The Pitchfork lay-offs spell danger for the alternative music press
Pitchfork, one of music journalism’s most influential online outlets, has become the latest casualty in a string of music industry lay-offs, mergers, and closures.
Originally founded by Ryan Schreiber in 1996, Pitchfork took on a new level of cultural currency in the 2010s, as blogs and emerging digital outlets started to find their feet. Often the snarkiest of the bunch, it worked hard to earn its devilish moniker; mercilessly reviewing albums according to a secretive, decimal-points based scoring system, devoted stans be damned.
Love or loathe Pitchfork’s knack for withering one-liners, it was impossible to deny that it’s debut album Funeral received a rare, near-perfect 9.7 write-up on the site, the record went out of print for an entire week as their label Merge struggled to keep up with demand.
