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Pitchfork & The Death of the critic
Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, was once an aspiring music critic for Pitchfork, an indie-music publication that was acquired by Condé Nast about five years ago. Last week, Condé Nast decided to roll up Pitchfork into GQ, essentially ending Pitchfork’s run. In a postmortem titled ‘Prestige Recession,’ Strickler pointed out that this is not just about Pitchfork, but rather, it is about cultural criticism at large, and the not-so-surprising death of the critic.
It was once critics who helped shape cultural values – spotting a trend here, putting a scene on the map there – but now the process is driven by metrics. Context, the land of the artist and the critic, has been determined valueless (unless algorithmic) by the mainstream, which honestly never much cared for it to begin with. Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else. Who was it that criticized selling out in the first place? The critic, of course.
The decline of the critic mirrors the decline of the mediums they cover. Music and film are industries whose relative cultural value has dipped, thus their critics’s cultural influence has plummeted. In realms like politics and the culture wars, however, critics are thriving. Where there’s power and money, critics can have influence and get paid. When the money and power dry up, the beat does too.
Given how we consume media, I would argue that this was inevitable. For over a decade I have argued for adaptation by media to a new reality. With algorithms and platforms starting to play a much larger role in our digital media lives, the media ecosystem had to evolve. It hasn’t. Instead, the industry has taken collective shortcuts and kept doing more of the same.
Well, the barbarians are at the gate.
‘The critic has to educate the public, the artist has to educate the critic,’ Oscar Wilde once said. Well, that might have been true, but not anymore. Today, algorithms shape everything.
Let me illustrate with a small personal example. Yesterday, I fired up the latest single by Nils Frahm, a musician whom I like a lot. Once the track finished playing, another one similar to Nils’ played on. It wasn’t long before I found a song I had not heard before — and I saved it to a playlist. In the past, this artist was someone I would have encountered in a music publication.
In other words, now our personal preferences determine how we discover the new and novel. Photography, fashion, art, ceramics, shoes, food — there is more of what you like, or from whom you follow. We live in a highly personalized world — where we have sliced, diced, and remixed our likes into an endless stream. In this reality, someone who was once viewed as a critic is much less valuable in their current, present form.
So, in that sense, Yancey is right when he laments:
Cultural criticism and contextualization aren’t going away. They’re being de-professionalized. They’re switching mediums. What was a grand(ish) vocation has been demoted to a hobby and another form of “content.” It feels inevitable. We’ve gotten so used to it by now.
However, culture changes!
F.O. Matthiessen, a literary critic at Harvard, argued that being a critic requires awareness, social consciousness, and the ability to create the right way to bridge the gap between literature and life. In an era of limited access to information, the ‘critic’ was vital in providing social context to art, culture, and creativity within the prevailing social needs and norms. Today, we don’t live in that information-restricted world, where media organizations act as gatekeepers. Instead, we live in an information-dense world.
The culture critics who spent days creating words of criticism now have to evolve to use today’s tools to help others think differently, try new things, and have an influence. Playlists are the new words. Followers are the new readers. Critics of yesterday are now ‘tastemakers.’
While anyone can be a tastemaker, to be good, and have real influence, one still needs to have skills that add up to a professional critic — broad awareness of modern and past works, other aspects of life, understanding of popular culture, knowledge of society, and contemporary politics, economics, and global context.
Most importantly, you need to have taste. It might not be my taste. Or to your taste. But the reality is that anyone can be a tastemaker. And as soon as they can no longer be relevant, they are not critics. But given how we consume media — perhaps, this is the right evolution.
January 24, 2024. San Francisco
They say there’s not enough money in advertising. But if the site were so desirable it could be subscription-based. But it’s not that desirable. I prefer Metacritic to Pitchfork anyway.
Bob Lefsetz
5 thoughts on this post
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Hey Om, appreciate the call and response. What the internet is so great at.
I don’t disagree with you that algorithms have replaced critics for most people. But what’s interesting is that the same way LLMs and other AI models transform other people’s existing work into new IP/output, the same is true of those Spotify recommendations.
Back when I worked at the digital music store (eMusic), we were looking for a new recommendations vendor for the site. A bunch where brought in, one of which, called EchoNext from Cambridge, especially stood out. Their whole team came to NY to demo the backend of their taste graph for our editorial squad.
The presentation was amazing. They showed one of those old school data maps where you could see the clustering and connections between tracks, artists, and albums, and how they could be chained together in fascinating ways. And where did that data come from? It was all biographical, historical, and curatorial data scraped from music reviews, music databases, and similar sources. All of which was originally sourced by a music critic or academic at some point in the distant or recent past.
These models would still be able to make “sounds like” connections without that data, but to do the rich connections, to know what scenes are and who played with whom, these are all things that originated with human research just like I describe in my piece.
Of course we don’t look at things this way because it’s far more profitable to get excited by all the magic instead of the wizard behind the curtain. But they’re there and they’re not as magical as the marketing wants us to believe.
The company did not choose EchoNest, btw, because there were cheaper options available. We personally kept up with their team and found a lot of kinship with them. When Spotify acquired them, we all knew that was a killer move.
Yancey
What a wonderful story to hear about Echonest. I am good friends with Brian, and funnily enough was good pals with the guys from Pandora. I think maybe my experience as living on the Internet has made me more accepting of the technology influencing choice. I think for me the biggest moment was when I saw MyYahoo page for the first time, and that was when the reality set in. I think we have been on this curve since then.
I am on the board of a company called System, and the founder who worked at Beats at one point, and then later was chief data guy at Spotify. You might know him from New York circles, Adam Bly, and he has helped educate me a lot about the music graphs. There is so much “humanity” that can be infused into the algorithms.
This is something we should discuss, IRL or on my podcast?
Let’s do IRL and on the podcast 🙂
I know System. I’m an angel! Adam is great.
Hah, such a small world. I love it. And yes, let’s do IRL when I am in New York next.
Om I’ve been quietly reading your articles for a while now, I enjoy your work. Thought I’d comment on this post.
2 things came to mind reading your piece:
One- My opinion lines up with what you say about Matthiessen, but in a different way: Even in the world of “AI”, AI is trained on an amalgamation of human data, and is therefore inherently generic in its views as a critic. Like you pointed out: a critic embodies unique human experiences, offering insights that come from a personal level- often pointed. Maybe the new critic needs to adapt to the AI world by having the same broad human awareness- but by being super niche: having pointed opinions on niche things that have little to no dataset that AI could have been trained on to “critique”. You’ve pointed out that we’re moving toward a highly personalized world, I say we’re also moving toward being hyper focussed on niches as a species.
Two- Nearly every algorithm I’ve seen is tailored by for-profits to show content you’d like to see: that tends to be akin to an echo chamber, not a critic. Algorithms tend to suggest what we already like, and limit exposure to challenging commentary. Very different world…
2 things I scribbled down when I was reading this. I appreciate your work writing this piece, look forward to more from you.