Pitchfork has been publishing album reviews almost every day for 30 years. Each one has a score on a 0.0 to 10 scale, and underneath is a thoughtful consideration of the album from one of our writers. This simple format has always been the foundation of our site.
We practice this obsessive ritual of publishing daily album reviews because we love music and want to deepen our readers’ relationship to the artform. And since the beginning, Pitchfork’s highly opinionated and carefully argued reviews have kick-started online conversations elsewhere on the internet: listservs, message boards, and later, social media.
Now, I am excited to announce that, for the first time, we are making it possible for that ongoing conversation to happen on Pitchfork.com.
Starting today, there is a new Pitchfork subscription that costs $5 a month, which allows readers to score albums themselves, comment on our reviews, and be in dialogue with our critics and each other. (Can’t decide if an album is a 6.8 or a 7.2? Read our new Scoring Guidelines here.)
Once a review has more than five scores, the aggregate reader score will appear beneath Pitchfork’s score on the review. We still believe in the authority and, to be honest, the primacy of Pitchfork’s taste—but we want to publish our readers’ taste and opinions, too. The comments section will be moderated by our editors and adhere to our new Community Guidelines. Subscribers will also have access to Pitchfork’s full review archive, which now contains over 30,000 reviews.
For non-subscribers, the News, Features, and Columns sections of the site will continue to be free. And casual readers can continue to read four free reviews per month. But to read unlimited reviews, see the reader scores, and comment yourself or read the comments of others, you’ll have to smash subscribe.
What we’re emphasizing by evolving the site to capture the voices and taste of our readers is that music and music criticism are inherently social. The Pitchfork review has always been authoritative. It can sometimes feel like the final word, a monkey peeing in its own mouth etched into a stone slab. But we publish reviews to turn people onto new music we love (or to save them from music we don’t) and to create critical discourse. We want our reviews to be generative, and we hope the comments section and other cool new tools on the site will deepen our readers’ connection to music and each other.
Thanks to every one of you for reading Pitchfork, whether you’ve been here since Ryan Schreiber was publishing the site out of his parents’ home, or you just found us because this letter is making the rounds on X. We believe the tools that we’ve packed into this new subscription are worth the $5—and the money you invest in us will continue to fund our dedication to the vital art of music criticism. You’d be hard-pressed to find a publication today with a more loyal and dedicated following. With your support, we’ve somehow found ourselves at year 30. Let’s make it another 30.
