The situation is worsened because Pitchfork supplies absolutely no public forum to accompany their news. Their comment capability is zilch. It's even difficult to locate staff contact information, and if one can find their email addresses, it's best not to expect a response unless your name is Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) or Win Butler (of Arcade Fire). In fact, the semi-rigged 2007 Readers Poll was the closest thing to a public forum that Pitchfork has ever provided. The downside is that it was a highly controlled and severely edited forum. Kovach and Rosenstiel warn against this. "Though new technology has made the forum more robust, its greater speed and velocity have also increased its power to distort, mislead, and overwhelm the other functions of a free press" (21). The site gets away with this because readers are too stunned by the sheer volume of content posted every day to realize that Pitchfork is not fulfilling the role of a music press.

Beyond preventing any reader interaction, Pitchfork also takes drastic measures to assert their control over the public conception of a band, even if that means severely damaging the band's livelihood. They have become experts at using love-me-but-hate-me tactics. They'll praise bands so long as it serves their interests, and then unexpectedly tear a band -- and the public's idea of that band -- apart. This is what happened to Travis Morrison of Dismemberment Plan, who received a 0.0 rating on his solo album Travistan (released by Barsuk Records), even though Morrison's original band had been highly rated by Pitchfork. "The effects of Dahlen's review were immediate and disasterous," wrote Dave Itzkoff, paraphrasing Barsuk Records cofounder Josh Rosenfeld in a 2006 Wired article (22).

How can an audience continue to trust an organization with multiple personality disorder? Readers never know when Pitchfork will turn on a growing band, or when they'll hype some new ultra-obscure one. This is jeopardizing one of the key factors that pushed the organization into the mainstream. "People increasingly see the press as part of an establishment from which they feel alienated, rather than as a public surrogate acting in their behalf" (23). If Pitchfork alienates more readers than they endear, their success will end.

Sustainable

In order to take so many editorial gambles, the site needs a rough formula that will guide how they approach new music. Pitchfork has become like a Vegas casino that develops a way to win every time. They only gamble when they cannot lose in the long run. Even if they hype a band that doesn't end up breaching the folds of obscurity, they'll survive as long as some of their pet bands do get huge. Hence, the bands are their lifeblood, and two basic reviewing methods evolved to keep the blood flowing.

The first method is to hype bands that they believe could enter the mainstream. Examples are the Shins, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, the Decemberists, and Broken Social Scene. All have risen to considerable fame within the past five years, with at least some help from Pitchfork. The second method is to create a façade of extreme obscurity or avant-garde spotlighting. Examples are Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and (more recently) El Guincho. Sometimes they hype a niche movement, like the "freak folk" to which Banhart and others belong. In this case Pitchfork is, by all common reasoning, taking a chance. They are hyping bands that will simply not appeal to most music fans.

This ensures that Pitchfork always appears to be on the edge of music culture, while deceiving readers into thinking they are fighting the oppression of the few major record labels. In fact, bands like the Shins, Modest Mouse, and Arcade Fire are now topping the Billboard charts and playing in regular rotation on FM radio stations -- both segments of the corporate music establishment that an independent publication should ostensibly despise.

Sometimes the two methods even cross over; Animal Collective is a perfect example. They are one of the strangest groups to create music in this decade. They seem to deviate from any expected progression in indie rock music. However, for a band that writes such bizarre music, they have built an enormous fan base. This year their name appears relatively high up on artist line-ups for festivals like Coachella and the inaugural All Points West, and they will headline the website's own Pitchfork Music Festival 2008.

Now even trying to find new music on Pitchfork can be a random act of stupidity, about as useful as pounding one's head on the glass outside a record store. That's because the site is in danger of becoming the digital boy who cried wolf. According to Kovach and Rosenstiel, the modern press "is squandering its ability to demand the public's attention because it has done so too many times about trivial matters. It is turning watchdogism into a form of amusement" (24). There's no doubt that Pitchfork is guilty of rampant sensationalism. But it happens in a calculated way that ensures that they stay afloat even if the bands that they depend on regress into obscurity.

It doesn't take much browsing to see that ratings are more often favorable than harshly negative. The Onion pointed this out with a hilarious spoof entitled "Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8," which turns out, coincidentally or otherwise, to be extremely accurate (25). In 2003, a University of Chicago student doing a computer science thesis analyzed 5,575 Pitchfork reviews, and published the results online (26). The average rating was approximately a 6.7 (which equates to about a 3 on a five-point scale, or a 7 on a ten-point scale).

This would by no means be a terrible review for any album, and many people who read the article would still check the album out, or even purchase it with no prior listening. In other words, Pitchfork's ratings are designed to appease more readers than they offend, thus ensuring the stability of their audience.

Previous-1-2-3-4-5-Next