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Die, Pitchfork, Die!
The indie music site that everyone loves to hate.
By Matthew Shaer
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006, at 7:26 AM ET
In July of this year, Bill Baird, a musician for an Austin outfit called Sound Team, drove out to a park near his home, slapped a sign with his band's name onto the chest of a life-size dummy, and stabbed the thing with a giant pitchfork. Then, as a friend filmed the action, Baird threw the dummy off a giant cliff. Later, he set it on fire. The next day, he posted the 51-second clip on YouTube. The impetus for the whole stunt was a 3.7 out of 10 review from online music magazine Pitchfork Media, which had described Sound Team's major-label debut as having "a shortage of, like, actual songs."
Pitchfork is often compared to Rolling Stone in its prime: a music journal that is single-handedly revolutionizing music journalism. That's a stretch, but Pitchfork does resemble its glossy ancestor in one particular way: attracting haters in astonishing numbers. Some people despise Pitchfork because it's too verbose, or too brutal, or they just don't like how the site dismisses established artists because it can. The Web contains large-scale Pitchfork parodies, statistical studies of Pitchfork's review history, and an eloquent, oft-quoted post from writer Daniel Taylor titled "Pitchfork Media Can Suck My Cock." Even venerable indie record label Sub Pop took their shot.
The Pitchfork haters, of course, only help their enemy. Pitchfork's founder, Ryan Schreiber, and his fellow editors can post album and track reviews earlier than most publications and at a greater velocity. They accumulate an incredible amount of wordage each week. But non-Pitchfork bloggers are the real engines of the site's influence. Pitchfork's traffic is modestâ??around 1.5 million unique visitors a monthâ??and it needs help to spread its gospel. Grand critical gestures, therefore, become essential. So does eliciting responses from people like the members of Sound Team. If a review is provocative enough, music geeks will pick up on it. By the time, say, a record-store owner gets around to weighing in on a band, a summary judgment has already been passed online. The phenomenon has a name: the Pitchfork Effect.
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