Pitchfork: Ryan Schreiber

I love doing the creative side of this so much that I like never focus on my business. Um, but I did have one advertiser who had like actually reached out to me and said, hey, we want to advertise at the top of your site. How much will it cost? What was the advertiser? Um there were a an online record store called InSound. And what would they pay you a month, to remember? Um they asked me to name a price and I so I went. Oh my god.

Wonder how much. So I just pulled out the biggest number that I could think of. Which was five hundred dollars a month. Wow.

How about Five. hundred dollars I was like, oh my God, that'll pay almost that'll almost pay my rent each month. And their synagogue.

Sure, no problem. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. they built. Guy Roz, and on the show today, how Ryan Schreiber taught himself how to write reviews about the music he loved. Grew that into pitchfork.

One of the most influential music publications in the world. If you met Ryan Schreiber in nineteen ninety five, He'd be hard pressed to predict that his webpage of his own music reviews would one day become a powerful media company. For the first few years, hardly anyone noticed what we called pitchfork.

In fact, Ryan's day job was as a clerk record store outside Minneapolis. But slowly in fits and starts with a few near-death moments. Ryan built Pitchfork into a multimedia company that could make or break new artists. Ryan was just 20 years old when he started posting reviews on a website. He had no training or formal experience as a writer or a critic. He was just a music man, and in many ways that lack of experience served him well. He wasn't trying to build something big or profitable or influential.

At least at the start. But eventually, Pitchhork was reaching millions of readers a month and employed an army of reviewers, writers, producers, and event planners. In 2015, Pitchhork was purchased by the media giant Condé Nast, And all of a sudden, Ryan Treiber found himself sitting in meetings with some of the most powerful figures in media. people like Anna Winter of Vogue and David Remick of The New Yorker. It was an unexpected path for a guy whose main ambition in life was to work at a record store.

Ryan grew up in the suburbs outside Minneapolis. His parents were realtors and not surprisingly, from an early age, music was a central part of his life. From the earliest point in my life, before my memory. Uh my mom tells me about, you know, how putting music on would make me just like if I was like throwing a tantrum or crying in the c crib or something like that. She figured out that if she put on music, like I would just be silent and

Listen. So even though they weren't You know. They weren't very into the arts or music or anything like that. They were, you know, casual music fans. We had some country music records around, some like Three Dog Knight and Captain and Teneal and whatever else they they liked. Um, but once they saw how

um enamored I was of music and that I would just sit in front of the stereo all day and just listen and listen. Um, they just started bringing me records. And I wasn't really particular about the records that they brought, though it was sort of a quantity over quality thing at that point. I just wanted to absorb as much as I could. Hm. In terms of like the school side of things.

How were you? Was school hard for you? Did you not care? School was very hard for me. I was neither a good student nor was I like at all socially adept. So I was definitely I was also sort of a I was like uh sort of textbook ADHD case. So I was always sort of acting out.

a bad combination in general, but uh you know, but at the same time, you know, I was actually also really fortunate because My parents actually really instilled a lot of self confidence in me. So If I would get rejection from my classmeates. I always kind of had a sense it's like

We're not close. You don't know me. You don't know what. You don't see the parts of me that I see. Did you as a kid did you play any sports? No. Completely unathletic. I played I did play piano.

Kind of a sport. A musical sport. Definitely. But I knew that I was gonna do something in music. And

Unfortunately just going to public high school The programs weren't amazing. Most of the programs that you could take I took. But It wasn't

It wasn't teaching me anything I didn't know. I was very much a self learner when it came to music. And I mean and then socially Things got much better in high school, but I was still definitely on the fringe. Um And there was definitely a point where I considered going to college.

But you know, I didn't have the gr I didn't nearly have the grades. Like I Kind of barely graduated. Yeah. Tell me about I mean,'cause you really

This is the early nineties. in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Minneapolis obviously legendary Music Town, Prince, Huskerdo, the replacements, um and and and and others. Yeah, I was really fortunate to grow up in Minneapolis because Music is such a big part of the culture there. And alternative music in particular was very very well nurtured in the city at that time and very

appreciated. Uh we had FM radio stations in 1990 that would play Jesus and Mary Chain and I mean you two but Nick Cave and I mean stuff that, you know, of the a very rare format at that time. And those were stations that like honestly kind of taught me. You know, here's a way to take music that is really subcultural and really kind of Deep?

um into alternative culture and make this presentable, you know, for sort of a wider audience because You know, a lot of independent alternative music. Um was also quite experimental. Did did you Would you hang out at record stores? In high school?

No. Constantly. Oh my God, it was like the only place I ever went. And I would spend hours, hours at the record stores. I got to know all the people at the record stores. You know, I'm like fifteen, sixteen, like asking them. for recommendations and I like this, what should I listen to next? And how's this? Have you heard this new album by the cure? How's that? And just constantly digging and you know looking at all the artwork. And they had like Actually at my local

record record store in Minnetonka we had at that time. It's no longer there, but th there's a big record store chain. Um in Minneapolis called Chepo. And um I just I spent all my time there. They had a listening station in the back. Do you pop in a C D. Yeah, if it was if it was used and it was already open, they would just like let you bring stacks back there and just listen. Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, eventually I mean they were just little the you know, C D boom boxes. Clears, yeah, yeah. But Eventually I kind of was like, okay.

This has a tape deck on it. Ha ha Um So Eventually I started bringing in tapes and making mix tapes in the record store.

He would just hit record and record record tracks. Yeah, I would. I was I was sneaking it and it was I'm sure very conspicuous and I would guess that probably they'd seen me do it, you know, once or twice and turn a blind eye. Sometimes I did get caught and they were like, You can't do that. Come on. This is like stealing music before uh. Yeah, it is actually, now that you mention it. Um It was so valuable. I mean, it was hard to get. It was expensive. Um you know. People don't realize People of a certain age don't realize there was a time when people would hit record and play on their boombox.

Yeah. You would just wait and you would time it. Yep, you would time it. And you know, um yeah, press that on pause, just sit by the radio and wait, you know. Wait for that song to come around on the hour. No pr no fun anymore. You don't have to hit record quick quick record. Hit record on the boom box. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it's hard to be too nostalgic about it. I think the art of the mixtape is like one of the main things I'm more nostalgic about. Because there was such a you're like handcrafting an object. It's not just like a collection of songs that you're putting together on a tape. It's like the whole package. It's not the same.

Exactly. Um All right, so you graduate, you're eighteen. And You're not gonna go to college. Um so w what did you

Do I mean where did you did you get a job? Right away. I did. I graduated and then I applied at this very like cool local record store.

And I was very adamant about my application and like calling, did you get it? You know. And they got back to me a couple of weeks later and they said Hey, we really appreciate your enthusiasm, but You need to have some prior record store experience.

to get this job. Um so I said. Where can I get that? Where can I get that where I can also get a job? Um but

The Mall of America had just opened. So I went down to the Mall of America. I applied at the Musicland store. I was in like that. And worked there for The minimum amount of time, six months, before I went and reapplied at the other you know. What was the name of that record shop, by the way? It was called Down in the Valley. It's still there. And um

Was it like in high fidelity? Was it like that? Like you were a a bunch of like sort of music snobs who were also working in a record shop? Was it or is that completely off off base? No, it was it was a lot like that. It was a lot like that. The the store itself Was

You know, it was a record store slash head shop. It was one of these, you know, with a counter in the back. And um lots of Grateful Dead stuff around, Pink Floyd, incense burning, like the whole nine. By the way, were you into any of that? No, I wasn't. What's so funny is I was not like I would sometimes have to go back and work the head shop counter. And they would They're just slinging terminology, you know, and I'm like they're like, uh give me that dugout and that one hitter, and I'm like Can you could you just point that out to me? Like I was insane.

But yeah, so we had people who were like into all kinds of music working there, lots of, you know personalities. Of course we're like all snobby, you know, like I don't think we're like snobby to the customers. Like you know. That's sort of a record store a record clerk stereotype. And for good reason because I've been I know I've experienced it to like no end also, right? Like being on the other side. You don't want that record. Exactly. You know, oh are you sure about this? You know, or just uh, you know. A light groan or a

Heavy sigh. Yeah. By this point, I mean there was obviously there was Rolling Stone, there was Spin, there were other publications, music magazines, they were they were already changing, right? Um But There were still some really good

music magazines coming out of the UK, like Melody Maker and N M E. Would you ever go to newsstands in Minneapolis and like Fine, look for those. Yeah, I mean that's another thing I would do. I would go to like the local borders or Barns of Noble where they had just like infinite magazines of every subject. Um and the music magazine section was so deep. I would just sit and read. I would like listen to my headphones, sit and read. I mean really I actually loved Q at that time. Q was so sardonic. Um it's really thick too. I mean they did so much coverage. Their captions on all their images were hilarious. Like It was so biting. And that

I think that that kind of UK sensibility of mu of the UK music press. was one of the things that really influenced me. to kind of be caddier or more vicious early on. And were you I mean, this is a time when like the mid nineties when um This is like the kind of the golden age and the beginning of like

alternative weeklies in in cities really kinda start to blow up. And zines. People would make it Scenes. People would like to use word PageMaker or a Quark Express and a Mac.

And print out pretty nice layout pages and then you could photocopy them into zines and then Sell them. Yes. Were were you ever were you into into those? I was. I was very into zines. You know, most of them were really

Interviews with artists and record reviews. I mean, you know, the indie community was very like there was a deep camaraderie. Like we're all sort of outsiders. We're all kind of in this together. Um, and we all support kind of, you know, people in the scene. So there wasn't a lot of negativity in the reviews, which I think in hindsight. You know, kind of kind of a nice thing. Yeah. Um, but at the same time, you know, you could always kind of detect, Oh, well, if you're into this or that, you might like this, blah, blah, blah. Um, I was like Where's the negativity? Like we're all music fans too, you know, and music fans have

We just we have strong opinions. That's like kind of the you know, that's one of the most fun things about engaging and having conversations with other music fans is this heated debate about, you know, what matters, what's good, what's not. And having not seen any of that in a lot of the local zines or any the indie zines, I was like We need to shake this up. Ha You s you see these kind of like this scene kinda scene. Yeah.

I mean h how did you I mean, did you start to think, you know, I wanna make one myself? Yeah, I was actually really drawn to the idea, but I just I had no I mean Working in a record store doesn't You know, I was fortunate to be able to live at home while I did that. So my expendable income, I could you know, whatever was there was not much. Uh, it's certainly not enough to support even something like

Creating Two hundred Three hundred. copies of something to distribute around town. The overhead was just kind of out of reach for me. Um, so yeah, there were there was always kind of like an instinct, like, oh, I could do this. Look at the look at these kids doing this. They got like 10 minutes on the phone with like

You know, Ian McKay. From Fugazi, yeah. But but he's a guy you can actually call up. He and would answer the phone. Exactly.

Yeah. But you know, there would also be, you know, oh, they got David Byrne, you know, and people who were like less accessible. I saw that they were getting that kind of access and they were just local zines. So I knew that There was a way. what was the genesis of of how you came to to the idea of Starting. Your own zine

Like So while I was working at the record store, this is nineteen ninety four, um I had already been on local bulletin board systems, these like

services that you could call up that a person would host a computer and it would be sort of like a local regional message board. But in nineteen ninety four, one of these people introduced me to the internet. He was online already and showing me all, you know, websites and showing me how everything worked. And he had made a website. And I was like How do you do this? You know? He's like, it's actually really super easy if you know Photoshop, which I'll teach you, and you know five HTML tags and You have an FTP client. I'm like, this is the sounds complicated. He's like, no. So he actually walked me through it and it didn't take long to learn. So I basically just started learning that software. And you didn't even really need to know that, frankly. Um, I just wanted to make sure that we had images and you know, that it was visual as well as text. And then I started to see other publications kind of popping up online. So you set up a website basically. And I think you called it turn table initially, right?

And it and this was just a static website, maybe with like a photo and just like Text links and then What do you remember writing on on it? Like what would I have found on Turntable? Um you would have found first you would have found interviews because the first thing that I did was try to talk to artists. Um who'd you get? That was actually the big draw for me at first. My first interview was with Lowe. Believe it or not.

But they at that time were just, you know, a local band starting out in Duluth, Minnesota, who would come to the city all the time and play. And did you just call them and say, Hey, can I interview you for my My Zine by a website or do you remember we how you pitched it? So I actually called the record labels because I didn't know how to reach the band's, you know. I mean nobody had a website at that point. Not even the labels had websites. So in order to find the in order to get in touch with the label, What I would do is I would call the Minneapolis Public Libraries information desk and I would ask them for can you find is there a phone number for Matador Records in New York? Is there a phone number for an up records in Seattle or in Washington. Um and I would hang on the phone for like half an hour while this wonderful

librarian lady would go and look through I don't know. God bless public libraries. Keep going. Seriously. And um and so yeah, she w it would take a while. And then she'd finally come back though, and she would have two of the three phone numbers for me. And at first I don't even know what department I'm looking for. I'm like Um, so I have a zine and I want to do like an interview with this artist. Do you know who I talk to about that? They're like uh You want publicity.

Hold on. Um and so I would I would Finally get in touch with the publicists and I'd be like I mean all I would want is like Can I get 10 minutes on the phone with this person? It doesn't have to be big, you know? Like I had no interview skills at that point anyway.

And and it was kinda novel. I mean, there were definitely interviews that I got really early on. Like I did get to talk to David Byrne really on early on, like nineteen ninety eight. I mean for me early on. Um and I got to actually meet him at, you know, what was something like the State Theater in St. Paul before his show. And like I'm sitting down with David Byrne, like asking him about the soup he's eating or whatever, you know? And um And what would you ask them? I mean, would you just ask them, I don't know, about how they made the record or how how how would you conduct the interviews? Often I wouldn't I wouldn't talk that much about the music. I want to know I again, I just like kinda wanted to have like a friendly conversation. Um and so I would kind of come up with a list of questions in case there was not necessarily like any form of chemistry, but often there would be. Some of the questions were also just

Joke questions. I think I asked King Coffee of the butthole surfers. Do you have any naked pictures of your mother? Which he said. No.

And I said. Do you want to buy some? And that was the end of the interview. Wow. Oh my gosh. Well yeah, but like I mean the music press at that time was also so irreverent and just you know, I mean it was that was sort of Gen X slacker culture. I mean you have this natural confidence, which is

Incredible. I mean you're very lucky that you had that. Because Being young is har I mean you remember this. Being like eighteen, nineteen, twenty twenty one, it's hard. It's scary. Like you don't

You you know that there are things you can do, but you don't quite have the the language and the experience to express that to people who are older in positions of power. But somehow you were like You would just go out and And just

See if somebody would do an interview with you. Yeah. When it came to music, I knew that I knew what I was doing. I knew that I knew what I was talking about. Even if I didn't necessarily have the skill set yet, I was like, There's only one way to do this. You know, and that's Dig in. Um, so after the First couple of interviews, I hit on an artist who um whose new record was coming out but hadn't been released yet.

And when I asked to do the interview and I had set the interview up, they're like, Oh, do you want to hear the record? I'm like, Well, isn't it not out for another month? They're like, Well, we'll send it to you. I'm like You'll just send it, like for free. Like you'll just send it to me for free, like before it's out. And once I found out that that was That was what happened at music publications, that you'd get on a mailing list and they just send you piles of free music. Everything that's not out yet, or stuff that's just come out across every genre and listen to whatever it was I wanted to listen to, and then like start writing about it. Yeah But yeah, once that started to happen, I started to go. I have so much music here that I can't cover myself. Maybe if I put out like you know a post on the website I can find other people I can send these CDs to, they can write about it, and maybe we can like really amp up our output and that's what happened. But how did you know?

how to talk about music, even how to break down the instruments or how to talk about how it was recorded on multi-track or How did you even have that language to where did where did that come from? How did you learn about it? Well that came from reading you know, all the music publications. That's where I got, you know, I mean, I read so much I read

every piece of music press that I could get my hands on from the time that I was thirteen. So by the time that I was Seventeen I had Kind of a a pretty strong handle of at least the terminology and you know the handy um

uh rock critic cliches or turns of phrase or You know, so I had an innate I had a really strong knowledge just from Self educating, you know, twenty four seven. I know that what was originally called Turntable, you I think very quickly had to change the name'cause you

There was another company called Turntable, right? Yeah. They were called Turntable Media. And They I think they did make like sort of magazine CD ROMs or like they did video interviews and things like that. I remember like oh I don't know, six months into me doing it and they sent they sent a cease and desist, which Scared you. Yeah, it's scared the hell out of me. You know, like what is this legal this is from a lawyer. What's going on? I guess, you know, I'll just change the name. We'll kind of just circumvent this entirely. So how did you come up with Pitchfork? I came up with pitchfork.

I was I was watching Scarface as teenagers do. And there's a scene in the movie where Al Pacino's being interrogated by The feds or something.

And um The they noticed this pitchwork tattoo. on his arm. And they're like, Oh, what does that mean? That means assassin. And I'm like, Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Like I needed a new name and I needed a new the new name pretty fast. You know, I'm like living in rural Minnesota. I kinda like the angry mob connotations, which at that time were not so Tea Party affiliated. You know, it was more just general. Angry villagers kind of vibe.

But I liked I liked all the connotations and I thought, you know, it's sort of like It's sharp. And um I really wanted pitchwork to be more aggressive in its review style, to be Harder.

on music and I don't know. Have a higher bar. Alright, so you kinda rebrand this as pitchfork. This is still a

A hobby. Right. And I and I want to I want to illustrate this. By reading your f the first review you wrote on Pitchfork. It's it's of the amps. It's a a record it was uh Kim Deal from the Breeders from the Pixies, she puts out this record and I wanna basically read I wanna read This is written by you. You give it an eight point two, you say, um initially I wasn't sure if this record was for me. It seemed so low fi that it was barely audible. The songs didn't stand out immediately, and I was just like, Jesus, compared to the breeders, this is terrible.

After a couple more listens, I couldn't believe I wasn't pulled into the awesome rock melodies and the brilliant lyrics from the beginning. And you go on to explain it with a few more words, and then you write at the end, It won't leave my disc man for at least three days. Well, that's kind of a long time, I guess. That is great. It's very short. It's to the point. This is not um Robert Cruzkow or Jim Devergata style review.

You know, a a young guy who's just starting out, but Unself conscious. Let me tell you, when you read it in that voice, it it it gives it a lot more character than I think it it leaps off the page with, naturally. So thank you. When we come back in just a moment. How Ryan begins to grow pitchfork out of his parents' house, telling them to please never answer the phone.

Because you never know when it might be David Byrne. Stay with us listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid-1990s, and Ryan Schreiber is working out of his parents' house, writing pithy and unpretentious reviews about indie music for his new online publication? Pitchfork. I started writing two reviews a day after a while. At that point it was really uncommon for websites to be updated daily. I mean in this at this point, you know, nineteen ninety five, ninety six when I started publishing.

Almost everything out there was static. There were just a few publications like McSweeney's I think was already around. There were a couple of others that would update and they'd have something every day. And of course I'm like, Oh, well these are the ones that are kind of becoming established and like getting a reputation. Um If we start if I start doing something every weekday, I can build a daily audience. And you know, but I mean when they're like that, when they're that short, that quick, they're just so easy to knock out. Yeah. But you know, I was very fortunate to be able to establish pitchfork at a time when there was zero competition. There was nothing on the web for these art as so uh so again by the time that people did start to log on 1999, 2000 These search results would lead so many people to pitch work.

And that's that really helped it get a get a strong footing. Um, I mean the first two years it was just you. Kind of writing. Well really what I would describe is like almost like a a public diary. of the music you're listening to.

And you were working at the record shop. And also I think you got Like you'd doing some telemarketing also to earn some cash. Yes. Which you were good at, right? You were pretty good at it. I was kinda good at it.

Yeah, the record store kind of stopped cutting it. You know, I wanted to move out. You want to move out of your parents' place. Of course. And uh I needed to support myself in some way and um When I did apply to the job and I got in really easily, I mean, this is a room full of like thirty or forty people who come in from five to nine PM We do cold call from these cards that we get issued from the mortgage company. Um, and we just call these numbers and the idea was to call them Ask them, you know, a series of questions about their home.

I was I mean I was such a kid. I know I sounded young Um, and so I'm calling people, you know, at dinner or like after work. And there's this child asking them about their 15 year adjustable rate mortgage or whatever, you know. And so um the way that it actually worked was that it was totally commission based. So you set an appointment with them, you got five dollars if they came in for the appointment, you get an extra ten dollars. If they ended up Submitting

to a mortgage proposal or to s submitting a mortgage. you get twenty five. If they close, you'd get fifty dollars. So like off one call you could reasonably make like You know. almost a hundred dollars. Yeah. Um, I started to actually make kind of like really good money doing that in the evenings. You know, and that would free me up during the day to do pitchwork from like nine to five. I would be able to work on it as a full time job. But um this is not a business. You were not thinking of this as a business.

I mean w w did you see this as like your future? Were your parents like, This is your future, Ryan? Or w was it just like Like this little kinda side project. I actually did see it as my future. Wow.

And by the way. I wasn't trying to be um I'm like I was really trying to understand how You saw it. because you probably weren't one of the few people who did see it as your future.

Yeah, I think so. I mean I definitely was one of the few people. My parents did not understand the internet. They didn't understand what I was doing in my room on my computer all day. I was telling them about it. They would get strange phone calls like Hey Ryan, somebody is calling you from You know, Sony music. David Burns on the phone. I mean exactly, you know. Oh Mom, don't answer the phone. Like, you know, I got my my my setup, my tape recorder, okay. Um But to Her great credit. She paid that phone bill every month and was

Mm. I didn't hear about it until many years later. But you but you did see this thing that you were doing as as what? Like when you say you saw this as your future, what did you'cause nineteen ninety seven The internet, I mean Yeah, I mean there was there was a big boom happening in California and people were making lots of money and Yahoo and but

But you had this little Basically block. Yeah, um You know, the it didn't take a lot of foresight to see that people were going to be logging on in mass numbers in short order that that was going to be happening. There's already like it was growing just at an insane pace, exponential. And so I you know, I'm looking at like w how much time I spend online versus how much time I read magazines and I'm like, well look, if you know all of these mag when all of these magazines transition online or have an online presence, like you know, I was already asking myself those questions, like Am I gonna continue to buy the magazine or am I just gonna do this? Um

For me, I was also like, Well look, they have advertising in magazines, we can have advertising on websites. Um so Even though I knew that I did not yet have a readership enough to support actual real ads. Um, but I did start looking at how other Zines. And you know, sort of the the the like mid tier kind of indie magazines like Magnet and Waygun and I I actually in in some cases went right there.

their sales department and be like, Oh, I'm interested in advertising, can I get like a cop and just like learning and figuring out how they did it. Wow. So you you would write to some of these music mags and say, Hey I'm potentially interested in advertising and they could send you their rate card. Yes. So you could learn about how they were making money. Right. And I would go, okay, this is what their distribution is. You know, this is the audience they're reaching. This is what they're charging for a full page ad. Oh wow, they charge it. So the gears were turning in your head. You were thinking How can I turn this thing into something that actually could be my job.

Yes. But but you were not you had n not only were you not making any money from it, you had no money to to get people to help you out, right? I mean So how did you eventually'cause then eventually you did get a couple more people

you know, writing reviews. Was just friends who just kinda did it for fun, for free. The first writer who started writing was my was my best friend at the time, was still one of my best friends, Jason Joseph's And um and it was just like a hobby for us. It was fun. I was like, I'll I'll give you some CDs and you're right about them. He's like, Okay, great, you know, because again, the reviews were so short, like it was effortless. And and it was clearly all kids. Yeah, I mean I don't think we had a writer who was older than twenty four at that point. And how would you find the writers? You would post where?

I posted on the main page of the site and I said, Hey, you know, we're looking Oh, you're looking for writers. We're looking for writers, you know, send a submission, send your examples and I got kind of amazing, like huge number of submissions, even as early as nineteen ninety eight. And in fact, a lot of people in the first and second sort of group of writers who kind of came on board. You know, ended up becoming sort of like pitchwork lifer. Like uh I mean, most of these people were way better writers than I was. So I was like, Oh, this is incredible, you know. people want to write about music, it's a good way to get experience or whatever. Um And

So Mark Richardson Who became the editor in chief for many many years and probably one of the most Post from your o March nineteen ninety eight.

Wow. Yeah. You know, I'm I'm wondering, I mean, as you sort of really begin to think about this as a potential business. Um, did you file like an L L C did you t I mean, in nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine was Pitchfork like

A business did you have like No Did you uh no not even close no I had not I had not the first idea about how or why to do that. Um and in fact I don't think we were even incorporated officially until like two thousand four. It's a very long time. Mm. What was the the impetus that gave you The confidence to

to jump into to a full time'cause it I think You know, you were doing record stores or telemarketing, but by nineteen ninety nine you decide To move to Chicago to leave Minneapolis. W was that for a job or was that just because you want to live in Chicago or w what was why? Yeah, I had made um road trips, a series of road trips to Chicago where like the I mean the very first road trip I took and I'm like in the city for the first time. Yeah. I mean I'm not actually in the city limits for thirty minutes before I decide like oh this is exciting. I would love to live here. I wonder if I could figure out how to do this, you know? Um, and um and so I actually just started saving up. And at the same time, um

eBay had just kind of come out. And um I noticed that people were selling Music and selling bootleg things, CDs. And you could get, I mean, just absurd amounts of money. on you know, the auction block at WASE Bay for, you know, things that you could just go buy at your local record store practically. So I just started selling the stuff that I already had in my collection, kind of like whittling it down and what can I get rid of and what's worth a lot.

And through doing that, I made I don't know. Probably five grand. But I moved to Chicago. With that much money in my hand.

And was determined, I was like, look, I love doing the creative side of this so much that I like never focus on my business. I'm gonna not give myself an opportunity to mess up, like I'm gonna have to work on this as a business. Um, I did have one advertiser who had like actually reached out to me and said, Hey, we wanna advertise at the top of your site, how much will it cost? What was the advertiser? Um, they were a an online record store called Insound, which no longer exists but was kind of a a force at the time. And what would they pay you a month, do you remember?

Um they asked me to name a price and I so I went Oh my god. I wonder how much. Um so I just pulled out the biggest number that I could think of. Which was five hundred dollars a month.

Wow. How Five Hundred dollars.

I was like, Oh my God, that'll pay almost that'll almost pay my rent each month. And they're seeing the gone. Sure, no problem. Yes. I mean, because they're at the top of every single page of the website, you know? Everybody. And I mean 1500 readers a day. People who are completely obsessed with music, people who are looking to buy music online.

Yeah. Yeah. So you go down to Chicago and I I have my theories as to why you I mean, Chicago was a hugely fertile place for amazing music in the nineties. I mean, just we can go on and on, Wilco and And Tortoise and uh I'm probably forgetting a million bands. I mean um Ko came out of there, but so many bands are coming out of Chicago. Yeah, I mean the Touch and Go was out of there, Drag City was out of there. Um and so, you know, it was an extremely fertile. Music scene.

And um and that to me was really exciting and really inspiring. You know, I just wanted to be in the middle of. Oh yeah. W did you get an office? Uh or no, presumably you're just doing this out of the apartment you're renting, right? Yes. I rented this apartment. I mean it was Six hundred dollars a month, totally cockroach infested, but like that was my HQ, yeah.

And and were the costs of running the site high at all, like the server costs or anything like that, or was that relatively cheap? No, it was actually dirt cheap. It was crazy. There was like no overhead whatsoever. So, you know, it was all upside, which was very fortunate because I wouldn't have been you know, if it hadn't been, I wouldn't have been able to make it work any other way. And I guess one of the things that that's important to emphasize here is that the reason why so many of these turns out to be incredibly talented writers We're writing for free was because It was really, really hard to get published in a in a

Print publication. In the early two thousands. I mean it was a very h in even an alternative weekly, like These were You know, these were really, really like buttoned up places in a lot of ways that was really hard to break in, and so Uh and then the big websites, the salons, the slates also really hard to get into.

So this was a way for people to just kinda get their name out there. Yeah, and also I mean pitchfork had Even from, you know, the late nineties on, pitchwork had, you know, among those whatever fifteen hundred people who read it every day, You know, had a quite a lot of credibility in the music space. Um even though a lot of our reviews were so not review like some of them

were I mean especially when s a lot of these other writers started, the writing got a lot better a lot more quickly. But Because we're turning out such massive quantities, review is kind of like the review factory. Um You know. There it was something that people who were really true music heads and were online And especially if they were, you know, interested in independent music, followed pretty closely.

So it had A certain Cachet. Even maybe that some of the Other publications might not have, even though

Certainly you'd get paid at those publications. So you're in Chicago, still I mean this is still a labor of love for everyone involved. Um you're living up your savings. Um and it's late n or ninety nine when you move there. And I think

one of the first really what I g I guess in hindsight was a real Turning point. was a review that this guy Brent Di Cresenzo writes about The new radio head album, Kid A. Yes.

And uh so So here's here's here's just a lot a couple of lines. Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as rock. are pointless.

Comparing this to other albums was Is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. This review gave the album a ten. Essentially calling this

The greatest You know. record ever. And um I wouldn't disagree. with him.

By the way, this is probably one of my two or three favorite albums ever. Yeah. Review and and I guess that got you

It did. I mean, it's funny when I look back on that review, there was a there was a time, I think, for a little while there where I was kinda like, Oh my gosh, that r'cause I the review spawned such polarizing Right, because it's over the top, really over the top, but but but beautifully written. It's probably one of the most over the top reviews I've ever read in my life. Um And at the same time, this is how we both felt about this record. We were both like, I mean, we were awestruck. This record was transcendent. I mean

He writes this review so unself consciously. And and and again we should Pitchfork is still small potatoes at this point. Like it is a tiny Like really tiny Place. But like

The writing of this review is is so unself conscious that it's just wonderful. And I don't know Brent D. Cresenzo, but Thank you, Brent. For that review. Yeah, I mean really thank you, Brent, because that review

Totally. I mean, like pitchwork was growing really quickly at that point. Uh we had probably something like an average three thousand. Maybe thirty five hundred readers a day. A day. Oh. But I was like really gunning for that five. You know, it was kind of like it was weird how like analytics at that time it was sort of like gamifying it for me. I'm like, okay, I gotta push this number higher and higher. How can I do that? What can what can we write? What can we say that's outrageous, you know? Um, and and how can we grow in a way that like lends further authority, but also grows the readership. And that like That record was I actually for that I went out and I interv I like uh sent a bunch of emails to all the Radiohead fan sites, which I knew also had huge readership. Um and so I was like, Hey, we're gonna be running this review tomorrow. Just FYI heads up, if you wanna like it, that'd be awesome, whatever. Just so you know.

Um so that brought in a lot of traffic? It brought in a staggering amount of traffic. We ease handily broke that five thousand mark in the day that review came out, but um Yeah, and um, you know, for so many people, that is their very first impression of what pitchfork is. Uh yeah. So, and because it reads Nothing like anything else in the music writing space. No.

People are like What is this? This is so hyperbolic. It's so purple. Um And it's so like unrestrained, like wow, that's so uncool. You know what I mean? Like just to rein it in, you know? Um

If that had just been, you know, a pretty straight faced, you know, if it had read like it any other music journalism, I don't think people would have even really necessarily noticed us. All right, so let's talk a for a moment about the business. It's it's You, you've got some writers you've got but clearly you're trying to branch out, like you're very strategically doing

smart things like when a Radiohead review comes out, you're you're emailing all the Radiohead fan sites and probably doing this with other reviews too. Which is driving traffic. You've got An advertiser. Were you going out and and se seeking out other potential advertisers too?

At the same time, were you were you like the biz dev guy too? Yeah, I mean I was the everything. Guy like everything. I mean, I just worked on pitchfork like nonstop. But by that point, um I had gone through this period where like I had You know

Failed. Chicago my first year and I had to move back to this cabin my parents had in rural Minnesota. Wha what do you mean you failed in Chicago? What how did you fail? Well, I mean what I I couldn't make my rent um because uh even though I gave myself like no alternative but to turn pitchwork into a successful business I couldn't do it that quickly. And you know, even though I was like calling record labels and trying to get them to advertise, like not everyone was biting. It wasn't enough to sustain, you know to pay your rent. To pay the rent never you know, and and to For me to eat, you know, for example. Yeah. So I I was something like four months behind in rent and um

Just like I had to go home. Um, I called my folks and They fortunately had like a lake cabin. way rural Minnesota. I mean an hour and a half, two hours outside the city. Um Like little six hundred square foot thing. And basically I w got to go up there for six months and kinda get my grounding again. Wow.

Did you did you spend the winter? Did you spend the winter there? No no no. I spent I spent the summer there because the place wasn't winterized. So I actually only had from April to October at latest to get out of there. And I was like determined dead set to go back to Chicago. I was like I'm gonna make this work. Why don't we come back in just a moment? how Pitchfork got profitable and stayed proudly independent.

Until a changing media landscape. put it on a very different path. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of two thousand and Ryan is holed up in a cabin in rural Minnesota, trying to figure out how to make pitchfork work.

As a business. I started to work as much on the ad sales as I did on the copy so that I could just reach that next step. And so that's how I spent that summer, like really just doubling down on like actually getting a A stable of of regular advertisers in rotation. So you go back to Minnesota for what? Almost a year? Probably six, six to eight months, something like that. Right.

And uh and then you head back to Chicago. Right. to s kind of start up again. with a few more advertisers, can you estimate like roughly how much you were bringing in and ad add revenue at that point? You know, I don't have a firm recollection of exactly how much I was bringing in at that point. It was probably a thousand to twelve or twelve hundred, something like that. So

when did you first get like a brick and mortar Space. Or you could work out of. Do you remember what what year was that? That was two thousand three. And what was the uh what was the turning point? How were you able to do that? Because that's gotta pay rent and you've gotta get office equipment and internet connections and phone lines.

What w how did you have the the cash to do that? Well, by the end of two thousand one I had a very Healthy. network of advertisers. And so I started to

be able to put some of that money back into the business. But the first thing I wanted off my plate was the thing that I liked doing the least, which is the ad sales. And once we already had a client roster sort of of, you know, uh we had a lot of people in rotation, um, I was kind of like, okay, I think I could afford to pay one person a salary. I actually offered one of them. my brighter friends from Philadelphia who had wanted to move to Chicago. I like offered it to him because I was like he would be fun to work with. Not because I thought he would necessarily be great at selling ads. I was like, Oh, it'd be fun to work with him. So he came he came out of Chicago, I got us an office, I gave him a little salary. We did that for

I guess almost a year. So he's your first employee, real employee. Um, but sort of,'cause you weren't you hadn't even incorporated as a business yet. Like this is still it's still like a friend's kinda just just write'em a check. Here's your check for the week. Yep. Not paying taxes, by the way, either. And

Meantime you have this stable of writers who are writing reviews. Um So we're I mean from the business side. Was it stressful or was it just like, you know what, this is fine. We got it. I'm editing these things and

We c we're paying our rent and we've got, you know, a couple thousand bucks coming in and in advertising revenue. Oh my God, life was good. I mean, what like the point that I was at with with Pitchfork, like being a like I can support you know, I can I'm like working with somebody, we have like a real office, like we get to go to concerts every night, like we have artists will stop by our office and like hang out, we'll interview them and because you start get'cause you had Built a reputation now. Yeah.

You know, it's important to point out that I think some people hearing this will be like, Well, how did you get Are these all these artists interested or record labels? And we're not talking about like stadium. arena artists, these are like indie artists, but

The reason why is because no one else was doing this, right? Like Rolling Stone and Spin like the big players. kind of seeded that ground. to Whoever else was Doing it, which was you.

They did, they sort of seeded it. I mean there was there there was it's not like they weren't covering this music. They were. Uh, but I think they were covering such a wider array of music. But also I mean most of them didn't have websites still. Yeah. And also just like we're younger and you know, uh kids like reading stuff by kids their own age. Um

And you know. Also being able to put a lot of those bands. forward to a larger audience was what one of the single most rewarding things. And think that thing that I loved about running pitchfork the most, it's not that these artists wouldn't have been heard or discovered. It's that if you're kind of able to

Provide more broader coverage or maybe help it happen faster than it might have happened. But also just to be able to champion artists who deserve it, artists who are doing things, you know, that are that are progressive. There was a review that came out in two thousand four, which is like w probably the m one of the if not the most, one of the most infamous reviews Ever posted by

by pitchfork and it's of a of a record by an artist named Travis Morrison, who is part of a Yeah. And the Um

The writer. of that review Chris Dollin gave it. Zero point zero. On it. ten point scale. Right. Saying it it fails so bizarre that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place. It was a devastating review and um needless to say Travis Morrison is not uh an artist anymore. I don't believe he makes music anymore today. He's a writer now. He's a writer, okay.

Um That had a huge impact. I mean, right, record stores weren't selling the record and It was pr I think one of the first moments where it was clear that you you could actually make or break artists. Do you remember that moment?

I do. I mean, I actually kind of remember very early on trying, um write reviews of artists that like work N not in the press at all. Like a going sorting through the stack of promos that we would get to find something deeply obscure, but that looked interesting. And I would pull out and just listen to these CDs, like really pour through the stack, try to find something nobody else was covering. But we're also still kind of tied up with this kind of, you know. Super uh irreverent, snotty, goofy publication at the same time. And so we like to do things that would, you know, get attention or be outrageous in a way. And that was one of those moments that was like W you know, I was like, We haven't given a zero point zero, like have we ever done it? We should do it, you know? And and unfortunately

That was also the point at which I realized when I realized that pitchfork could Could break careers, could like break artists. In the bad way? I was like. That really gave me pause because the reaction to that I did not, I mean I didn't.

expect it to end his career, for God's sake. You know what I mean? So when that happened. We Took a beat. You know, and we're like

Okay. We need to reevaluate. How are you? Using this. authority that we

manage to accumulate. And we we've got to be a little more responsible with this'cause that You know, that doesn't feel That doesn't feel right. As you were growing,

Right. And and able to hire one person. How did you figure out how to be a manager of people. I mean Be before you answer that question, when was when were you started when were you able to hire additional people, like on payroll? So what happened was in early two thousand four, um Eric

Who had been selling ads. was like, I actually hate doing this. I don't think I can do this anymore. But Eric had managed to like expand it even a little bit more, like the base, right? So we're I was kinda comfortable. I was like, okay. If I actually hire a person who's really good at this We'll really be set. We can really grow from there because at this point the readership is

Ps I mean. thirty thousand readers a day or something. You know, I mean it's a day by two thousand four. Easily probably much higher than that. It might have been, you know, seventy five thousand readers a day or something. Like it started to get enormous. And I mean, probably around two thousand one was when it started to just skyrocket, just completely boom. And seventy five thousand readers a day. That's a medium sized daily is a big deal. Yeah. It was uh it was staggering to watch this number just like explode. Did you were you y I mean, did you start to become actually profitable?

Yes, uh started to become quite profitable. Um quite profitable. So I you know, I was like, okay. Well, I can afford to hire the right person for this job now. And uh once again, I just went the same route that I always did, which is putting out, you know, a call on the site saying, Hey, you know, um, we're looking for a person who's an ad salesperson and let us know. So, you know, apply here, send your resume. And then I found um the very last application that came in was from a Salesperson at the onion. And he had in his resume

All these like benchmarks and like I took sales revenue from, you know, I increased it like twenty five percent and this way, and I did this and that and there. And like he actually could qu he quantified his results in in the resume, which I was like, Oh, this is it. This is the guy. Like don't even need an interview. Like this is him. So yeah, and his name was Chris Kaskey. And he went on to

basically become like he ran the entire business of pitchfork from that point on. Wow. And so once he came on board, he was so good at what he did, and he was able to like branch out beyond, you know, indie record labels, which had been our primary target. Uh before to get like I mean

you know, American apparel started advertising and you know, like huge companies with a real marketing budget started advertising. As you start to hire more and more people, right? And and finally you can do this. two thousand five, two thousand six, you can finally start to hire two, three, four people. Yes. This is a this is a business. You know, you F probably what I mean, can you estimate what you were bringing in a year more than

Two hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue? Yeah, it would it would have been something like that. Um, because by two thousand five. Yeah, we probably had something like six employees at that point. So I I'm I'm curious, like in terms of leading and leadership. Yeah, you were the editor? and you were doing everything, but now you've got like four or five people.

Six people. I mean how did you Because Managing once you have multiple people it's Can start to get tricky.

Yeah, I mean people were like everybody who was there was really on board. It didn't require like I wasn't having to breathe down anyone's neck about anything. Um but but leadership was definitely not at that point at all a natural skill. I mean, you know, when you think about my background and like the kind of My social ineptitude from you know from the early days. Not like that ever went away, you know, I mean That was a big that's all always was a huge learning curve for me. But I I did end up learning so much about leadership from watching Chris. Chris had an innate ability to lead. And this is your ad guy who who was basically your business operations guy. He was, yeah. I mean he was I mean from the time that he joined, the org chart of the company was me and Chris side by side and everybody else. So without him, it's very likely it would not have ever become really a professional business. He kind of the fact that his resume was the last one that you pulled up.

Was kind of a stroke of luck. It was a stroke of luck. To a large degree. I mean there was uh I could have, you know. If I had kept searching, if Chris hadn't come along, if I kept searching, I'd like because I already had like I we're already kind of on a roll at that point. I think it would have been able to become, you know, a much bigger business, but it would not be

Anything like what we know pitchfork as today. And and so I mean as you Yeah, as you sort of

more and more influential, right? With this sort of the pitchfork effect. Right. you start to get attention, media attention, na even national media attention. Did you ever did it did you ever think about

Like raising money. And and turning it into like a massive media operation. Yeah, you know Um, at a certain point we started to see People

Who had kind of come up alongside us start to do that. Um I remember When I was in Minneapolis, you know, Vice started out as a Montreal operation. Yeah, we had him on the show in on season one. The story of Vice, yeah. Right. And I remember getting, you know, an a copy of Vice then was still in newsprint. And thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Um, and then just didn't see another issue again for a while. But like then they started to kind of like once again, like the web came along, they started to have like a really strong presence. And they like, I mean

They just skyrocketed. Like they had so much investment. Um, they were so good at raising capital that like It was almost insane to watch. We but but at the same time, like pitchwork was growing so well. Like we didn't We didn't really have that many aspirations beyond being the music publication, right? That's what I really wanted because I didn't have a lot of interest in culture beyond that. I just didn't

didn't have it. Yeah. If we had sort of for movies, like I would have been pretty hopeless. And so we love being independent so much. We love not having to answer to anybody. And and and God, we were making so much money from advertising by that point. Yeah. But it was just like, you know what, this is good, this is comfortable. We don't need to we don't need to go that route. You guys got into the festival business in two thousand five. There was a festival called the Intonation Music Festival and and you were you guys were hired to curate it, which was A chance for you to kind of get your feet and your fingers into. that business,'cause that's a complex business. Yeah. Um, we were very fortunate that Intonation kind of came to us that we were I mean, again, this was an advantage of being in Chicago. This would have never happened if I hadn't moved there. So they asked us to

join up and just ask us if we wanted to choose the choose the bands. We were like, yeah, sounds amazing, obviously. Yeah, let's do that. You guys run it and we'll just choose the artists and promote it. Uh that sounds like a good deal, sir, let's do that. Um we ended up selling that first year, I think something like twelve thousand tickets for two days or something, maybe th maybe thirteen, fourteen thousand. It was a lot, a lot, a lot of tickets. And so um fortunately, but essentially the festival director, uh whose name is Mike Reed, was uh a really I mean, just incredible. uh promoter or producer, and um we worked with him every step of the way. on putting this thing together, but I mean he was really leading.

that side of it. And then Mike actually ended up leaving parting ways with the company that that founded Intonation. because essentially we just wanted to do that together. We were like, this is great. We love working with you. We don't know about these other guys. You're having problems with them. Like let's just go in on this and You know, and work together on building this and as the pitchfork music festival from here on. And and just I'm just curious, like from a business perspective, was that good for your business? I mean it's good in the sense that you really become a cultural well known festival, but is it possible to make money relatively easily on a festival?

You know, we've found out kind of the hard way pretty early on that first year. Um I mean Mike already had understood like, you know, the finances of it the first year and kind of had explained it to us and walked us through PL for that. Um, so we were always kind of like, okay This is clearly not going to be the major revenue driver that you would think it would be. Um, there is so much overhead that

It's also like kind of a a delicate dance where all of these things have to just happen just right. You know, you have to have a reasonable artist budget with which you can attract talent that's not going to the competing festivals, say Lollapalooza, Riot Fest, et cetera. Um, you've got to, you know, make sure that the ticket sales are like fair, reasonable, that you can attract a big enough crowd. Um, you've got security concerns, vendors, um, there's just there's so many moving parts. If one of those things doesn't come together, if you have like inclement weather all weekend because it's an outdoor festival, I mean, these things can really

crash the festival enterprise altogether, like kill the business. So it's a very, very high risk. business, um and one that we Fortunately. by staying mid-sized and not trying to scale up and not trying to compete with the Lollapalooza's and Coachellas and Bonaroos. Um We were able to manage to make it

Profitable break even. So no, it wasn't a big it was probably it might have been ten percent of our overall revenue. You um m you eventually moved to New York, I think, um And the editorial office stayed in in Chicago for a while would eventually move to New York, but I think by

By like two thousand ten, you had twenty four Full time staffers. in New York and Chicago, like you know, freelancers as well. Um, you're doing like

Two and a half million unique Visitors a month. four hundred thousand visitors visitors a day. So You're really on the map. You're really major Yeah.

in music journalism. But there were competitors, right? There obviously a lot of these upstart news media websites that now are out in the world, right? Um we know that BuzzFeed, I mean there are Huffington posts out there and Some of these publications were branching out to music. N PR launched N PR music, I can't remember when, but that was

becoming a pretty important force. Were there people kind of saying to you, hey, we've gotta like protect our turf or we've gotta look out for these competitors because we're we can get eaten alive. I mean you you you can just see what would happen in newspapers. Yes. And that could happen to us too. Yeah. I mean that we were cognizant of that. Um We're like we're very cognizant of that. I mean Christmas dress out all the time. You know We did start to see the writing on the wall a little bit. We did kind of like as a

Not necessarily as a direct result, but sort of we did try to kind of like branch out into other directions and and attempt You know, a couple of other sort of arms of of the company. One was of course was like pitchfork TV, the video arm, which did quite well. We also tried to put a movie site together and a couple of other things, but They didn't work. They

We didn't really have enough resources by ourselves to put into all the things that we wanted to do. Frankly, it was just a little bit too I don't know, it was kinda like at that point and the you know, the the band's been together for fifteen years and everybody sort of wants to start their own side projects. You know, there was a little bit of that to it. Um So it wasn't our our strategy wasn't. the best. But at the same time, because we're trying to do too many things at once without any You know.

Without any help. There are many things that you guys tried. Tried a print magazine. Yes. You tried um pitchfork TV. There were There's even got into like games and collaborations with a bunch of different publications, all these things are, I think are smart, right? You want to try things and a lot of those things didn't work out. But I mean year on year until you were acquired, which we'll get to in a moment.

Were you growing? Every single year. Were you were you growing in your was your revenue growing every year or were there years where it was up and down, up and down? The revenue was growing year over year. Um, but our expenses, you know, varied.

I think it really wasn't until probably yeah something like 2013, 2014 That We started to kind of feel the effects of what would become kind of the influencer model of marketing and that kind of shifting The entire landscape from, you know, a banner ad driven.

Economy. Two a totally social media focused a co like marketing economy. When you were approached by Condane Nast in twenty fifteen,

Um to purchase. Bench for I mean, I'm sure I'm sure y for you it was Incredible. It was it w your publication was valued. Um must have been valu quite high at that point.

But I wonder also was a calculation in your mind that You were looking at the future and at competitors and at media consolidation and and maybe we're concerned that without

You know, without being part of a bigger organization like Condane asked, Pitchfork might not. Survive for another ten or twenty years,'cause it was twenty years at that point that you'd been right. Yes. Yeah, I mean the again, we could see very clearly what was coming down the path. And um, you know, seeing where we are. today where if you don't have a paywall

you're struggling. Yeah you know, uh it it it it was clear that the whole model was gonna change or was already changing. On one hand I was like Look at the how this how the business is going here and like the future of this business and how difficult it's going to be to continue to adapt with what is still ultimately A niche publication, you know, a well read, but ultimately still very niche.

You know, that's that's that's gonna become harder and harder to do. We're gonna have to start making difficult decisions, and we're gonna have to s probably downsize a little bit, you know, or there's this offer on the table. That I'm not likely to ever see anything like this again if we do follow that road. And At the same time being met with these the promises that kinda offered of, you know, investing in the business and helping to grow it and at the same time being able to tap into their huge network of like luxury brand advertisers and things of that nature. So it was kind of like okay, they've been doing this forever. There's 32 brands like where

It not only is this something that like Kind of elevates and as further escalates pitchfork and is more of like a success story kind of approach. It it feels like We're gonna need to band these publications are gonna need to band together in order to make this work going forward.

And you had a lot of people that depended on on it for employment. So I'm sure that was a lot of pressure. Oh my God, by that time we had Fifty some employees. Yeah. Yeah. I'm also kind of a I don't know. uh superstitious in ways. Like things

in my life have tended to happen at the right time for certain reasons. And That just seemed to be one of those moments where like this wouldn't have fallen out of the sky. Yeah. It wasn't the path I was supposed to take. You stayed on.

as an editor for another few years and then stayed on with Condé Nastor, I think for four years. Yeah. After the acquisition. How did you adapt? to that environment. Corporate. You were moved to w the World Trade Center.

in New York, the Conde Nast offices, you're part of like I don't know, like I I I think I'd be scared as hell to be in a conference room with Anna Winter. Um but there you go. You're in that world. Yeah, I mean on one hand on one hand it was intimidating to be, you know, like Having come from the background that I came from, where I've never gone to school for, you know, for journalism or editorial, and I'm in a room where, you know, my peers are David Remneck.

Multipulets are winning. Genius. Editor of The New Yorker and and Anna Winterer, who is the creative director of Condae Nas, so who you interface with regularly about your business. Um you know, and uh among numerous other legends like W magazine, like uh uh Vanity Fair, GQ, Jim Nelson at GQ. I mean these are genius, genius people. And not to denigrate, you know, myself, but like, you know, yes, it was deeply intimidating going into especially with my general like social awkwardness that I already innately have when I'm nervous and nervous situations. So like that didn't help. Um But you know, at the same time, it was also kind of like this crazy like media college campus. Like there were so many amazing journalists, amazing um

And amazing business minds there as well that you could kind of go to and tap whenever you needed to. And like that was all open. And that was another big reason why this made sense to do. It's like if we all kind of bring our knowledge together, you know, moving forward together, it's gonna be a lot easier. Um But You know, well at the same time, obviously when we got to Condé Nas, Condé started to make decisions as to what should, you know What we should continue to focus on and what we should So they didn't want to support

Like all the different projects that you guys ha had going, like the film publication or the the print version of of Pitchfork or whatever, like they they didn't want to pursue those things? Yeah, these were both things that Conde decided. You know, the

uh the ROI basically. Um you know, they when we when we got to Condé Nas, like they were very much like, Oh yeah, this is a niche. you know, business and right for very complicated reasons and machinations behind how Conde operates. Even though you would think a print publication would be something they would embrace with arms wide open.

Yeah. Not exactly. So um so yeah, these were things that were on their way up. They were, you know, I mean, had really good reputations, had really had a strong readership. But were not able to be nurtured to the degree that We wanted to nurture them. Especially at at that point. You are no longer part of Pitchfork.

you I think f officially left in twenty nineteen. Yeah. I know that you're writing a book, uh, written history of the of pitchfork, which will come out in a couple years. Do you miss that?

Daily interaction, all those people being steeped in that world, um I don't know. Ideas. Do you do you miss that day day to day?

Oh, it's and it's hard not to miss, you know, like all the activity and excitement of a newsroom. Yeah. I mean, it's the most thrilling that for me, sort of like it's the most thrilling thing in the world. At the same time, you know, kind of like having this sort of more isolated like for one thing, I stopped writing in two thousand four, just mostly Stop doing it publicly. Um, and stop doing it almost period. So it took a while to kind of get back into the swing when I started kind of writing. kind of mapping out like if I was to write a book, what it what what would it look like? Um And writing is something that I've just recently realized is kind of it's totally my calling, but Also, you know, the idea of running businesses that are innovative that do help kind of change the landscape.

I mean is is just as much a part of who I am and what my interests are as it's been since since the beginning of Of the web. I think I I might know the answer to this question, but I'm I'm still gonna ask it'cause I'm curious. You knew that this was gonna be the thing you wanted to do. You knew that this was at a certain point, a year or two into this blog, you knew that this was what you wanted to with your life. But if you if you could see yourself

In nineteen ninety five, ninety six. And have seen that journey. Would would you Do you think you would have been like, Yep. I can see that happening. I can see building this into a

Multimillion dollar business. And selling it to a massive Media. you know, juggerna just huge media organization. Do you think you you would have been surprised?

I think um I would have I would have been elated. I would have been Thrilled just to the very core.

to see everything that pitchwork has been able to accomplish. Not quite beyond my wildest dreams, because I absolutely dreamt that something like that could happen with it. And I tried. Every day. To make it be that. I mean

Considering how most people interact with and engage with new music discovery now through algorithms primarily, that it still has significant influence in the world of music journalism and music listeners. It's incredible. Yes, it it is it is wild that That's

We all and I say we because I naturally I mean there's many more people who are just as crucial and pivotal to this story as me. Um, but and just as responsible for its success. But it's um You know, and now it's it's kinda like it's like a kid that you know, you have a kid and it grows up and goes away to school and then it starts making its own decision and it's an it's an adult now and you kind of like, you know, you can't You don't you no longer have the input that you used to have. It's gonna go out and make its own mistakes and you know, you'll just

idly stand by, you go, I might disagree with that, but you know what? I'm really proud of you anyway. That's Ryan Schreiber, the founder. Of pitchfork. By the way, uh what's your your favorite album of all time?

It's an impossible. It's an impossible question. I mean, think of all the music that you've listened to in your life, can you say at any given day Alright, top five. No order, just just five great records. No order. Okay, five great, great records, no order. Uh DJ Shadow introducing. Pet sounds, beach voice. Yeah, it's good.

I like it. Marvin Gay, what's going on? That was gonna be the next one I was gonna say, actually. Mark Yeah, what's going on. Radiohead, Kid A? Yeah, that's certainly one of my favorite albums. Um

Talking heads remain in light. Uh It's a record by um A UK duo called the KLF. It's a record called Chill Out. Prince. Scient times?

Oh my god. Why did you even have to ask me? Purple Rain is my favorite album of all time. Prince is Prince is my number one of all time. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to hear every episode one week early, check out Amazon Music. If you want to listen one week early and ad free, subscribe to Wondery Plus in the Apple Podcasts or on the Wondery app. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded.

And another way to support the show is by filling out a survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter or Instagram, our account is at how I built this, and mine is at guy. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.Roz. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with music composed by Rautine Erablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Fara Safari.

Our audio engineer was Brian Jarbo. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Casey Herman, Josh Lash, Alex Chung, Harry Thompson, Sam Paulson. Catherine Cypher, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Massini, and Carla Esteves. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening.

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