also, why did vampire weekend (upper class, rich, trust fund police rip off artists) receive such a high rating on their lackluster, mediocre-at-best full length album?? because they’re ALL friends with the staff writers @ pitchfork.

check out staff reviewer, joshua love. he seems to think jenny lewis’ newest album was nothing special (i’ll agree; NOT saying it deserved ‘praise’, necessarily)… but check out what josh was up to before he landed his gig @ pitchfork…

instead of blindly trusting a ‘credible/legit’ review site (which kids do, because they’re lazy and want people to tell them what to listen to – see iLike, Pandora Radio, etc.) it would be fantastic if people were able to produce the effort necessary to see through pitchfork’s scam.

bottom line:
they’re helping their friends out because of how the public perceives them. nice scam.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GZWQ5sa-ftQ

‘Doesn’t sound like a derivite to me’

You raise some really interesting points in your comment, and I definitely agree with a lot of them. I agree that the connection is tangential at best, and I particularly like thinking of Pitchfork as Yahoo’s hipster twin.

And while I do think that there are things that Pitchfork shares with, for instance, Cell Phones and H&M, I think there are a remarkable number of parallels between P4k and Google that raise interesting questions. Certainly they are far from clones of each other, but they have followed similar trajectories and fill a niche space in their respective fields that is rarer than you give it credit for being.

Yes, in short Pitchfork is the publisher and Google is the library. But I think more and more we are seeing people treat Google as a publisher and Pitchfork as a library. Google chooses what people see and what people don’t, essentially, through their search rankings and targeted ads, while Pitchfork is frequently treated as an aggregator of music news and review (with individuals as publishers). Yes, they perform different roles, but I would argue that they are both trending toward the gray area in the middle.

As for the “dreamy mashup ideas”, I think you may be surprised. I agree that some of the ideas a farfetched or whimsical, but two years ago, P4k TV would have been a pipedream. Pitchfork has already printed a book. Pitchfork already publishes tour dates/release dates in a haphazard manner. Making the jump to the next level might be less a leap of faith and more a smart business decision

I would say combining your thoughts and my thoughts would probably construct a fairly reasonable middleground – but where’s the fun in that?

I just bookmarked your blog.

Which i fear, will be a pick up line in 5 years, but for now, it’s just a compliment.

Pg 6 should start: Point 2 (paraphrased): “Google and Pitchfork are successful industry leaders.” Every industry has a leader.

Pg 7: “Both make their money almost entirely off of ads” …like virtually every other successful website.

Pg 8: It can basically be boiled down to “Both have control over too much information.” The issue manifests itself in different ways.

I think it dropped only those 3 quotes. Lo siento.

The premise isn’t outrageous, but there’s really no structured argument here, just “here’s a few things Google and Pitchfork have in common, OK that’s done so they obviously must be the same in every way, now lets apply some of their details to each other and see what crazy shit we can come up with.”

That being said, even if a few similarities were a satisfying condition to declare Pitchfork and Google kindred web spirits, the similarities aren’t exactly rock solid themselves. Both launched in ~1996? Really? Just in search engines alone Ask.com launched in 1996 as AskJeeves, Altavista in December of 1995, and Yahoo! all the way back in 1994. Maybe Pitchfork is the Yahoo’s hipster twin.

(An aside: I won’t get all geeky on you, and you did kind of allude to this yourself, but suffice it to say that technologically speaking Pitchfork is more akin to the original “directory” model of Yahoo! whereas Google has significantly more in common with aggregators like Hype Machine.)

Anyway, why stop at search engines? There are tons of things in their infancy in the mid-Nineties that have totally penetrated the society since. Maybe Pitchfork is Cell Phones. Or DVDs. Or environmental awareness. Etc. Etc.

Point 2 (paraphrased): Every industry has a leader. Why isn’t Pitchfork BMW, or Apple, or H&M? Furthermore, Google isn’t successful because it embraced it’s subculture. Quite the opposite. It’s successful largely because it’s accessible and intelligible to non-geeks, and was when few other major portals on the web even thought such a thing mattered.

…like virtually every other successful website. “Google and Pitchfork are both websites” isn’t exactly a shocking revelation.

Then we arrive at a point I don’t think you make very well, but is worth discussing. It can basically be boiled down to The issue manifests itself in different ways. Google doesn’t actually manufacture the information, but they record the information everyone consumes. Pitchfork is a content creator, so they have a high degree of influence on the mindshare of their readership. In either case, it’s only a problem if they intend to “use their powers for evil.” (Yes, that’s a play on Google’s well known motto wherein, I think, they doth protest too much.)

But really, as a result of Pitchfork pushing Fleet Foxes et al. really hard, did people not listen to enough electro/nouveau backpacker hip hop/paul simon-y world-pop-folk/”we were born in the 80s so we’re gonna make pop music like they had in the 80s”/insert-genre-here this year? I think that whole notion is a bit of a red herring.

(Another aside: I do like the idea of PCal, but it also reminds me of something I don’t like. Namely, the notion that anyone aside from record label employees gives a shit about release dates. People who really like a particular band are much more interested in the day 3 weeks/months before the album release when it leaks on the torrent sites, and people who are ambivalent never cared about the release date to begin with.)

Then come the dreamy mashup ideas, none of which, I pray, will ever come to fruition. Pitchfork.tv will never be a TV network, IPTV will be widespread long before Pitchfork has enough cash on hand to attempt to launch a cable network, even in just a few markets. And when IPTV is widely adopted, *gasp*, they’ll be well prepared, as long as they start allowing embeds. They can start printing books if they like, provided that their goal is to go bankrupt as quickly as possible. They probably will merge with some streaming audio site at some point, but I hope it’s not Hype Machine because it’s my favorite, and whichever one they do merge with will inevitably be the worse for it. Finally, a Pitchfork social network may actually be the one thing that could make it officially uncool, for good.

Ultimately, there’s one big reason why a comparison between the two just does not compute. Pitchfork is a manufacturer; Google is a delivery medium. Pitchfork is Hearst, they’re NewsCorp, Tribune, you can insert any big media conglomerate in that comparison and it pretty adequately describes their mission. They cater to a smaller market, but it’s a growing one. And they want to make as much stuff as possible (written web content, web video, print content, live events) that market will want to consume.

Google doesn’t want to make anything. Google is smart enough to know that they can leave the creation to other people, they just need to be the best at helping you find the stuff you’ll like, and making it easy to integrate it into the rest of your life.

In short, Pitchfork is the publisher, but Google is the library.

The world is moving fast these days, as is the music scene. Pitchfork is blogging proof of this. They are not defining ‘hipster’ trends, rather hipster trends are defining them.

Speaking of which, I would really like to see a Thinking Man’s Take on ‘the hipster’.