Wintour Storm: How Folding Pitchfork Into GQ Impacts Live

Last Wednesday (Jan. 17), in a surreal study of stark contrasts, Anna Wintour, the powerful long-time editor-in-chief of Vogue, a.k.a. the “Iron Lady of Gloss,” announced that Pitchfork, one of the most influential music criticism and discovery platforms of the last 25 years, would be pared down and folded into GQ. Wintour, who is also Chief Content Officer for parent company Condé Nast, said senior staffers, including its EIC Puja Patel, would be laid off. It was widely reported that while addressing the staff of Pitchfork, known for helping break acts like Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, Wintour never once removed her sunglasses.

Some claimed Pitchfork’s web traffic was more than many of its sister publications, that its unionizing activities influenced the platform’s gutting, and that nesting Pitchfork’s diverse staff under a male lifestyle mag was a slap in the face. What it impacts for sure, though, is artist development in the live space.

Pitchfork’s gutting is only the latest and most high-profile chapter in the ignominious grinding down of music criticism over the last three decades mirroring in reverse the rise of the digital era. Once a powerful throne from which artist’s careers, at times, could be made or broken, today music criticism seems anachronistic and a lost art form amidst a digital onslaught of instantaneous access, interactivity and quantifiable metrics. Who needs anyone to tell us anything, let alone what’s derivative, groundbreaking or meh if we can decide for ourselves with others in real time?

Except that when the independent-leaning Pitchfork gave its Best New Music imprimatur to relatively unknown artists it could become a hurricane started by that indie butterfly’s lone wing flap. A stamp of approval could spark an artist’s rise through the music business ecosystem with spikes in streaming numbers, radio spins, record sales and syncs along with packed club gigs, festival plays, late-night TV appearances and, significantly, a sustained touring career.

“It was fantastic,” says Wasserman Music EVP and Managing Executive Tom Windish when asked if Pitchfork helped his acts. “I looked at it every day for a long time,” he says. “We did parties with them at South by Southwest in the early days of Windish,” the veteran agent says of his original eponymous agency before it was acquired by Paradigm. “The first two parties we did there were co-presented by them. So we were close. We came up together and started around the same time, but there were so many acts we worked with at Windish where the support of Pitchfork — I can’t directly say how many tickets sold — was a substantial benefit to the artists when they got good reviews.”

Some of the many acts whose careers were enhanced by Pitchfork’s support, beyond Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, include LCD Soundsystem, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, The National, Kendrick Lamar, Deerhunter, The xx, Flying Lotus, Grimes, M83, Run The Jewels, War On Drugs, Beach House, Fleet Foxes and Odd Future among many others. The site’s in-depth reviews were carefully considered, contextualized and flew in the face of so much mindless clickbait and short takes.

When any act got a good score or Best New Music appellation it could put a huge bounce in an artist’s and their team’s steps. “We would relay it to the promoter and festivals immediately,” Windish says. “If they got a 9.0 or whatever, we would text a screenshot. It was like, boom! You don’t even need to read the review. Look at the number.”

And that number could directly help increase the band’s payouts.

Pitchfork was founded in 1996 by a 19-year-old Ryan Schreiber, who worked as a Minneapolis record store clerk and who was put off by mainstream mag’s music reviews, the lack of range and strong opinions. Pitchfork, which is a reference to a tattoo worn by Tony Montana (Al Pacino) in “Scarface,” proceeded to run circles around magazine gatekeepers with its thorough coverage of every genre.

“I personally deal with bands that are a bit left of center,” says TBA Agency’s Managing Partner Marshall Betts, who this week spoke about his Grammy-nominated act Alvvays, who have received Pitchfork’s Best New Music accolades. “And that’s the target audience that Pitchfork traditionally has gone after. The fact that they have very broad reach, when they do champion something is impactful. And it has been throughout my entire career to varying degrees. It’s something a lot of bands want and wish for, as a stamp of approval and it also can be somewhat impactful for ticket sales, especially newer artists. If you have a brand-new artist, but the awareness isn’t there on any sort of national level, it can help get that first step into selling out smaller clubs, which can lead to a lot of things from there.”

The music platform also produces the highly-regarded annual Pitchfork Festival at Chicago’s Union Park, which began 2006. With a capacity of 20,000, the fest has a history of quality bookings across music genres and eras and has included everyone from Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Beck to De La Soul, Bjork and Spoon, Chance the Rapper, Bon Iver and The Isley Brothers, Wilco, Phoebe Bridgers, Kamasi Washington and Mavis Staples among many others. It’s one of the most musically diverse and most user-friendly festivals in the market. Reports from Chicago indicate the festival will continue as will its upcoming fest in Mexico; there’s no word yet on its Berlin and Paris event.

My teenaged daughter just liked a TikTok post by Kittyyy335 featuring a knock down on a wedding dance floor with Sophie Ellis-Baxtor’s resurgent 2001 hit “Murder on the Dance Floor,” which has suddenly catapulted to the top of the charts after 22 years thanks to the Amazon Prime horror movie “Saltburn.” That post has 2.9 million likes, and there’s thousands of other user generated posts — that’s fully-leaned-in democratic participation, although maybe not the most discerning and it’s facilitated by the powers of marketing.

“Now it’s about virality,” Windish says, “which is a totally different thing. You can argue about whether or not you get virality because you’ve made a great album, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what’s required.”

Two days after Wintour’s bombshell, several retained Pitchfork editors updated the industry. “It’s been a devastating 48 hours,” the e-mail said. “I don’t have any answers about what Pitchfork/GQ means right now” and that “as of now we will still be publishing reviews on Pitchfork.com as we have been…”

And that’s good news for the live biz and many others.