Pitch Fork Grows Up

Ryan Schreiber's Once-scrappy hipster-ironic music review site has made it to media's mainstage-and that means teaming with Teen Vogue

- Devin Leonard

Baby’s All Right, a club in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, is almost full when Ryan Schreiber arrives. A burly 41-year-old, he’s wearing a dark overcoat open to display a vintage Whitney Houston T-shirt. Schreiber, founder of the groundbreaking music website Pitchfork, gets a beer and threads his way through the crowd for a better view of Melina Duterte, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter who plays under the name Jay Som; her debut album, Everybody Works, recently earned a glowing 8.6 (out of 10) review from Schreiber’s site. He wants to hear how she sounds live, as he puts it, “before it becomes a job” for her.

Duterte is the kind of independent artist whom Schreiber set out to champion in 1996, when he started Pitchfork while living with his parents in Victoria, Minn. Along the way, he established what became the dominant voice of internet music reviewing. “It wasn’t the detached, scholarly take of a Rolling Stone review,” says Alan Light, a former editor of Spin and Vibe. “It stood out for its insidery, hipster tone.”

Much has changed since 1996. Today, Schreiber employs 51 people, runs music festivals in Chicago and Paris, and has Fortune 500 advertisers. In 2015, Condé Nast, publisher of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, bought Pitchfork for an undisclosed sum, and now Schreiber works in a comfortable office at Condé’s headquarters in One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.