At the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.
This reminds me of Google under Marissa Mayer buying Zagat. Remember them?
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.
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.
"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."
There's a difference between buying a media property to try to sell more content(/advertising) into its subscriberbase(/userbase), vs keeping it as a going concern. Or sometimes, companies acquire into newer markets to try to boost their valuations based on P/E ratio.
AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.
I see Ars Technica taking a lot of flak in the comments but lawdy, they’re still pretty great and one of the news sources I actually pay for (full-text rss feeds are a nice bonus).
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…
Their automotive industry coverage is pretty good, but their car reviews are pretty awful. I'm not sure what value they add to the automotive review world -- they could carve out a niche of very detailed infotainment reviews, for example, but they don't.
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.
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."
Well there are signs. There have been less in depth articles in the past years.
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.
Do you have any opinions on the retro game value pumping scheme that ars had a few articles involved in it. I've only seen half sided pieces from them on those sorts of articles, I mentioned in the article having been made aware from a Karl Jobst video but they just tore me to shreds about the Karl getting canceled/nazi stuff. Like sure, he may or may not be whatever, but the information he put together was pretty convincing and didn't have anything to do with that.
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.
TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.
I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good music.
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.
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!
When Apple launched iTunes in 2001 it destroyed the value of music reviews. Buying physical albums used to be expensive, and sometimes you would kind of get cheated. You would hear a banging single on the radio and buy the whole album only to realize that the other tracks were just filler. So, a review by a good critic could save you from wasting money on a low-effort album.
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.
In the mid 2000s I remember following a redditor who worked in the music business and he would predict pitchfork scores for anticipated albums with crazy accuracy.
> I disagree, because I think the idiosyncratic aspect was way more of a feature than a bug of Pitchfork. The real purpose of Pitchfork was not to say which music was good or bad. It was to say which music is worth talking about, and it made itself the center of that conversation. Getting reviewed by Pitchfork was more important than getting a good review by Pitchfork. They were notorious for giving bad reviews to good 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
Music, even more so than film and TV, is incredibly subjective in terms of what you find to be good. Pitchfork has trashed a bunch of albums that I love and they've adored lots of music I find to be unlistenable. I suspect this has a lot to do with identity politics and other things that I really don't want being front and center in criticism of the arts. Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte.
Pitchfork was the way it was before the rise of identity politics in the 2010s. They’re inconsistent but they did document a lot of music over the past decades so I can’t be too mad at them.
Pitchfork was gone long before Conde. Back in 2011, they panned Childish Gambino's 4th release††, giving it a 16%†. Here's what Donald Glover had to say, 2 years before the Conde acquisition:
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
A year or two I was browsing the Pitchfork "best songs of the 10's" and was rather confused that "This is America" wasn't on it. A long running feud explains it.
But eh, they're allowed to have "bad" opinions. Every critic I've remotely followed has strongly disagreed with me at times.
It's not that they didn't like Childish Gambino (I don't either), but rather that the idea that Pitchfork had long since sold its soul for access was already floating out there in the air years before the Conde buyout.
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.
This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?
Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for personal care products("What I'm obsessed with this week!").
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.
Exactly. We always tend to blame the purchaser, but why not the seller? If their business was good and they cared about the product, why sell? And if the business was bad, can't blame they buyer, either.
I guess I will now blindly accept music recommendations from GQ instead of Pitchfork. Kinda fitting as I push towards 40.
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
I’m not a fan of their embrace of pop music. Music publications are useful to the extent that they introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. You can’t avoid hearing pop music all the damn time. Why anyone would want to read about it as well is beyond me.
Since day one, Pitchfork (all white nerds) used to love to throttle good music but they'd always give a pass to mainstream rap, praising even the most generic mass produced hip hop, like they always secretly wanted to fit in with that crowd.
Do we even need that anymore? I play games of "follow the recommendation algorithm" around my streaming service and I've been very successful in what I've found. Been able to surface a lot of artists I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Between that and Reddit's genre-specific offerings I'm golden.
I think so. Like OP, I would browse Pitchfork's reviews every so often, and often come away with things I never considered. That's the difference between looking at music reviews and following the algorithm. The latter points you to things that sound like what you're listening to, but the former opens your eyes to radically different sounds, or interpreting them in ways you hadn't considered.
I listened to the catalog of ONE (very good) parody band and Spotify spent the next four months presenting me only meme songs so yeah, those recommendation algorithms aren't very helpful IMO
Pitchfork is not dead ass now but close. 15 years ago we were in lockstep. I find Gorilla vs Bear best of playlist retains that OG Pitchfork vibe the best.
Readit News
http://web.archive.org/web/20240205170646/https://www.semafo...
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.
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.
"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat
AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vindigo-inc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
Dead Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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
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