Pitchfork Considered

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 21:38:19 GMT

Interesting NY Times article on Pitchfork Media and their role within the music criticism world. A lot of folks like hating on Pitchfork and some of this is deserved given their penchant for reviews that are, at times, long on self-indulgence but short on real insight or quality prose. However, that's a general problem with writing on the internet writ large. The real reason people resent Pitchfork, as the Times suggest is because it's powerful as a taste-making site. They are, without question, the most influential WWW-only publication in the rock world (don't get us started on most of their rap reviews though), making a magazine like Spin seem a little irrelevant when you get right down to it.

The larger issue this raises is what's now becoming a classic tension between print and new media and which will emerge as the victor in the long run. It's not that a site like Pitchfork operates at the same level as, say, Blender but as print becomes less important a medium to a generation raised online. Says Pitchfork's founder, Ryan Schreiber,

""Actually, I think things have gone from small to big on the Web. In print, you can only go as high as your distribution, and we would have never been able to pay for circulation, paper and mailing to reach the kind of audience we have. We have gotten very big without being really big."

(Source: Coolfer.com)

Music Filter: Computers and Internet

Pitchfork Considered