Pitchfork

Last year, in an appearance on Rick Rubin’s podcast, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor observed that over the course of his career, music has become more ubiquitous — and, simultaneously, less special. “I kind of miss the attention music got … not that I’m that interested in a critic’s opinion, but to send something out into the world and feel like it touched places.”To platforms, music is just contentA little more than six months after Reznor observed that his medium’s cachet had been diminishing, half of Pitchfork’s…

Last week, it was announced that the influential and widely read music website Pitchfork was being folded into men’s magazine GQ, with the loss of many jobs.The title, which started as a blog in 1996, rapidly rose to become the dominant voice in music criticism for millennials. To many of the site’s millions of monthly readers this news means a great deal more than simply the decline of a large website: they see this, with some justification, as an existential threat to worthwhile music criticism itself.The pill has been…

On Wednesday, January 18th, media conglomerate Condé Nast revealed that it would be laying off staff at the online music publication Pitchfork and merging the website with men’s magazine GQ. “Today we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization,” wrote Anna Wintour, chief content officer at the venerable company that also publishes The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, in a memo to staffers that was first reported by Semafor and obtained by Rolling Stone. After 28 years and…

Pitchfork, the acerbic music site that defined album reviews in the early blogging era, is being hollowed out. Owner Condé Nast has decided to merge the music magazine with GQ, the men’s interest publication, according to a staff memo circulated by Max Tani of Semafor. Launched back when CDs were a thing, Pitchfork outlasted the age of music piracy and mp3s and through the rise of digital streaming. Its future as a brand post-merge is now uncertain. Multiple employees were also laid off on Wednesday, including…