Pitchfork President Kaskie Talks About How He Decided to “Zag”

On Friday, Chris Kaskie, the president of the prominent online music magazine Pitchfork Media, participated in a public interview with Panos Panay, the founder of Sonicbids, a portal that brings together concert organizers and bands. Pitchfork Media, founded in 1995, is an online publication dedicated to music journalism, with a particular focus on up-and-coming, independent music. The event was part of the 20th Annual James G. Zafris Jr. Distinguished Lecture Series for Music Business/Management at the Berklee College of Music.

Straightforward and honest, Kaskie told the story of his early days at Pitchfork. While he was working at the Chicago-based satirical publication The Onion, he was an avid music fan and Pitchfork reader. One day, Kaskie ordered a review book published by Pitchfork and never got it. So, he decided to email the company’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, to tell him that he, Kaskie, was proficient in sales and would be willing to guide business operations. Schreiber hired Kaskie over the phone and said, “Dude, let’s go have a beer.” After that beer, Kaskie moved into Schreiber’s basement and began to work on the site and live with Schreiber’s cats.

Schreiber and Kaskie knew from the beginning that they wanted to do something unlike the rest of the online music criticism world. “When everybody was zigging, we wanted to zag,” Kaskie said. He claimed that the willingness to do good business comes before profit.  The big moment came in 2005 with the launch of Pitchfork Festival, then called the Intonation Music Festival, a music festival organized by Pitchfork, which attracted 20,000 ardent fans. Kaskie attributed this success to the fact that this event, which he described as a counter-festival, was designed to be deliberately different from mainstream music festivals.

Kaskie also talked about problems he sees in the contemporary cultural approach to music. In particular, he mentioned passive listening, which is the phenomenon in which listeners receive a playlist dictated by tools and algorithms designed to reflect their taste, rather than selected by the listeners directly. According to Kaskie, the aim of Pitchfork is to avoid this sort of occurrence by putting people in touch with new music through recommendations directly from other music lovers, rather than through an automated algorithm. Kaskie’s advice to the audience on how to find music was curating a Twitter feed, reading Pitchfork, and simply talking to people. “[Commercial radio is] the most concise filtration of music,” Kaskie said.

Other problems he identified included the estrangement of artist from fan, and the fleeting intangible nature of digital media. Kaskie asserted that the removal of intermediaries between the artist and the fan produces more uniqueness and transparency in the music, which he sees as a major advantage. He also predicted that the future of the music industry would involve the resurrection of the album, and said he still buys vinyl to be able to leave something for his kids.

After the lecture, Kaskie spoke with The Harvard Crimson.

The Harvard Crimson: Do you think recognition depends more or less on the merit of the musician than on networking and the musician’s ability to reach a wider audience?

Chris Kaskie: I think it will inevitably always be merit, because that’s what’s going to last... Ultimately the quality of your art is what’s going to resonate with any audience, whether it be big or small. So, growing that audience is the challenge, and how you do that, and as long as the art and the quality of your art maintains itself recognition should grow. But you have to work for that, obviously, whether it be live or finding the right promotional outlets and developing relationships with publications [and] blogs—whatever—that just know what you’re doing. And labels I think are still a huge part of that.

THC: If merit is that important, why do you think people who claim to value quality in music are drawn to discovering the obscure? Why is mainstream not considered good quality?

CK: I don’t know. I think that everyone wants to be unique and [have] their taste in music be unique, so as something becomes bigger or becomes more ubiquitous, it becomes more [conventional]. There’s a tendency for any invested music fan to go different [which is] becoming the norm even if the norm is really small. I think there’s a certain person that wants to keep finding it, but you also run the risk of—if you go too far, you forget the stuff that you may have gone past but still also very good. You need to make sure you don’t ignore that.

THC: How do you think Pitchfork plays a role in the artist’s efforts to turn fans into customers?

CK: The festival is the closest thing to that, but no, we don’t have a purpose like that. Our job is to cover music as honestly and as best as we can. Whether that’s success or non-success is irrelevant to our thinking. I mean we’re not in the business of creating, making bands. We’re talking about what’s good and bad, really. And if that ends up helping expose them to more all eyes or ears whatever, that’s great, and the closest we can get to that is, “Here’s all our favorite stuff, we hope you enjoy it.”

THC: Are there any new features that we should look forward to?

CK: I think we’re going to continue to enhance the way we build our mobile platforms because we want to have our site available to everybody wherever they want it. It’s exciting because we’ve always been a website and while print moved backwards and went online we’re looking at how to push online forward. We’re definitely in the position where we want to  innovate online publishing, whereas before we were a website when the print is the one that’s innovating, at least in many people’s eyes. Now, it’s a challenge that we fully feel like we’re in the driver’s seat and/or the passenger seat and kind of ready to tackle.

THC: What are some music events and festivals that you’re looking forward to in the upcoming months?

CK: South by Southwest [music festival] is always fun. It’s the only real thing that I do that becomes kind of industry-specific, so there’s an element of “bummerness” to that too. But there’s a lot of industry people that I really like, so that’s okay too. And then we have our festival in July. We [also] program a stage at a festival in Barcelona, Spain. It’s probably the best festival on earth. We’re one of the six or seven stages, but we have a very large stage. I look forward to that because the Spanish love what we do and they also have a very good vibrant local scene. The European festival stuff is game-changing—I wish we could be like that.