How To Get Your Music Reviewed on Pitchfork: An Interview with Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief

If you’re here to find out how to get your music reviewed on Pitchfork, scroll past the next five paragraphs of self indulgence to the first question of the interview (it’s in bold).

Recently I spoke with Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief Scott Plaegenhoef to get an inside view of the holy grail of online music opinion.  A condensed version of this interview appeared in Wired.

I was encouraged by Scott’s view that Pitchfork is a conversation starter, that Scott is a regular reader of Hipster Runoff and that he intends to preserve Pitchfork’s long form reviews as the company embraces micro-publishing.

I first read Pitchfork in my late teens after being sent a link from a similarly music-obsessed friend.  Pitchfork changed everything.  I read Rolling Stone constantly in high school, even getting out back issues from the library.  In Pitchfork I found a new, more sophisticated kind of food to crave my musical hunger.
In the intervening years, Pitchfork’s reviews and end-of-year lists have exposed me to music, both old and new, that has made my life better.

I read the Arcade Fire ‘Funeral’ review in a backpacker hostel in San Francisco.  Within ten minutes I had bought the album at Rasputin’s and was lying on my bed, looking out at the cold listening on my Discman (I was late to the iPod party).  ‘Funeral’ will be the sound that anchors me to that time in my life.  I have similar stories about Neutral Milk Hotel, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Air France, Annuals and more.

For all those discoveries, I am grateful to Pitchfork.

13.99 at Bunnings Warehouse but not an early adopter.

I have watched, and occasionally laughed at, the backlash against Pitchfork in recent years and I’ve seen the Pitchfork Effect dilute with the emergence of thousands of online tastemakers.

But Pitchfork is still the king.  Pitchfork is still the tree at the top of the hill.  Below is a transcript from my interview with Scott.

Say I’m an Australian indie band with genuine talent.  What do you recommend is the best process for getting my music reviewed on Pitchfork?

Ha, well, the genuine talent is a help! The easiest way to contact us to email and mail something to me directly, not just to the office. I would also read some reviews, find out which writers might like what you’re doing, and try to contact them directly. Targeting people who seem open to your music is an easy way to help it along. If you do send CDs, I would expect that a one-sheet, while it could be read, is more likely going to be discarded, so if you send a promo CD you should make sure any information that anyone might want– your website, short bio if needed, contact info for booking or PR if you have it, is on the back of the CD case itself. Conor Oberst’s Team Love, Drag City, and some other labels do an excellent job with that.

As the world of music moves online, how do you see Pitchfork’s role changing?

I think we’ve become a more central critical voice, and although we are consistently used as a lazy stand-in for anything that’s “right” or “wrong” with “the internet” or “indie”, I’m glad we’ve been able to still provide an outlet for long-form reviews and ideas.

I’m dismayed when I read people thinking we are subjecting them to our opinions, shouting them at them and expecting them to be considered gospel.

We’re simply trying to start conversations, to share thoughts and experiences and ideas, and approach music as fans rather than consummate insiders. Online conversations are becoming shorter and pithier as people increasingly use handheld mobile devices to go online– Facebook updates and Twitter don’t exactly provide opportunities for much thought– so we’re a bit old fashioned with our long-form reviews and features.

It’s our hope that we can retain some of the intellectual vigour and column space of a print magazine in some of our sections (reviews, features), while also taking advantage of our status as an online-publication in others (the Forkcast, Pitchfork.TV and our news blog).

Readers, meet Scott.  Scott, meet readers.

I read the Forkcast pretty regularly but in terms of traffic what are the most popular areas of the site?  Do you see really clear user trends about how people are navigating through the site?

Reviews and news are still the most popular aspects of the site, by far. Certain features, however, tend to be among the most popular individual items we publish. On the whole though, the lead review is almost always that day’s most popular content.

How do you filter music from overseas?

We don’t treat international music any differently than American music, unless a record by a smaller band is soon to be released in the U.S. We sometimes then hold a review until the record is out in the U.S. Obviously though, we are an international publication by nature and we don’t restrict what we do or what we cover to what goes on beyond our shores.

You have the Pitchfork Festival, The Pitchfork 500, Pitchfork TV, the Forkcast… what goals do you have in terms of delivering the Pitchfork experience in multiple ways?

We’ve tried to slowly build new ideas that make sense. We’ve taken a very low-risk approach, we’ve not accepted offers for outside investors– we’re still a 100% independent publication– and we’ve done thing that we, as music fans, would have liked someone to do.

There is no place on the internet for high-quality indie music videos and shows, so we created that. There was no guidebook to cut through the past 30 years of music history, so we wrote that. There was no non-corporate, affordable music festival in the U.S., so we created that.

We understand that some of these things are open to scrutiny, that it can seem dubious to have a media outlet involved in them so heavily, but we trust what we’re doing and thought the rewards for our audience outweighed the criticisms we may have received.

One of a great series of photographs.

My favourite Pitchfork review of all time is Band of Horses ‘Everything All The Time’.  What is yours?

Hmm, I don’t know that I have a favorite. I do like Nick Sylvester’s first Jet and his Louis XIV reviews, which drive at some of costume-y, hollow necrophilia of today’s rock music– a lot of imaginationless guys doing it the way people did decades ago. I find that approach very dull. In the end though, we rarely ever do those stunt review and I like our clear-voiced, analytical reviews best however. One great example is Mark Richardson on the 30th anniversary of Born to Run.

What sites do you read religiously?

Music sites, I check out a wide variety– all of the bigger online ones of course (Drowned in Sound, Stereogum, Resident Advisor), about two dozen mp3 blogs with some regularity (most of the ones you’d expect: the larger U.S. indie ones, Little White Earbuds, Nah Right, Discobelle, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, etc.), some individually run sites like K-Blog, Blissblog, Riffmarket, HRO. NYT. The Guardian.

What are you most proud of in terms of what Pitchfork has achieved in its 14 years of existence?  Is there a review/article/band that stands out for you as an example of Pitchfork’s potential?

I’m most proud that an independent music publication has risen near the top of the music media world. I’m proud that we’ve maintained that independence, that we’ve helped push people toward sounds they might not otherwise have heard, or considered hearing.

And I’m proud that we still have the ability to ignore celebrity culture, which dominates almost all aspects of entertainment news these days, and we can spotlight anyone on the basis of whether or not we enjoy their music– whether that’s a global superstar like Kanye West or a guy self-releasing a record he recorded at home like Bon Iver.