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Pitchfork: ‘The New Man’

The re-launched Pitchfork.com is flat out excellent.  I’ve been a big fan of the site for years, but it took a quantum leap forward with the recent redesign.  The editorial sensibility is as sharp as ever, the layout is incredibly clean and easily navigable, the use of lists is a great way to synthesize content into smartly digestible bits and the ability to sample more music and videos was sorely needed.  All in all, it is an outstanding face-lift for what was already the gold standard in music editorial on the web.

The Pitchfork redesign and my friend Dan Harris’ Tweet to me yesterday asking if Pitchfork had become ‘the man’ got me thinking more broadly about the evolution of editorial filters.

Outside of expensive video production and serious investigative journalism, the barriers to content creation are largely non-existent today.  Content is flowing like water on the web.  As a result, ways to filter and curate that content are becoming ever more important for overstimulated consumers.

Technology has enabled new types of open, ‘pull’ filters previously impossible at any degree of scale in a closed, analog, ‘push’ distribution world.  It’s always tough to appropriately categorize and label these things, as the specifics often fall into multiple buckets, but I generally think of two categories for these new curators: Platforms and Aggregators.

Platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr (both Spark companies) and others easily enable me to get a constant flow of great suggestions from friends and other trusted voices.  Folks put stuff out, and I decide what I want to consume. Twitter has effectively replaced my news reader (more on that another day), and I get a ton of music on Tumblr from folks I follow like tuneage, tracks, Andy, Bijan, Fred and many others.

Aggregators such as Techmeme and The Hype Machine present information pulled from editorial sources across the web deemed most relevant to their respective audiences.  They are not purely user-driven platforms, but rather aggregate and curate largely through technology built to measure relevance.

Brands are all the way on the other end of the spectrum and are of course more traditional in their approach to content — they are fundamentally human created and edited offerings.  This is where the Pitchforks of the world reside.

Maintaining and certainly building brands with so much noise out there today is incredibly difficult.  And given the openness of the web, even great brands are reliant on these platforms and aggregators for distribution.  I get Pitchfork updates through Twitter; I read NYTimes content through Techmeme.

And that’s exactly what is so impressive about Pitchfork.  They stuck to their guns through the ups and downs and smartly built and grew a best-of-breed niche web brand from scratch — one that rises above the crowd, leveraging these new distribution points but making it worth spending some real time on the site itself.  For this they will be rewarded with a business that continues to generate revenue, albeit less than what Rolling Stone made in its hayday, but with a much lower cost structure and therefore a profitable, sustainable model.

So to Dan’s question, yes Pitchfork has become ‘the man.’  But I don’t think they sold out.  What they did instead is build arguably the best niche music editorial brand on the web.  How many others in the music business can say anything that positive?

Pitchfork is the new model for niche web media properties.  Well done.