masculinity and white men in particular are seen as the core demographic for that sort of format. But, you know, there's even been sort of divergences if you think back to, you know, the kinds of music media targeted at women audiences, it's always targeted at like teen girls.

15:05I remember back in the day when I was a New Kids on the Block fan and I would buy music magazines, right? These were not prestige publications. This was not NME. This was, you know, Tiger Beat or whatever. So I think there's another industry precedent there for thinking about the different kinds of music media that are targeted to different gendered audiences, right? It's really sort of teen girls that are represented there and not adult women. Totally. I think in large part because the market doesn't know how to actually represent adult women right for sure as like independently thinking consumers i mean maybe it's starting to but yeah and also it's interesting about the teen girl magazines i remember those two like the implication very much with those from the aesthetic to the content is very much like not serious right and it's interesting i was just reminded of the the publications that hired taylor swift and beyonce reporters oh yeah which are like covering them more like the british royal family than they are like musicians, if that makes sense, right?

16:08Like they're not sort of focused on their work or their musical output, but it's really like covering them like celebrities. Right. But then, of course, you had Pitchwork, which I think really kind of helped change the temperature on that, right? Yeah, for sure. I was doing some research and I looked back and it rated Britney Spears' Toxic as the number three single of 2003, right? Which was a bold move back then for a serious music publication to have anything positive or praiseworthy to say about someone like Britney Spears and her work. This is pre-Khalifa Santa's rap against rockism. So they were kind of on the leading edge of what we might now understand as like the poptimist turn.

16:49Right, exactly. And I think that move has been so powerful, even though it's come with its own share of criticisms that are maybe kind of holdovers from that perception of that music not being quote unquote serious or whatever. And now I think that's part of what makes Pitchfork getting folded in a GQ actually feel kind of regressive. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and one thing that Pooja Patel has done is really just, you know, broadly diversify the kinds of music that have been covered. Pitchfork was sort of known early on as this like hardcore indie, very gatekeepy publication. Poptimism happened and it started sort of expanding beyond sort of elite indie tastes.

17:24But it had in the last couple of years become really expansive in its coverage in a way that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. So totally something that I wonder about or like part of what made the news so shocking to me is that whatever you thought of Pitchfork or it's like specific editorial choices in any given moment. It always just seemed like, you know, the one American digital music publication that like would survive or it was kind of like the benchmark against which you would measure everything else in some ways. And I just, you know, I think part of why this is such a blow beyond, you know, people losing their jobs or like the loss of opportunities for writing for lots of different music journalists was if Pitchfork can't survive, how could any music journalism publication survive right now?

18:17Without knowing the specific play-by-play of what happened behind the scenes, how do you think we ended up here? Again, I'll go back to financialization and I'll loop in what happened to Bandcamp and Bandcamp Daily as well. Right. So like Bandcamp and Pitchfork were, from everything I've been able to read from staffers, you know, functioning businesses, they were plugging along just fine. But that's not good enough for shareholders, basically. Right. Investors want to see constant and continual growth. So finding a profitable business model and just kind of plugging along isn't that, right? You have to constantly be showing that you're doing something and managing and changing and growing the company.

19:01You even see this in higher ed with what happened at West Virginia University, right? They took a profitable modern languages department and closed it just because they need to show growth and change. So I think in the sort of political economy of media today, where profitability isn't enough for investors, I think we're just in this weird place where nobody cares about the actual product. People just want to see growth at whatever cost. And I agree that it just feels very impossible to imagine a future for that kind of stable, solid publication or platform or outlet. Totally. As someone who worked at, Andrea and I met working at Vice Media, that definitely rings particularly true, especially since it was like, you know, it wasn't like Pitchfork where they sold it to a larger established company.

19:57It was, you know, a venture capital funded and private equity funded, you know, experiment in digital media growth or what growth on the Internet for a publication could look like. and this mentality of, you know, basically media companies began thinking of themselves as tech companies, or at least pretending they thought of themselves that way in order to like get venture capital investment and get investors excited. And then we're seeing what happens when you base a publication not on profitability, but on future growth, essentially, you know, especially after the vice bankruptcy and the stories of the higher up, like walking away with these huge bonuses after their layoffs and stuff.

20:47I don't know if this is actually true, but it felt to me having gone through all this at like the point of Vice was never to necessarily build something that would survive into the future. It felt like the point of it was to like make a few shareholders and founders very, very rich and then kind of took all of us along for a ride. Yeah, exactly. And I compare this to what was going on in the Vice building before they took over. Something I talk about a lot with like, you know, the DIY scene that happened in the Vice building in Brooklyn with venues like Glasslands and 285 Kent and Death by Audio, etc.

21:29Where there was like this pretty thriving underground music culture. It was not disconnected from like all of these dynamics, or at least it was like definitely in dialogue with like the internet and the growth that could happen as a result of the internet I guess or exposure but there was like real transactions like I was a part of that scene and it was like financially sustained by like real fans coming into a space and exchanging you know money for music and then Vice came in and took over the building and we're like oh we're going to kind of like take this spirit that is here, this DIY scene, and we're going to sell it to investors and say, like, we can give you access to this cool or whatever.

22:14And I asked myself, like, which was more real? Like they made, you know, millions of dollars. Right. And then there was a scene in the building before that that made, you know, a modest amount of money. But I'm almost like, was the modest amount of money somehow more stable or like more real than what happened afterwards. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that sort of speaks to stuff some scholars like Melinda Cooper and Lisa Atkins have been talking about when they talk about the asset economy. And they say, like, increasingly, the only way to make money is to own assets like intellectual property, copyright, stuff like that.

22:48And like actually working and getting a wage is not enough to get by anymore. And that's not even the emphasis of the economy. I mean, like selling things or selling your labor used to be like the basis of capitalism, but that's shifted now. So it's just like assets and investments. And that's why, you know, like Spotify is demonetizing low performing IP. That's why you can't get paid to write about music anymore. Right. And I think it also speaks to how one of the things that contemporary capitalism does is it sort of co-ops DIY. DIY, right? Because DIY is a community-based thing. You were talking about it's this building, this community, whatever.

23:30Doing it yourself meant doing it together apart from the mainstream industry. But now capitalism is selling DIY back. It's like, no, you literally, you're on your own. You're on your own as in, can you explain that? As in you're an independent contractor, as in there's no community. It's just platforms, things like that. Like it's literally you against everything else. You're an independent contractor competing with other independent contractors, but the game is sort of stacked against you to begin with by the platforms or whatever. That makes me think of that line in Ghostbusters like about Zool.

24:09It's like there is no community, there is only platform. Yeah, like I had some interesting forays a little bit into the crypto world in the last couple of years. And that was like the sort of neoliberal nightmare that, you know, certain people viewed as like, this is a good thing that we want to work towards. Like, we are all just sort of independent contractors who have like various sort of like maybe gig work here and there with different crypto projects. And then like also like investments here and there. And you sort of like you think of your income more as like a portfolio of like different investments and like transient kinds of work that you compete with others against often just like on the basis of like interactions with code.

24:55It's very, very dystopian. But I don't think that that's unique to crypto. I think that's just like where everything or a lot of things have been headed. Yeah, no, no, I absolutely agree. I mean, that's even like the whole blockchain model is just like individual contracts, no broader system. Yeah, it does like leverage rhetoric around community. but I think that it always ultimately boils down to that. Yeah. Yeah.

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26:02Specifically in music, where else do we see the effects of this sort of orientation of the music economy around the potential for exponential growth. For example, how might you connect it to like the way that musical fame works on the internet today? You had a really interesting piece recently about the narratives fueling music fandom, both on the right and on the left right now. Yeah. So if Pitchfork was sort of instrumental in the sort of rise of the rockism-poptimism debate. I think we're in a very different moment now for a number of reasons. First, musical categories work differently on algorithmic platforms, right?

26:45With listening being personalized, genre categories are sort of too generic and things are broken down differently. So there's that. But the rockism-poptimism debate was always a debate about race and gender privilege. I mean, you saw this with the infamous sort of Jan Wenner interview, right? Only white men can be rock gods, nobody else. That's changed, in part due to poptimism, in part due to popular feminism. You know, the biggest star in the world is Taylor Swift. Olivia Rodrigo, a teen girl of color, released the biggest rock album of 2023. The Breeders are opening for her. so wild yeah the genre politics and gender politics have scrambled from what they were 20 years ago so i'm trying to i was just trying to figure out like how is status negotiated in music fandom and music aesthetics today and i think it i mean this build on some earlier work i did but if everything's just markets now like if we're sort of told to think of ourselves as a market, right?

27:52You're a brand, right? You know, we invest in ourselves. Then markets are valued today when they grow exponentially, right? That same sort of like investors expect exponential growth, big gains, whatever. And you sort of see this, I mean, if you look on Twitter and online, this is what the fan armies do, right? They sort of pile on tweets. Like if, you know, Ann Powers writes a mildly critical but ultimately generous review of Lana Del Rey, you know, she can't log into Twitter for three days because she's just piled on by fans. Totally. That's definitely related to the political economy of platforms as well, right?

28:27Like that sort of engagement is really good for Twitter. So there's a lot of market forces sort of privileging kinds of engagements that create exponential growth, right? Like the various right-wing country songs, the rich men from Richmond and whatever, the try that in a small town, that was it, right? There's been, you know, sort of fan campaigns to kind of artificially boost the numbers of those tracks on the charts by buying downloads and things like that, right? So that's sort of like exponential chart performance, which again, you know, also drives social media engagement. So I think you have this sort of figure of the sort of capacity for exponential growth or sort of resilient kind of overcoming of being an underdog or a little guy or whatever.