The most trusted voice in music just put up a paywall.
Pitchfork announced on Tuesday that it’s moving toward a subscription-based model, mirroring a trend for other major music review sites like Stereogum.
The company will now charge $5 per month for unrestricted access to its album reviews, among other features like user-generated scores and moderated comment sections.
A spokesperson called it a “new era” for the company — a more social one.
“We want our reviews to be generative, and we hope the comments section and other cool new tools on the site will deepen our readers’ connection to music and each other,” Pitchfork’s Head of Editorial Content Mano Sundaresan said in a letter.
Because we know that spaces for terminally online music fans are hotbeds for polite, nuanced discourse.
Sundaresan also highlighted the new scoring guidelines for user reviews (which I’m sure will be followed very closely).
Despite the change, non-subscribers can still access four reviews for free each month, as well as the News, Features, and Columns areas of the site.
But readers who want more than that will have to “smash subscribe,” said the Pitchfork head.
In 2015, Pitchfork was bought by Conde Nast, one of the largest media companies in the world, famous for magazines like Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired.
In 2024, Pitchfork laid off roughly half of its staff, including senior editors and eight unionized members, as part of broader layoffs at Conde Nast, which included more than 270 employees.
Conde Nast simultaneously announced it was folding the popular music review site into GQ as part of a restructuring at the company.
But the worst part of all this? You could pay Pitchfork $5 per month and still not know what’s happening with the music scene in your own city.
Speakerhead is the kind of community-based, independent music journalism that investigates the stories that matter most in the Bay Area— coverage of upcoming artists like LaRussell, Surprise Privilege and those teens sneaking into Outside Lands every year.
Our goal is to serve the Bay Area music scene, its artists, and to put eyeballs on smaller acts in new and interesting ways. Even though we want to make money doing it, we’re never selling ourselves to Conde Nast. Promise.
You can support us by following us on Instagram, checking out our Patreon, or buying from our upcoming merch store.
It’s time to get back to our roots, y’all.
