Pitchfork: Ryan Schreiber

While working at his local record store at age 20, Ryan Schreiber dreamt that his scrappy music review webpage might one day grow into an influential music publication. Working out of his parents’ house, he wrote about indie music because he loved it, and recruited like-minded friends to do the same. In 2000, a rhapsodic review of Radiohead’s “Kid A” got huge attention online, and soon Ryan’s site began to attract tens of thousands of users—building a reputation for pointed reviews that could make or break careers. In 2015, Pitchfork joined The New Yorker and Vogue when it was acquired by Condé Nast, one of the most prestigious magazine publishers in the world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:14Guy Raz?

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• 2:58Guy Raz?

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• 3:40Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

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• 5:13Speaker 01

  I love doing the creative side of this so much that I like never focus on the business. 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?

• 5:26Guy Raz?

  What was the advertiser?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  There were an online record store called InSound.

• 5:31Guy Raz?

  And what would they pay you a month, do you remember?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  They asked me to name a price. And so I went, oh, my God, I wonder how much? So I just pulled out the biggest number that I could think of, which was $500 a month.

• 5:46Guy Raz?

  Wow. How about $500?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, my God, that'll pay almost, that'll almost pay my rent each month.

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  And they're sitting there going, sure, no problem.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:05Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:18Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Ryan Schreiber taught himself how to write reviews about the music he loved and grew that into Pitchfork, one of the most influential music publications in the world.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  If you met Ryan Tribber in 1995, you'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 he called Pitchfork. In fact, Ryan's day job was as a clerk at a local 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 fan.

• 7:22Guy Raz?

  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, Pitchfork was reaching millions of readers a month, and employed an army of reviewers, writers, producers, and event planners. In 2015, Pitchfork was purchased by the media giant Conde Nast. And all of a sudden, Ryan Tribber found himself sitting in meetings with some of the most powerful figures in media, people like Anna Wintour of Vogue and David Remnick 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.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  His parents were realtors, and not surprisingly, from an early age, music was a central part of his life.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  From the earliest point in my life, before my memory, my mom tells me about how putting music on would make me just like, if I was throwing a tantrum, or crying in the crib, or something like that, she figured out that if she put on music, I would just be silent and listen. So even though they weren't very into the arts, or music, or anything like that, they were casual music fans. We had some country music records around, some Three Dog Night, and Captain and Tenille, and whatever else they liked. But once they saw how... Enamored I was of music and that I would just sit in front of the stereo all day and

• 8:58Speaker 01

  just listen and listen. They just started bringing me records.

• 9:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  I wasn't really particular about the records that they brought. It was sort of a quantity over quality thing at that point. I just wanted to absorb as much as I could.

• 9:11Guy Raz?

  Hmm. In terms of like the school side of things, how were you? Was school hard for you? Did you not care?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  School was very hard for me. I was neither a good student, nor was I like at all socially adept. So I was definitely, you know, kind of a loner. I was also sort of a, I was sort of textbook ADHD case. So I was always sort of acting out a bad combination in general. But, 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 classmates, 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.

• 9:59Guy Raz?

  Did you as a kid, did you play any sports?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  No, completely unathletic. I played, I did play piano, kind of a sport, a musical sport.

• 10:07Guy Raz?

  Definitely.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  But I knew that I was going to 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. And there was definitely a point where I considered going to college, but you know, I didn't have the, I didn't nearly have the grades. Like I kind of barely graduated.

• 10:44Guy Raz?

  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 Husker Du, The Replacements and, and, and others.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  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. We had FM radio stations in 1990 that would play Jesus and Mary Chain and I mean YouTube and Nick Cave and I mean, stuff that, you know, 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 into alternative culture and make this presentable, you know, for sort of a wider audience because, you know,

• 11:42Speaker 01

  a lot of independent alternative music was also quite experimental.

• 11:48Guy Raz?

  Did you, would you hang out at record stores in high school?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Oh, 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 15, 16, 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 there's a big record store chain in Minneapolis called Cheepo. And I just, I spent all my time there. They had a listening station in the back.

• 12:33Guy Raz?

  Do you pop in a CD?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I remember those.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, eventually. I mean, they were just little, you know, CD boom boxes.

• 12:45Guy Raz?

  CD players, yeah, yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  But eventually I kind of was like, okay, this has a tape deck on it.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So eventually I started bringing in tapes and making mixtapes in the record store from CDs.

• 13:00Guy Raz?

  You would just hit record and record, record tracks?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would. 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 turned a blind eye. Sometimes I did get caught and they were like, you can't do that. Come on.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  This is like stealing music before Napster.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is actually, now that you mention it.

• 13:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  It was so valuable. I mean, it was hard to get. It was expensive.

• 13:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  You know?

• 13:27Guy Raz?

  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 to catch a song on the radio so then they could hear it later on.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:39Guy Raz?

  You would just wait and you would time it.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yep, you would time it and, you know, yeah, press that unpause, just sit by the radio and wait, you know? Wait for that song to come around on the hour.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  You're just going to Spotify. It's no fun anymore. You don't have to hit record. You don't have to wait. Quick, quick, record. Hit record on the boombox.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  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 hand crafting 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.

• 14:16Guy Raz?

  It's not the same.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:17Guy Raz?

  All right, so you graduate, you're 18, and you're not going to go to college. So what did you do? I mean, where did you, did you get a job right away?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  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. So I said,

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  where can I get that? Where can I get that where I can also get a job? But the Mall of America had just opened. So I went down to the Mall of America. I applied at the Music Land 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?

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  What was the name of that record shop, by the way?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It was called Down in the Valley. It's still there.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  And was it like in high fidelity? Was it like that? Like you were 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?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  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 lots of Grateful Dead stuff around, Pink Floyd, Incense Burning, like the whole nine.

• 15:51Guy Raz?

  By the way, were you into any of that?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  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? It's making 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 were like all snobby, you know, like, I don't think we were like snobby to the customers. Like, you know, that's sort of a record store, a record clerk stereotype. And for a good reason, because I've been, I know I've experienced it to like no end also, right? Like being on the other side of the counter.

• 16:34Guy Raz?

  You don't want that record.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, oh, are you sure about this? You know, or just a, you know, a light groan or a heavy sigh.

• 16:43Guy Raz?

  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?

• 16:53Guy Raz?

  But there were still some really good music magazines coming out of the UK, like Melody Maker and NME. Would you ever go to newsstands in Minneapolis and like find, look for those?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's another thing I would do. I would go to like the local Borders or Barnes and Noble where they had just like infinite magazines of every subject. And the music magazine section was so deep. I would just sit and read. I would like listen to my headphones and read. I mean, really, I actually loved Q at that time. Q was so sardonic.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  Q was great.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  It was 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, of the UK music press was one of the things that really influenced me to kind of be cattier or more vicious early on.

• 17:45Guy Raz?

  And were you, I mean, this is a time when, like, mid 90s, when, um, this is like the kind of the golden age and the beginning of like, alternative weeklies and, and cities really kind of started to blow up. And zines, people would make zines, people would like, would use Word PageMaker or a Quark Express on a Mac and print out pretty nice layout pages and then you could photocopy them into zines and then sell them.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:10Guy Raz?

  Were, were you ever, were you into, into those?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  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. So it'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 in the indie zines, I was like, we need to shake this up.

• 19:15Guy Raz?

  You, you see these kind of like this scene, kind of scene pop up around you. I mean, how did you, I mean, did you start to think, you know, I want to make one myself?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  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. It's certainly not enough to support even something like creating 200, 300 copies of something to distribute around town. The overhead was just kind of out of reach for me. So yeah, there, there was always kind of like an instinct, like, oh, I could do this. Look at, look at these kids doing this. They got like 10 minutes on the phone with like, you know, Ian McKay.

• 20:03Guy Raz?

  From Fugazi, yeah. But, but he's a guy you can actually call up. He would answer the phone.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  What was the genesis of, of how you came to, to the idea of starting your own zine like thing?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  So while I was working at the record store, this is 1994, 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 1994, 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, this sounds complicated. He's like, no. So he actually walked me through it and it didn't take long to

• 21:16Speaker 01

  learn. So I basically started learning that software and you didn't even really need to know that frankly. 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.

• 21:31Guy Raz?

  So you set up a website, basically. And I think you called it Turntable initially, right? 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 it? Like, what would I have found on Turntable?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  You would have found, first, you would have found interviews. Because the first thing that I did was try to talk to artists. It's like, you can't have a zine without interviews.

• 21:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah, no. Who'd you get?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  That was actually the big draw for me at first. My first interview was with Low, 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.

• 22:14Guy Raz?

  And did you just call them and say, hey, can I interview you for my zine, my website? Or do you remember how you pitched it?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  So I actually called the record labels because I didn't know how to reach the bands. 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 Library's 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 Up Records in Seattle or in Washington? And I would hang on the phone for like a half an hour while this wonderful librarian lady would go and look through, I don't know.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  God bless public libraries. Keep going.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Seriously. And so, yeah, 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 didn't even know what department I'm looking for. I'm like, so I have a zine and I want to do like an interview with this artist. Do you know who I talked to about that? They're like, ah, you want publicity. Hold on. And so I would finally get in touch with the publicist 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 it was kind of novel. I mean, there are definitely interviews that I got really early on. Like, I did get to talk to David Byrne really early on, like 1998.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, early on. And I got to actually meet him at, you know, it 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

• 23:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  the soup he's eating, or whatever, you know? And, um,

• 24:00Guy Raz?

  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 would you conduct the interviews?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Often, I wouldn't, I wouldn't talk that much about the music. I want to know, again, I just like, kind of wanted to have like, a friendly conversation. 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.

• 24:38Guy Raz?

  Wow. Oh, my gosh. Wow.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  I mean, you have this natural confidence, which is incredible. I mean, you're very lucky that you have that, because being young is hard. I mean, you remember this, being like, 18, 19, 20, 21, 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.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  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. So, after the first couple of interviews, I hit on an artist who, whose new record was coming Coming out but hadn't been released yet. And when I asked her 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?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  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'd 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.

• 26:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:37Guy Raz?

  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'd you learn about it?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  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 13. So by the time that I was 17, 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, I had a really strong knowledge just from self-educating, you know, 24/7.

• 27:24Guy Raz?

  I know that what was originally called Turntable, you, I think very quickly had to change the name because you, there was another company called Turntable, right?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:46Guy Raz?

  Scared you?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes, scared the hell out of me, you know, like what? This is 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.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

  So how did you come up with Pitchfork?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  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 is being interrogated by the feds or something. And they noticed this Pitchfork 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 name pretty fast. And I'm like, living in rural Minnesota. I kind of like the angry mob connotations, which at that time were not so Tea Party affiliated. 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.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And I really wanted Pitchfork to be more aggressive in its review style, to be harder on music and, I don't know, have a higher bar.

• 28:53Guy Raz?

  All right. So you kind of rebrand this as Pitchfork. This is still a hobby, right? And I, and I want to, I want to illustrate this by reading your, the first review you wrote on Pitchfork. It's, it's of the amps. It's a record. It was a Kim deal from The Breeders, from The Pixies. She puts out this record and I want to basically, I want to read, this is written by you. You give it an 8.2. You say, initially, I wasn't sure if this record was for me. It seemed so lo-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.

• 29:36Guy Raz?

  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 Robert Crisgau or Jim DeRogatis style review. It's a, it's the review of a, of a, you know, a young guy who's just starting out, but unselfconscious.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Let me tell you, when you read it in that voice, it, it gives it a lot more character than I think it leaps off the page with naturally. So thank you.

• 30:07Guy Raz?

  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.

• 30:31Guy Raz?

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• 31:13Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 31:58Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together. And that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "A Lightning for the Agentic Era: How AI Is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work. Work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 32:43Guy Raz?

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• 33:02Speaker 02

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• 33:37Guy Raz?

  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.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  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, at this point, 1995, 96, 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. 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.

• 34:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  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 artists. So again, by the time that people did start to log on, 1999, 2000, these search results would lead so many people to Pitchfork. And that really helped it get a strong footing.

• 34:57Guy Raz?

  I mean, the first two years, it was just you kind of writing, well, really what I would describe as like, almost like 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're doing some telemarketing also to earn some cash.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:14Guy Raz?

  Which you were good at, right? You were pretty good at it.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I was kind of good at it. Yeah, the record store kind of stopped cutting it. You know, I wanted to move out.

• 35:21Guy Raz?

  You wanted to move out of your parents' place?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Of course. And I needed to support myself in some way. And 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 P M. We do cold calls from these cards that we get issued from the mortgage company. 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. And so I'm calling people, you know, at dinner, like after work. And there's this child asking them about their fifteen year adjustable rate mortgage or whatever, you know. And so the way that it actually worked was that it was totally commission based.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  So you set an appointment with them, you got five dollars. If they came in for the appointment, you'd get an extra ten dollars. If they ended up submitting to a mortgage proposal or submitting a mortgage, you'd get twenty five. If they closed, you'd get fifty dollars. So like off one call, you could reasonably make like, you know, almost a hundred dollars.

• 36:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  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 pitch work from like nine to five. I would be able to work on it as a full time job.

• 36:36Guy Raz?

  But this is not a business. You were not thinking of this as a business. I mean, did you see this as like your future? Were your parents like, this is your future, Ryan? Or was it just like, like this little kind of side project?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I actually did see it as my future.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  Wow. And by the way, I wasn't trying to be, what's word, condescending. I'm like, I'm 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.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  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, Brian, somebody is calling you from, you know, Sony Music.

• 37:23Guy Raz?

  Hey, David Burns on the phone.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I mean, exactly, you know. Oh, mom, don't answer the phone. Like, you know, I got my setup, my tape recorder, okay. But to her great credit. She paid that phone bill every month and was, I didn't hear about it until many years later.

• 37:41Guy Raz?

  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, because 1997, 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, but, but you had this little, basically, blog.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, you know, 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, you know, I'm looking at like, 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, 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 going to continue to buy the magazine or am I just going to do this? But for me, I was also like, well, look, they have advertising in magazines, we can have advertising on websites. So even though I knew that I did not yet have a readership enough to support actual

• 38:45Speaker 01

  real ads, but I did start looking at how other zines and, you know, sort of the, the like mid-tier kind of indie magazines like Magnet and Wagon. And I actually, in some cases, would write their, their sales department and be like, oh, I'm interested in advertising, can I get like a copy? And just like learning and figuring out how they did it.

• 39:06Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you, you would write to some of these music magazines, say, hey, I'm potentially interested in advertising, and they would send you their rate card?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:15Guy Raz?

  So you could learn about how they were making money?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:26Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. 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.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  But you were not, you had, not only were you not making any money from it, you had no money to, to get people to help you out, right?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:44Guy Raz?

  So how did you eventually, because then eventually you did get a couple more people, you know, writing reviews. Was this friends who just kind of did it for fun, for free?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  The first writer who started writing was my, was my best friend at the time, was still one of my best friends, Jason Josephs. And, 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 write 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. Yet I mean, I don't think we had a writer who was older than 24 at that point.

• 40:14Guy Raz?

  And how would you find the writers? You would post where?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  I posted on the main page of the site and I said, hey, you know, we're looking.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  Oh, you said, looking for writers?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  We're looking for writers, you know? Send us submissions, send your examples. And I got kind of amazing, like huge number of submissions even as early as 1998. And in fact, a lot of the 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 Pitchfork lifers. Like, 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. And so Mark Richardson, who became the editor in chief for many, many years, and probably one of the most well-known names associated with Pitchfork.

• 40:59Guy Raz?

  He just answered this post from your, your little blog?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  March 1998.

• 41:05Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:05Guy Raz?

  You know, I'm, I'm wondering, I mean, as you sort of really begin to think about this as a potential business, did you file like an LLC? Did you, I mean, in 1998, 1999, was Pitchfork like a registered business? Did you have like?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:25Guy Raz?

  Did you, no.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Not even close. No, I had, I had not the first idea about how or why to do that. And in fact, I don't think we were even incorporated officially until like 2004. It was a very long time.

• 41:42Guy Raz?

  What was the impetus that gave you the confidence to to jump into to a full time? Because I think, you know, you were doing record store or telemarketing. But by 1999, you decide to move to Chicago to leave Minneapolis.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:00Guy Raz?

  Was that for a job? Or was that just because you want to live in Chicago? Or what was why?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had made road trips, a series of road trips to Chicago where like, I mean, the very first road trip I took, and I'm like, in the city for the first time.

• 42:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not actually in the city limits for 30 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? And so I actually just started saving up. And at the same time, eBay had just kind of come out. And 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 what's eBay 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

• 42:57Speaker 01

  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 going to not give myself an opportunity to mess up. Like, I'm going to have to work on this as a business. 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?

• 43:30Guy Raz?

  What was the advertiser?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  There were an online record store called In Sound, which no longer exists, but was kind of a force at the time.

• 43:38Guy Raz?

  And what would they pay you a month? Do you remember?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  They asked me to name a price. And I so I went, oh, my God, I wonder how much. So I just pulled out the biggest number that I could think of, which was $500 a month.

• 43:56Guy Raz?

  Wow. How about $500?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, my God, that'll pay almost, that'll almost pay my rent each month.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  And they're sitting there going, sure, no problem.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, because they're at the top of every single page of the website, you know, everybody who comes up. And I mean, 1,500 readers a day, people who are completely obsessed with music, people who are looking to buy music online.

• 44:23Guy Raz?

  Amazing deal.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:25Guy Raz?

  So you go down to Chicago and I have my theories as to why, I mean, Chicago was a hugely fertile place for amazing music in the 90s. I mean, just we go on and on, Wilco and Tortoise and I'm probably forgetting a million bands. I mean, OK, Go came out there, but so many bands are coming out of Chicago.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's Touch and Go was out of there, Drag City was out of there. And so, you know, it was an extremely fertile music scene. And that, to me, was really exciting and really inspiring. You know, I just wanted to be in the middle of it.

• 44:59Guy Raz?

  What, did you get an office or no, presumably you were just doing this out of the apartment you're renting, right?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yes, I rented this apartment, I mean, it was $600 a month, totally cockroach infested, but like, that was my HQ, yeah.

• 45:13Guy Raz?

  And were the costs of running the site high at all, like the server costs or anything like that? Or was it relatively cheap?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:31Guy Raz?

  And I guess one of the things that's important to emphasize here is that the reason why so many of these, it turns out to be incredibly talented writers, were writing for free was because it was really, really hard to get published in a, in a print publication in the early 2000s. I mean, it was a very, 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. And then the big websites, the salons, the slates, also really hard to get into.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:07Guy Raz?

  So this was a way for people to just kind of get their name out there.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also, I mean, Pitchfork had, even from, you know, the late 90s on, Pitchfork had, you know, among those, whatever, 1,500 people who read it every day, you know, had quite a lot of credibility in the music space. Even though a lot of our reviews were so not review-like, some of them were. I mean, especially when 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, it's kind of like the review factory. You know, 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.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:07Guy Raz?

  So you're in Chicago still. I mean, this is still a labor of love for everyone involved. You're living off your savings, and it's late 99 when you moved there. And I think one of the first really, what I guess in hindsight was a real turning point, was a review that this guy Brent DiCresenzo writes about the new Radiohead album, Kid A.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:33Guy Raz?

  And so here's a couple of lines. "Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as rock are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper." This review gave the album a 10. Essentially calling this the greatest, you know, record ever. And I wouldn't disagree with him, by the way. This is probably one of my two or three favorite albums ever.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Guy Raz?

  It's an amazing review. And I guess that got you a little bit of attention.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  It did. I mean, it's funny now, when I look back on that review, there was a, there was a time, I think, for a little while there where I was kind of like, oh, my gosh, that really, because the review spawned such polarizing.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  Right, because it's over the top, really over the top, but beautifully written.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  It's probably one of the most over the top reviews I've ever read in my life. 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.

• 48:40Guy Raz?

  I mean, he writes this review so unselfconsciously. And again, we should emphasize Pitchfork is still small potatoes at this point. Like, it is a tiny, like, really tiny place where a tiny group of people go to. But like, the writing of this review is, is so unselfconscious that it's just wonderful. And I don't know Brent DiCresenzo, but thank you, Brent, for that review.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, really, thank you, Brent, because that review totally, I mean, like, Pitchfork was growing really quickly at that point. We had probably something like an average 3,000, maybe 3,500 readers a day.

• 49:20Guy Raz?

  A day. Wow.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  But I was like, really gunning for that. 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? And how can we grow in a way that like lends further authority, but also grows readership? And that, like, that record was, I actually, for that, I went out and I entered, like, sent a bunch of emails to all the Radiohead fan sites, which I knew also had huge readership. And so I was like, hey, we're gonna be running this review tomorrow. Just FYI, heads up. If you want to like it, that'd be awesome, whatever. Just so you know.

• 49:59Guy Raz?

  So that brought in a lot of traffic?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  It brought in a staggering amount of traffic. We handily broke that 5,000 mark in the day that review came out, but. Yeah, and you know, for so many people, that is their very first impression of what Pitchfork is.

• 50:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  So, and because it reads nothing like anything else in the music writing space.

• 50:27Guy Raz?

  No.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  People are like, what is this? This is so hyperbolic. It's so purple.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  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? 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.

• 50:53Guy Raz?

  All right. So let's talk for a moment about the business. 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 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 seeking out other potential advertisers too at the same time? Were you, were you like the biz dev guy too?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was the everything guy, like everything. I mean, I just worked on Pitchfork like nonstop. But by that point, 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.

• 51:42Guy Raz?

  What do you mean you failed in Chicago? What, how did you fail?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, what I, I couldn't make my rent because even though I gave myself like no alternative but to turn Pitchfork 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?

• 52:03Guy Raz?

  To pay your rent?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  To pay the rent, you know, and to, for me to eat, you know, for example.

• 52:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  So I was something like four months behind in rent and.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Just like I had to go home. Um, I called my folks and

• 52:17Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  They fortunately had like a lake cabin, way rural Minnesota. I mean, an hour and a half, two hours outside the city. Um, like a little 600 square foot thing. And basically I would got to go up there for six months and kind of get my grounding again.

• 52:33Guy Raz?

  Wow. Did you, did you spend the winter? Did you spend the winter there?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:52Guy Raz?

  When 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.

• 53:16Speaker 03

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• 54:54Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2000 and Ryan is holed up in a cabin in rural Minnesota, trying to figure out how to make Pitchfork work as a business.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  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 stable of regular advertisers in rotation.

• 55:25Guy Raz?

  So you go back to Minnesota for what, almost a year?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Probably six, six to eight months, something like that.

• 55:32Guy Raz?

  Right. And, and then you head back to Chicago?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:36Guy Raz?

  To kind of start up again with a few more advertisers. Can you estimate like roughly how much you were bringing in in ad revenue at that point?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  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 12, 1200, something like that.

• 55:52Guy Raz?

  So when did you first get like a brick and mortar space where you, where you could work out of? Do you remember? What year was that?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  That was 2003.

• 56:02Guy Raz?

  And what was the, what was the turning point? How were you able to do that? Cause that's got to pay rent and you've got to get office equipment and internet connections and phone lines. What, how did you have the cash to do that?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Well, by the end of 2001, 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, we had a lot of people in rotation, I was kind of like, okay, I think I could afford to pay one person a salary. I actually offered one of my writer 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.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, it'd be fun to work with him. So he came, he came out to Chicago. I got us an office. I gave him a little salary. And we did that for, I guess, almost a year.

• 57:06Guy Raz?

  So he's your first employee, real employee, but sort of, because you weren't, you hadn't even incorporated as a business yet. Like, this is still, it's still like friends, kind of just, just write him a check. Here's your check for the week.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yep. Not paying taxes, by the way, either.

• 57:21Guy Raz?

  And meantime, you have this stable of writers who are writing reviews. 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're paying our rent and we've got, you know, a couple thousand bucks coming in and advertising revenue.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Life was good. I mean, what, like, the point that I was at with, with Pitchfork, like, being able, like, I could 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 and we'll interview them and.

• 58:00Guy Raz?

  Because you start to get, because you had built a reputation now.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:04Guy Raz?

  You know, it's important to point out that, because I think some people hearing this will be like, well, how did you get? Are these, are 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.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  They did. They sort of seeded it. I mean, there was, there was, it's not like they weren't covering this music. They were. But I think they were covering such a wider array of music, but also, I mean, most of them didn't have websites still.

• 58:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And also just like we're younger and, you know, kids like reading stuff by kids their own age. And, you know, also being able to put a lot of those bands forward to a larger audience was one of the single most rewarding things. The 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 progressive.

• 59:28Guy Raz?

  There was a review that came out in 2004, which is like probably one of the, if not the most, one of the most infamous reviews ever posted by Pitchfork, and it's of a record by an artist named Travis Morrison, who was part of a band that was buzzy for a while called Dismemberment Plan. And the writer of that review, Chris Dolan, gave it 0.0 on a 10-point scale.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:53Guy Raz?

  Saying it fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place. It was a devastating review, and needless to say Travis Morrison is not an artist anymore. I don't believe he makes music anymore today.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  He's a writer now.

• 1:00:08Guy Raz?

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

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  I do. I mean, I actually kind of remember very early on trying to write reviews of artists that like were not in the press at all. Like 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 this 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 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, you know, I was, we haven't given

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  a 0.0, like, have we ever done it? We should do it, you know? 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,

• 1:01:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  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 we're using this authority that we've managed to accumulate. And we, we've got to be a little more responsible with this because that, you know, that doesn't feel, that doesn't feel right.

• 1:01:52Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  So what happened was in early 2004, Eric Carr, who'd 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 kind of 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, I mean, 30,000 readers a day or something, you know? I mean,

• 1:02:37Guy Raz?

  A day by 2004?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Easily, probably much higher than that. It might've been, you know, 75,000 readers a day or something. Like it started to get enormous. And I mean, probably around 2001 was when it started to just skyrocket, just completely boom.

• 1:02:54Guy Raz?

  And 75,000 readers a day? That's a medium sized daily.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, it was, it was staggering to watch this number just like explode.

• 1:03:02Guy Raz?

  Did you, were you, I mean, did you start to become actually profitable?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, started to become quite profitable, uh, quite profitable. So, you know, I was like, okay, well, I can afford to hire the right person for this job now. And 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, 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, 25% in this way, and I did this and that and there.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  And like, he actually could, 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 Kasky, and he went on to basically become, like, he ran the entire business of Pitchfork from that point on.

• 1:04:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:04:29Guy Raz?

  As you start to hire more and more people, right? And finally, you can do this. It's 2005, 2006, you can finally start to hire two, three, four people.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:39Guy Raz?

  This is a, this is a business. You know, you probably, what, I mean, can you estimate what you were bringing in a year? More than $200,000 a year in revenue?

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would, it would have been something like that, because by 2005, yeah, we probably had something like six employees at that point.

• 1:04:57Guy Raz?

  So, I'm, I'm curious, like, in terms of leading and leadership, I mean, 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.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  And, 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 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.

• 1:05:51Guy Raz?

  And this is your ad guy, who was basically your business operations guy?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:04Guy Raz?

  So without him, it's very likely it would not have ever become really a professional business. You kind of, the fact that his resume was the last one that you pulled up was kind of a stroke of luck.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  It was a stroke of luck to a large degree. I mean, there was a, 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.

• 1:06:36Guy Raz?

  And, and so, I mean, as you, you know, as you sort of became more and more influential, right, with this sort of the pitchfork effect, right, you started to get attention, media attention, 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?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, at a certain point, we started to see people who had kind of come up alongside us start to do that. I remember when I was in Minneapolis, you know, Vice started out as a Montreal operation.

• 1:07:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah, we had him on a show in, on season one, The Story of Vice.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Right. And I remember getting, you know, a copy of Vice that was still in newsprint. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life. 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. They were so good at raising capital that, like, it was almost insane to watch. But, but at the same time, like, Pitchfork 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

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  I didn't have a lot of interest in culture beyond that. I just didn't, didn't have it.

• 1:08:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  If we had started to cover 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.

• 1:08:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:23Guy Raz?

  You guys got into the festival business in 2005. 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 because that's a complex business.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 never happened if I hadn't moved there. So they asked us to join up and just asked us if we wanted to choose the bands. We're like, yeah, it sounds amazing, obviously. Yeah, let's do that. You guys run it and we'll just choose the artists and promote it. That sounds like a good deal, sir. Let's do that. We ended up selling that first year, I think something like 12,000 tickets for two days or something, maybe 13,000, 14,000. That was a lot, a lot, a lot of tickets. And so fortunately, essentially, the festival director, whose name is Mike Reed,

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  was a really, I mean, just incredible promoter, producer. And 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 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.

• 1:10:03Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  You know, we found out kind of the hard way pretty early on that first year. I mean, Mike already had understood, like, you know, the finances of it the first year and it kind of had explained it to us and walked us through P and L for that.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  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. There is so much overhead that it's also like kind of. 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. You've got to, you know, make sure that the ticket sales are like fair, reasonable, that you can attract a big enough crowd. You've got security concerns, vendors. There's just, there's so many moving parts.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  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. And one that we fortunately, by staying mid sized and not trying to scale up and not trying to compete with the Lollapaloozas and Coachellas and Bonnaroo's. We were able to manage to make it profitable, break even. So, no, it wasn't a big, it was probably, it might've been 10% of our overall revenue.

• 1:11:55Guy Raz?

  You, you eventually moved to New York, I think. And the editorial office stayed in Chicago for a while, would eventually move to New York. But I think by, by like 2010, you had 20 full time staffers in New York and Chicago. Like, you know, freelancers as well. You're doing like two and a half million unique visitors a month, 400,000 visitors, visitors a day. So you're really on the map. You're a really major

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:24Guy Raz?

  force in, in music journalism. But there were competitors, right? There are obviously a lot of these upstart news media websites that now are out in the world, right? We know that BuzzFeed, I mean, there are Huffington Post is out there. Some of these publications are branching out to music. NPR launched NPR Music, I can't remember when, but that was becoming a pretty important force.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:45Guy Raz?

  Were there people kind of saying to you, hey, we've got to like protect our turf or we've got to look out for these competitors because we're we can get eaten alive. I mean, you you can just see what what happened in newspapers.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:56Guy Raz?

  And that could happen to us, too.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that we were cognizant of that. Um, we're like, we were 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 and 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.

• 1:13:34Guy Raz?

  They didn't work.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  They we didn't really have enough resources by ourselves to put into all of the things that we wanted to do. Frankly, it was just a little bit too. I don't know. It was kind of like at that point in the, you know, the the band's been together for 15 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 were trying to do too many things at once without any, you know, without any help.

• 1:14:08Guy Raz?

  There are many things that you guys tried. Tried a print magazine.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:11Guy Raz?

  You tried 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 and was your revenue growing every year? Were there years where it was up and down, up and down?

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  The revenue was growing year over year, but our expenses, you know, varied.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  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

• 1:14:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  of marketing and that kind of shifting the entire landscape from, you know, a banner ad-driven economy to a totally social media-focused, like, marketing economy.

• 1:15:14Guy Raz?

  When you were approached by Conde Nast in 2015, who eventually acquired you to purchase Pitchfork, I mean, I'm sure, sure, for you, it was incredible. It was, your publication was valued, must have been valued quite high at that point. But I wonder also, was it calculation in your mind that you were looking at the future and at competitors and at media consolidation and maybe were concerned that without, you know, without being part of a bigger organization like Conde Nast, Pitchfork might not survive for another 10 or 20 years? Because it was 20 years at that point that you'd been writing.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, the, again, we could see very clearly what was coming down the path and, you know, seeing where we are today, where if you don't have a paywall, you're struggling.

• 1:16:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  You know, it, it, it was clear that the whole model was going to change or was already changing. On one hand, I was like, look, 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 going to become harder and harder to do. We're going to have to start making difficult decisions. We're going to have to 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 Conde offered of

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  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, well, okay, they've been doing this forever. There's 32 brands like where not only is this something that like kind of elevates as further escalates pitchfork and is more of like a success story kind of approach. It feels like we're going to need to ban these publications are going to need to band together in order to make this work going forward.

• 1:17:25Guy Raz?

  And you had a lot of people that depended on it for employment. So I'm sure that was a lot of pressure.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, by that time we had 50 some employees. Yeah.

• 1:17:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  I'm also kind of a, I don't know, 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 if it wasn't the path I was supposed to take.

• 1:17:53Guy Raz?

  You stayed on as an editor for another few years and then stayed on with Conde Nast, I think for four years.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Guy Raz?

  After the acquisition. How did you adapt to that environment? It's corporate. You were moved to the World Trade Center in New York, the Conde Nast offices. You're part of like, I don't know, like I think I'd be scared as hell to be in a conference room with Anna Wintour, but there you go. You're in that world.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  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 Remnick, multi Pulitzer winning genius editor of The New Yorker and Anna Wintour, who is the creative director of Conde Nast, so who you interface with regularly about your business. You know, and among numerous other legends like W Magazine, like Vanity Fair, GQ, Jim Nelson at GQ. I mean, these are genius, genius people.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  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. But, you know, at the same time, it was also kind of like this crazy like media college campus.

• 1:19:23Guy Raz?

  I bet.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Like, there were so many amazing journalists, amazing, 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 is going to be a lot easier. But, you know, at the same time, obviously, when we got to Conde Nast, Conde started to make decisions as to what should, you know, what we should continue to focus on and what we should.

• 1:19:58Guy Raz?

  So they didn't want to support, like, all the different projects that you guys had going? Like, the film publication or the print version of Pitchfork, whatever? Like, they didn't want to pursue those things?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. These were both things that Conde decided weren't worth, you know, the ROI, basically. You know, they, when we, when we got to Conde Nast, like, they were very much like, oh, yeah, this is a niche, you know, business and

• 1:20:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:56Guy Raz?

  You are no longer part of Pitchfork. You, I think, officially left in 2019.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Guy Raz?

  I know that you're writing a book, a written history of Pitchfork, which will come out in a couple of years. Do you miss that daily interaction, all those people being steeped in that world? Meetings, talking about, I don't know, ideas. Do you miss that day to day?

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Oh, 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 for me. 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 2004, just mostly stopped doing it publicly and stopped 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 would it look like? 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

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  kind of change the landscape, I mean, is just as much a part of who I am and what my interests are as it's been since the beginning of the web.

• 1:22:14Guy Raz?

  I think I might know the answer to this question, but I'm still going to ask it because I'm curious. You knew that this was going to 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 do with your life. But if you could see yourself in 1995, 96, and have seen that journey, 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, juggernaut, just huge media organization? Do you think you would have been surprised?

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  I think I would have, I would have been elated. I would have been thrilled just to the very core to see everything that Pitchfork 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 is. It is wild that that we all, and I say we because I naturally,

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  I mean, there's many more people who are just as crucial and pivotal to this story as me, but and just as responsible for its success. But it's, you know, and now it's it's kind of 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. It's an it's an adult now. And you kind of like, you know, you can't, you know, you no longer have the input that you used to have. It's going to 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.

• 1:24:15Guy Raz?

  That's Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork. By the way, what's your your favorite album of all time?

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  It's impossible. It's an impossible question. I mean, think of all the music that you've listened to in your life. Can you say it any given day?

• 1:24:30Guy Raz?

  All right, top five, no order, just just five great records, no order.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Okay, five great, great records, no order. DJ Shadow introducing.

• 1:24:39Guy Raz?

  Yes. Pet Sounds, Beach Boys?

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good. I like it.

• 1:24:45Guy Raz?

  Marvin Gaye, What's Going On?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  That was gonna be the next one I was gonna say, actually. Marvin Gaye, What's Going On? You can't not have it.

• 1:24:50Guy Raz?

  Radiohead, Kid A?

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's certainly one of my favorite albums. Talking Heads, Remain in Light. It's a record by a UK duo called The KLF. It's a record called Chill Out.

• 1:25:03Guy Raz?

  Prince, Syntetimes?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:14Guy Raz?

  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/survey. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter or Instagram, our account is @howibuiltthis and mine is @GuyRaz. And on Instagram, I'm @Guy.Raz.

• 1:25:58Guy Raz?

  This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Farah Safari. Our audio engineer was Brian Jarboe. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Josh Lash, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.