Today, Explained - Music’s Pitchfork in the road

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

Pitchfork’s parent company is folding the influential music site into GQ. Vulture’s Craig Jenkins explains how this is the end of an era. Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman says the robots are here to help. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My name is Eric Harvey. I'm an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University. But I've also been writing for the website Pitchfork since 2007. In 2023, I wrote the biggest article of my career for Pitchfork, a Sunday review of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I spent about five or six months researching and writing and editing the review. I submitted it to Pitchfork, and then they published it with a score of 9.3 out of 10. And then all hell broke loose. I got more emails and social media feedback than anything I'd ever written by a lot. Half of them were laudatory or congratulatory, and the other half were asking me,

where the hell are the other.7 points? That, to me, is Pitchfork. On Today Explained, the agony and ecstasy of Pitchfork and how we'll discover music without it. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement,

and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. This is the worst thing I've ever heard. 4.3 out of 10. Today explained Robin's firm. About a week ago, Condé Nast laid off a ton of people at Pitchfork. And in the days since, everyone's been writing these obituaries for what was maybe the most influential music publication on the internet, from Rolling Stone to The New York Times to Vulture. My name is Craig Jenkins, music critic at New York Magazine, Vulture. What else?

Craig Jenkins wrote the one at Vulture. You know, 2021 Pulitzer nominee for criticism, all-around annoying person on the internet for a good 15 years going. Craig's being humble. He was a Pulitzer finalist. He also used to write for Pitchfork. I wrote a lot of the rap coverage, the reviews from 2013 to 2016.

I've written about Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Earl Sweatshirt, Tyler, your creator, Childish Gambino, the Migos, whatever was new and interesting. For the uninitiated, we asked Craig to explain what made this site exceptional. What you saw in Pitchfork was a matter of perspective.

For fans, it was a music discovery factory where you could find out about great or terrible art inside and outside the mainstream field. And you could click around, you could check the good reviews, you could check interesting interviews, you could find out about news that was not getting published everywhere. There were a lot of cracks in the coverage up till the 90s at the prestige outlets.

There was a lot of stuff that they weren't able to catch or even interested in. There was antagonism towards certain genres. There was just a lot of real estate for someone to come in and have a different perspective on what was going on in music at the time and you know a lot of people did i don't want to give the one site that credit but for whatever reason that was the one that well

it was persistence a and b brashness good and bad that you, turns them into the one that the most people read, argue with, fight with the most. But there is a very strong chance that you might've heard about Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, LCD Sound System. You know, just think of any indie staple that's been around since the 2000s. The huge stuff that wasn't on the radio, a lot of it came up through there. And a lot of it was championed there first. So yeah, it wasn't just Pitchfork. There were a bunch of other websites doing this work, like Stereogum, or even like the Onions AV Club. Pop Matters, there were so many.

I mean, also another thing that was very unique about Pitchfork was it had this 0.0 to 10.0 decimal rating system, which led to people making fun of it, of course, and satirizing it. I remember The Onion once said, Pitchfork gives music a 6.8. Classic write-up. Do you have any favorite reviews or ones that you can quote that sort of give you a sense of what it was like to be in this world? Okay, I've been thinking about the Eminem Show review that's a mock email thread, the Daft Punk remix album review that's a comic strip in part, the write-up of Party Traumatic, the debut album by the band Black Kids is just a picture of puppies and a one-word apology for hyping the ep in addition to being you know an outlet where you could celebrate oddball

musical geniuses like you know isaac brock from modest mouse or whatever the site did a good bit of deconstructing reconstructing sort of the very concept of a review and so kind of the story is it spends a long time tearing the idea apart and then a long time playing tower defense and fortifying itself when it becomes the big fish. A lot of people hated the expansion into more traditional coverage, but personally, I saw opportunities to get really granular about popular music. At the same time as just weighing in on whatever indie stuff, I don't think my friends are yelling about enough. You know, looking back at stuff that I wrote that I feel like very proud of, the Kendrick Lamar Topimba Butterfly review. Kendrick Lamar's major label albums play out like Spike Lee films in miniature. In both artists' worlds, the stakes are unbearably high, the characters' motives are unclear, and the morality is naughty,

but there is a central force you can feel steering every moment. The good hair and bad hair, I agree with this story. Good hair and bad hair musical routines from Spike Lee's 1988 feature school days depicted black women grappling with colorism. It ain't even real. You wish you had hair like this. Girl, you know you weren't even born with blue eyes. That's right. Blue contact lenses. They're just jealous.

Right. Jealous. It's the biggest get of my career at the time, but for people who are looking at it from a different perspective, they're upset about, you know, a 0.2 decimal score difference from what they wanted. You couldn't write about this at Pitchfork like 10 years, 5 years prior. Nobody was trying to hear it. Nobody was there to cover it.

Nobody was there to. So like when I like, yeah, I wanted to get a certain voice in there and am really crushed about the fact that a lot of those voices are possibly potentially not going to be there anymore. Tell me what is going on with Pitchfork now that we've kind of established what this website was and why it meant so much to people. Well, so it's been folded into GQ and it seems like a lot of people have been laid off. You know, a lot of foundational staff and editors. It is still pumping out news and reviews so I am loathe to call it dead necessarily but it seems like there's not going to be the lists and the features there were a lot of the stuff that really kept people chatting in there it seems like it's going to pump out reviews maybe

underneath a GQ banner which is trippy because this was built on shooting at that kind of thing, was built on having no regard for the big mainstream media stuff, almost being in opposition to it. And it's like, can you have 25 years in this biz without it turning out that way? Yeah, it feels like a lot of people are mourning the loss of something, even though it's maybe not quite gone yet? Why do you think that is? I realized over a long week of trying to figure out what my next step would be if I got clapped that I was mourning a version of myself, a way of thinking, a sense of adventure, and a, you know, just like a learning about things in ways that i wasn't before and

that's what i miss i miss that era of things in general i'm reflecting on on what i was like in 2003 and what it was like to like find out about all this stuff that nobody knew about to to argue with friends about pop records and indie rock at the same time the kinds of conversations that were forcing this this website was not i don't want to say it was central to, but that were happening around it and that it was weaving in and out of. But you still have the kind of job that people who love music and music criticism dream of. I know when I see you tweet, like I wrote about SZA, I wrote about Mac Miller, I wrote about John Bryan, I typically have to stop what I'm doing to read what you wrote. But this feels like a dying relationship that people have with music criticism.

And it feels like platforms like Spotify, for example, want to make y'all completely obsolete by having the robots do all the work of music recommendation. How does that make you feel? Being that I have yet to run into the suggestion algorithm that quite gets me, like they can't decide if I'm a 70 year old man or a 20 year old teenager. And like, I love to be in that slippery position with them. So, you know, I'm happy for whoever it works for, but just if you're really like a serious music nerd, like this, you're going to find this stuff lacking. I feel like, um, another thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately is this notion that

people don't need critics anymore. Cause they could just go listen to the record. Do you know how long records are? Like, do you want to take 70 minutes to figure out if the new Drake is good, or do you want to take five and talk to a trusted guy? You know, like I don't necessarily buy all the notions about the lay of the land. And I think that there's still a value for discourse. If artists are cussing out their critics and the fans are, you know, using review scores as trophies, certainly something matters to somebody somewhere. I feel like there's still life left in it and there's still interest left in it and there's still amazing music happening all the time

that deserves attention so I'm going to be fighting for that as long as anybody lets me that's how I feel about it and when they stop then I'll be, I don't know writing about whatever else writing is transferable kids

remember that Amen Writing is transferable, kids. Remember that. Amen. Amen. When we're back on Today Explained, the next generation of music recommendations. The rise of the machines, the singularity, all that jazz. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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Today is gonna be explained to you. First, we had the radio and magazines. Then we had websites like Pitchfork. And then Spotify showed up to tell you what to listen to. Reporter Ashley Carman wrote about how the world's biggest music platform is changing how we discover bops. For Bloomberg News, we asked her to start in the age before AI. So Spotify comes to the U.S. in 2011. So how do you characterize Spotify? Is it a musical application? Is it social media? What is it? Well, it's really a music app. But we think music is the most social thing there is.

So it's probably a bit of both. This is the time of piracy. People are downloading music for free. They're not buying CDs. People have iPods. They're just downloading songs like crazy. And the music industry is really in a time of crisis. Spotify's bet here was that they could get people to pay for subscriptions that are ad-free,

and they can get essentially access to the world's history of music. So what we tried to do with Spotify, and the goal was to create a service that was actually better than piracy. It was simpler, it's easier for people to discover and share music. It's really all that. In 2015, Spotify debuts Rap Caviar, which is this flagship playlist that is supposed to really define hip-hop in that moment. The concept was basically kind of being like SportsCenter.

Like, these are the highlights of the culture. And so that year, you know, Rap Caviar takes off. It starts soaring in popularity. And eventually, a couple years later, Cardi B's success

is eventually attributed to this playlist. Her team said this actually in a Vulture piece. Hey! A song goes in Rap Caviar and everyone pays attention. This was for her single

Bodak Yellow. Don't let this bother me. So Rap Caviar reaches the point where, without even radio support, artists are breaking, they're becoming huge superstars, and it's all because of Spotify's editorial placements. The certainty here throughout this timeline seems to be that nothing lasts forever. What upsets the dominance of rap caviar? A few things. In Spotify world, Spotify starts shifting people towards these personalized playlists.

So you might remember when Discover Weekly came on the scene. Discover Weekly, every week you get a personalized playlist of new songs that you've never heard before. That was a big phenomenon that people love and I think people still do love. Essentially, they've just pushed people towards personalized playlists that are a bit more attuned to their specific tastes rather than a one-size-fits-all of a catch-all genre or category. But also, I mean, one thing that's important to note just in the broader kind of music consumption landscape is that during the pandemic, so, you know, we're talking 2020 here, TikTok totally takes off. And TikTok is obviously very algorithmically curated. It's not necessarily an outright music streaming platform, obviously, but music is so innately built into that app that people really start to discover music through it.

Hmm. And people at Spotify are paying attention to this change? I don't know that we could say how much TikTok specifically pushed them along, but personalization is kind of a buzzword that Spotify has long tracked. And even going back to 2020, again, the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Leck, he mentioned personalization on an earnings call. And he was saying, as we're getting better and better at personalization, we're serving better and better content. So more and more of our users are choosing that. So you can really see this acknowledgement of the shift outright completely in 2020, but I am sure it happened before then as well.

So what is this dominant figure in the music curation marketplace space doing now? What are their latest innovations? So the biggest thing they're doing is they're starting to shift towards AI playlists. They debuted a playlist called AI DJ last year. They use generative AI that was trained on one of their employees, actually, to kind of DJ a set, I guess. The idea is that the music selections are based on you and your personal taste. And then instead of it just being, you know, a regular personalized playlist, the AI generated DJ will, you know, give you some context like a traditional DJ would. So like some facts about the artist or some context, or maybe it's just like, hey, it's Tuesday. How

are you feeling? Or whatever, you know, like it will give you a little extra color to the playlist. Where does this AI DJ exist? Let me open up my Spotify. I didn't even know this robot existed. If you go to your phone and then at the top, you should see like a bunch of different tabs, like music, podcasts, audio books.

Okay. So what do I do? I just hit play and it's going to start yelling at me. Yeah. If you just tap on it. Hey, what's going on, Sean?

It's really great to be here with you. I'm Xavier. My friends call me X. And from this moment on, I'm going to be your own Personal AI DJ on Spotify Yeah, I'm an AI But listen I don't set timers

I don't switch on your lights I'm all about music Your music I know what you listen to I see no age there So I'm gonna be here every day Playing those artists You got in rotation

Going back into your history For songs you used to love And I'm always on the lookout For new stuff too Just to push your boundaries A little bit I'm always on the lookout for new stuff too. Just to push your boundaries a little bit. I'm going to come back every few songs to change up the vibe. But if you're ever not feeling the music,

there's going to be a DJ button at the bottom of your screen. Tap that and I'll come back early to switch it up. All right enough talk. I mentioned No Age. Let's get it going with that and some other music you've been listening to cute they're gonna play minor by no age uh x over here x gonna give it to you is just playing me music i already like i could do that myself yeah i mean i'd be curious yeah if you're getting a lot of what you've already listened to or if you think there's some new discovery there. The visualization is kind of creepy. It's like a circle with a mouth.

I don't like it. Yeah. But I want to know, do other people like it? Are people using this thing? I personally haven't heard anyone mention AIDJ to me. Spotify says it's very successful. I can't remember if they've shared any specific details about user numbers, but they haven't said anything to counteract that narrative of it's a successful launch for them. The thing I do see people using more and what they really do seem to like is this day list. I saw a TikTok where somebody said Spotify has a new personalized playlist called the day list that changes all throughout the day based on what kind of music you usually listen to then. And I was like, Oh my god, what's on mine? So this is my yearning, soul crushing, emotional, mellow, dramatic swamp evening. What's wrong with just

good old fashioned like, hey, this DJ is pretty good and always introduces me to new music. Why did we have to go from the human curated to the algo curated? I think there's a few reasons. One is kind of like a typical techie reason, which is like a DJ might push you to try new music that you've never heard before. And I guess I would say like make you uncomfortable in the sense of like, I don't know this person.

I'm like totally experiencing something new, which to some people might sound awesome. But to other people, they might be like, no, I just want to hear something I like. I don't really want to be like pushed. I'm just trying to do a workout here. And I want something that works for that moment that works for me.

And so if you're a tech company, naturally you're going to be like, we want to serve people stuff that keeps them using our app. We don't want them to switch off and just do something else with their time or just turn the music off completely. So from there, you can see kind of an incentive just to make sure that everyone's having a good time, basically. But then also, one of the reasons I reported on that Spotify has kind of started to make this shift over to the algorithm is because these music curators like the physical humans, it's really difficult to scale them. You know, you would need a huge workforce to cover all the genres, all the different possibilities of situations you might be in that you want to listen to music. And so really what they're trying to do is like use humans to better classify music that they can then put out into the personalized playlists.

The truth is as good as we are at recommendations, if you really put your mind to it, you could create a better playlist yourself. If you really spent the time on researching and doing all that stuff, I think five years to 10 years from now, that will not be true. I think we will do a better job even if you spend a whole working day trying to figure out what you wanted to listen to. We will be able to create a playlist that is so much better than any of that.

Hmm. Do you think in this new sort of algorithmic driven model, that story you told about Cardi B could still happen? I think so. Yeah, I do think artists continue to find success on playlists. It's kind of almost like a ladder system. Like maybe you start out on these personalized playlists or like super niche playlists, but then you eventually rise up until you're like on the rap caviar or whatever, where you are now on the flagship editorial playlists. And one thing that I know rights holders artists do like about the personalized playlist, or at least they call them

alligatorial playlists, is essentially, whereas on a flagship playlist, maybe you have 50 artists or something. On a personalized playlist, what you have 50 artists or something. On a personalized playlist, what ends up happening is these human curators might put 100 artists on the playlist or more. And you and I will have different playlists, but essentially, there's still this bucket of people that can be chosen from. And it really just allows more artists to be heard rather than limiting the opportunity to just these select lucky artists that are on the flagship playlist. Ashley, do you think there's room for both of these phenomena to exist sort of in perpetuity? The trusted critic review from Craig of the new

Jay-Z-D'Angelo collaboration as a way of discovering that there's a new Jay-Z D'Angelo collaboration versus the AI DJ, which I personally find a little creepy, but I'm sure some people love and yearn for, that is giving you all the things you like and maybe based on those things, something that's like it that you might also like. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a broader crisis around digital media, obviously. So like, you know, if you're publishing an article to a website, like, is that a sustainable future in business? You know, I think right now it's in question. But as far as like human beings sharing music they like and like making recommendations, you know, that culture does exist on TikTok. I somehow these personalized playlists kind of flatten culture and you lose the nuances of the human existence. So I do think there are like a lot of questions about what happens when you lose these independent editorial voices.

And I hope there's still room for them. But as of right now, it seems like it's becoming a smaller and smaller opportunity. Ashley Carman, she writes about all things audio for Bloomberg News. The program today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Hadi Mawagdi. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd. This is Today Explained. Earlier in the show, you heard from music lover Craig Jenkins, who writes beautifully about all the good stuff and some of the bad stuff at Vulture. We asked him what he's listening to. Wall of Eyes by The Smile, Tom York and Johnny Greenwood and

Tom Skinner, not Radiohead guys have made a great record that is really gritty and weird and sort of like murky just a fun listen Lee Scratch Perry final album final recordings out in February

I really enjoyed them hopefully other people will Yeah.