Okay, not everything is behind a paywall but the reviews are.

Honestly, for a site that has been about inclusivity for a while, paywalling is not a good idea but for me personally, this is good, because it finally forces me to go elsewhere to find new music. I was already mostly reading out of habit. I was finding it harder and harder to engage with the reviews. I just kept going back because I did still occasionally find great artists on there. Based on the number of albums I’ve saved, it just became fewer and fewer.

I understand that there are many pressures on any kind of a news site these days. Google is just fucking them over with AI overviews, they have corporate overlords who have their own goals and demands (and might very well be in bed with the AI companies to fuck themselves over), and more and more Internet traffic is focused on a very limited number of sites. It’s hard out there. In the case of Pitchfork, that corporate overlord is the owner of some very exclusive magazines, so Pitchfork feels like an outlier among all of the CQs, Vogues and Architectural Digests.

The other side of this is that is it worth it? The paywall is $5. Okay, that is in itself not a problem. However, subscription models have not been doing well. Sure, this was the dream since early Internet, but it has met with limited success. Sure, now people are more used to paying for content, but at the same time, how much money do you want to spend on subscriptions? I prefer to minimize regular spending like that. Sure, I pay for Nebula and MUBI and occasionally for something else, but I just don’t want to pay that many of those. I get wanting to help your favorite creator financially but there has to be a limit, right? If you are not rich (and I am not), how many of these should you really be doing? Should I stop paying into charities to pay for reviews I hardly bother reading anymore? I mean, if I paid that five bucks to every outlet or creator or service I get similar value from, we would be talking about somewhere between $250 and $300 a month. I could sustain that but I would rather pay down my mortgage faster.

So, I take the paywalling of Pitchfork as an opportunity. Specifically an opportunity to find a new source or sources to find music. Clearly, I have been growing apart from Pitchfork anyhow, but haven’t just bothered to react. You know, a relationship that is basically already dead but you just want to keep going, because you are comfortable in it. Now I have an excuse. I really don’t know what my alternative is right now but it shouldn’t take too long for some other outlet to step up to fill the void that is now being created by the paywalling decision.

So, yeah, Pitchfork has had a nice 30 years, about 25 of which we have spent together, but I guess everything needs to come to an end. A quarter of a century is quite a bit, but right now I’m listening to Sassy 009, a pretty good artist apparently, but one that Pitchfork barely acknowledged, so it kind of feels good to finally pull the ripcord.