MI, Pitchfork and digital disappearances

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Putting this in metal discussion insofar as it relates to what happened with MetalIreland too:

Blogs waned as social media boomed. Platforms like eMusic and AOL Music invested in reviews for a while but then gave up. Often entire archives were junked. My CD single reviews are no great loss to posterity – but vast swathes of 21st-century music criticism are now literally unreadable. Every dead link on the reviews' aggregator Metacritic tells a story of neglect.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2024/01/the-pitchfork-years

(Do the aul interrupt page loading as soon as you see text to avoid the paywall appearing.)

[KingHostile]

Joins a raft of music related habits that are now disappearing into history.

Waiting outside the record store for the album, physical product cost of postage alone these days, crate digging (accept those with a smaller collection might still do this more), album artwork (design / presentation)....why is it all my 80's vinyl sounds better than any of its modern day reproductions?

Analogue say what you will its still king, prefect transmission of midi-chlorians digital continues to move a good direction but its still in the box as far as sound scope goes....

etc etc

[Don Gately]

Yes it's a shame, we really are at the mercy of streaming platforms now for our music, I still buy records tho of my favourite albums or good new music because you never do know if they will be available in the future to stream. That's why gigs are so important to the metal community

[Paul keohane]

I never collected Vinyl,but collected cassettes from a young age and then Cds in my early teens.Nothing will ever replicate the feeling of finding an album you really wanted after sifting through hundreds of albums in a shop.Or taking a chance on an album by a band you never heard of,just going with your gut because the album art was class.All a gamble becsuse thats all the money you had that week,so if the album was shit youd be gutted!!.I sold or gave away all my collection about 7/8 years ago,i just ran out of room,kids and homelife etc.Ive been a Spotify junkie years now.I do miss looking at album art and reading inlays I have to say.

[Bogmetaller]

Did anyone ever find out why MetalIreland just ceased to be one morning without any prior notice? Surely your man Treacey could have sold it to someone?

[ochoill]

Did anyone ever find out why MetalIreland just ceased to be one morning without any prior notice? Surely your man Treacey could have sold it to someone?

There's digging to be done across a few threads here and FB to put it together but the long and short of it was he was sick of running it, was moving on to do something else anyway with his life (was it the BBC he was working for?) and shut it down with the intention of selling the domain but was asking a demented price for it.  It never sold and now we have MW here instead with a sort of weird splinter of terrible FB groups that tried to fill the void and took off during the start of 2020.

[ochoill]

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2024/01/the-pitchfork-years

(Do the aul interrupt page loading as soon as you see text to avoid the paywall appearing.)

Would any of ye be able to copy and paste the article text here please?  I can't get the interrupt trick to work on my phone.  Go raibh mhaith agat

[Bürggermeister]

When the music itself is of practically no value, it's no surprise we're heading to a point where all that will be left is youtube comments. Everything which used to live off the back of vital new music can't be sustained when nobody really gives a fuck about music anymore, certainly not in the way it defined us as kids, assuming most of yizzers are over 30. I don't think music plays anywhere near as important a role as it used to for most, beyond the walls of this very niche forum for what is still a largely niche form of music.

It's interesting they list Mojo as a magazine which is still healthy. The audience is those 50 and above, far less likely to have abandoned print than younger customers.

[Carnage]

The Pitchfork years

The announcement that the music website will be folded into GQ signals the end of an era in music criticism and popular culture.

By Dorian Lynskey

The news that the music website Pitchfork will be folded into GQ by its owners Condé Nast, with the reported loss of most of its team, is a body blow to the world of music journalism. The decision, for which the reasons remain vague (the content chief at Condé Nast Anna Wintour said it came after a "careful evaluation of Pitchfork's performance"), has ripped out the heart of online music criticism. The music-writing section of my CV is largely a cemetery of defunct magazines, but Pitchfork's demise as an independent entity feels especially shocking – because it was supposed to be the future.

I remember when, in 2001, Q magazine first decided to take its website seriously. Print, I was told, was doomed sooner or later, and online journalism would be superior anyway. Clips! Links! Comments! For a few months I was somehow paid to review the bonus tracks on CD singles. Like later experiments, that investment did not last long because the real money was still in the print magazine. Pitchfork, however, was a digital native – the flagship of an armada of new websites and blogs that constituted a brief golden age for online music journalism.

Pitchfork was founded in 1996 by the Minneapolis teenager Ryan Schreiber and professionalised in the mid-2000s when it boosted a generation of so-called Pitchfork bands, from Arcade Fire and Bon Iver to Deerhunter and Grizzly Bear. In 2006, Pitchfork staged its first annual music festival. In 2013 it won a National Magazine Award for excellence in digital media. Two years later, the acquisition by Condé Nast gave it serious financial muscle, although the publisher's announcement at the time that it hoped to bring Pitchfork's "millennial males into our roster" was ominous.

While Pitchfork has also published profiles, essays and investigative reporting, its core mission has always been thoughtful long-form album reviews. Despite its reputation for snobbery and snark (an infamous 2006 "review" of the Australian rock band Jet consisted of a gif of a chimpanzee urinating in its own mouth), its real appeal lay in the sincerity and passion of its best pieces. It offered numerous young, talented writers paid work, a global platform and conscientious editing. Its Sunday Review series, reassessing older albums, boasts some of the finest music criticism of the past decade.

During the Noughties, Pitchfork was intertwined with the figure of the hipster: the internet-savvy, semi-ironic, postmodern cultural magpie who inspired considerable angst about the distinction between serious love of art and shallow clout-chasing. How long ago that seems. The efflorescence of online music journalism began to fade as far back as 2007. Late in that decade, excellent sites such as Stylus and Idolator were shut down or bastardised. Blogs waned as social media boomed. Platforms like eMusic and AOL Music invested in reviews for a while but then gave up. Often entire archives were junked. My CD single reviews are no great loss to posterity – but vast swathes of 21st-century music criticism are now literally unreadable. Every dead link on the reviews' aggregator Metacritic tells a story of neglect.

Legacy titles struggled, too. The digital versions of NME and Spin are pale shadows of their print predecessors. The brand of Q, once the UK's biggest-selling music magazine, was recently sold off and relaunched as a skeletal news site. But Pitchfork sailed on. Like NME or Rolling Stone before it, it became synonymous with music journalism itself: loved and hated, resented and admired, essential.

The gutting of Pitchfork is not just a loss for writers and editors, but all music fans. Spotify's algorithm can introduce you to new music but it can't contextualise it or tell its stories. Replacing media "gatekeepers" with AI ones has not enriched the culture. There are new formats for music journalism – the YouTuber Anthony Fantano is perhaps the world's most influential music critic, while Cole Cuchna's podcast Dissect is a masterclass in analysis – but like any art form, popular music deserves a thriving critical culture in the written word. While some music websites survive, notably the defiantly left-field digital magazine, the Quietus, it is striking that the alleged dinosaurs of print, led in the UK by Mojo and Uncut, have outlasted most of their supposed successors.

Artists, too, will feel Pitchfork's absence. Under editor Puja Patel, the site vastly expanded from its white, male indie-rock roots – in a 2010 list its favourite song of the 1990s was Pavement's "Gold Soundz"; in the 2022 rerun it was Mariah Carey's "Fantasy (Remix)" – but it continued to review niche albums that would be lucky to get 150 words in print. While thin-skinned stars, such as Lizzo, have summoned their fan armies to persecute the writers of less-than-glowing reviews, most artists still appreciate passionate, well-informed engagement with their work. I found Pitchfork's decimal ratings system an absurdly precise affectation but the site's honour of Best New Music could launch a career. Such journalism plays a vital role in building up the stars and headliners of the future by amplifying artists' ideas and personalities and generating a wider conversation. Meanwhile, there are several one-shot magazines solely devoted to the billionaire Taylor Swift.

You could argue that music criticism, and music itself, are less culturally important in the age of streaming and social media. But Pitchfork's problem seems to have been advertising, not readership. The puzzle of how to monetise online journalism has still not been solved. Buzzfeed and Vice, the new media stars that flourished while magazines and newspapers were decimated, have recently downsized, too. Only a handful of media behemoths, such as the New York Times, seem financially secure.

The crisis is even bigger than journalism – part of what Cory Doctorow calls the "enshittification" of the internet in pursuit of shareholder profits. Most websites are shallower and uglier than they were a decade ago; most platforms less functional. As laid-off Pitchfork veteran Marc Hogan wrote in Rolling Stone, "Perhaps Pitchfork matters today because its arc parallels that of the internet itself, from nerdy and amateurish to grown-up, worldly, and inclusive, to now gated off in a Babel of AI-age confusion."

The promise implicit in tech's philosophy of "move fast and break things" was that what was broken, or "disrupted", would be replaced by something better. But like the proposition that the "long tail" would foster a more diverse culture, or social media would bring us together, or limitless free information would strengthen democracy, that turned out to be a devil's bargain. Pitchfork's fate is just one symptom of the failure of the glorious online future.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Ah, nice one man, sorry should have thought of doing that meself!

[The Butcher]

If you have your own music on digital only platforms, make sure not to put all your eggs in one basket, have your own gdrive + youtube + whatever else that you control + personally I always make sure to do a batch of physical copies.

The more of anything the less value we attach. Interested to see how things pan out as we have a 2 generations now either grown up in their 20s or growing up in the digital age - just in terms of how they create/consume music and music-related content when it faces direct competition from games/podcasts/clips/reels etc etc. I know with my stuff, 100% of the CDs are purchased from the age bracket of 25-55. Realistically is that going to continue from that cohort 10 years from now? I'm not so sure.

I see people from metal bands making tik-toks/clips/reels - not for me but I'm guessing that's how people are trying to link people back to their own work. Doesn't seem sustainable and just adds to the pile of digitally disposable content out there - again less and less value as more and more people feed into those social media systems. Subscriptions & crowdfunding will only work for the 0.001%. MetalIreland went out in an odd fashion and the money aspect was ludicrous considering how a similar forum was created so quickly after it's demise.

I could see a scenario where AI/ChatGPT etc will ramp this nonsense up and becomes impossible to filter out the crap and people will flock back to these old school forums to have actual proper interactions (unless AI bots cleverly flood this type of place too to bring the numbers up in order to obtain revenue from advertisers but maybe advertisers will become wise to fake stats too).

Spotify now implementingof a filter in terms of monetisation by removing payouts to bands with less than 1000 streams per month.

a whopping 158.6 million songs, a staggering 86.2% of the total catalog in streaming services nowadays (measured using ISRCs, which stands for International Standard Recording Codes), received 1,000 plays or less last year.

24.8% of the entire streaming services catalog received ZERO plays in 2023. That's a whopping 45.6 million tracks.

 

[Bogmetaller]

Did anyone ever find out why MetalIreland just ceased to be one morning without any prior notice? Surely your man Treacey could have sold it to someone?

There's digging to be done across a few threads here and FB to put it together but the long and short of it was he was sick of running it, was moving on to do something else anyway with his life (was it the BBC he was working for?) and shut it down with the intention of selling the domain but was asking a demented price for it.  It never sold and now we have MW here instead with a sort of weird splinter of terrible FB groups that tried to fill the void and took off during the start of 2020.

Interesting. We are lucky to have Metal warfare and we should probably remind ourselves of that too

[Pagan Saviour]

Yep, defo lucky to have it. The chat on facebook etc is braindead. You can have a good discussion here most of the time and it's largely been civil, definitely a valuable resource.

[Paul keohane]

Good online forums are invaluable and stand the test of time.

[Squigs]

There used to be loads of websites, now there's only a handful of social media platforms and they're all shite. Forums absolutely ruled, Metal Ireland was truly pivotal for me.