“It’s a good deal for Condé Nast”, said Joe Mohen, a digital investor who has bought and sold a number of properties over the years.
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Terms of the deal were not released, but the transaction includes the website, two music festivals and a quarterly print magazine, The Pitchfork Review, which launched in 2013 with a circulation of 10,000.
Started in Chicago in 1996 at the dawn of the age of widespread Internet access, Pitchfork has become a kingmaker in its reviews and news on bands, particularly niche artists on independent labels. Pitchfork’s traffic has been growing slowly and steadily, though, and Condé execs especially excited that the site has expanded into video, which is considered very good at “engaging high-value millennial audiences”. It also owns magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ to name just a few. The move, founder and CEO Ryan Schreiber said in a statement, would allow Pitchfork “to extend our coverage of the artists and stories that shape the music landscape on every platform”. While The Pitchfork Review has continued, all three online ventures were shut down with film site The Dissolve wound up in July.
Fred Santarpia, the Conde Nast executive who handled the acquisition, explained the reasoning more bluntly in an interview with The New York Times: It’s about attracting “millennial males”, a group that is apparently underrepresented in Conde Nast’s mix of legacy brands and women’s publications.
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The combination of an influential but independent-minded music site, Pitchfork, with Conde Nast’s aspirational and consumerist titles drew a few strong reactions.
