The operators are doing more than recommending alternatives to the trends marketed by major labels in the music business. Pitchfork.tv at http://www.pitchfork.tv is also conceived as a critical response to the established programming model of major music channels such as MTV and VIVA. In contrast to their preference for US dating shows, the new channel is intended to concentrate on music videos and interviews. The established text-based magazine mainly offers news from the music scene and CD reviews.
With Pitchfork.tv, the three operators Ryan Schreiber, Christopher Kaskie and Scott Plagenhoef are adding moving images and the sounds they could previously describe only in words to their media offering. MTV itself is said to have supplied the idea when the channel gradually abandoned its original format and music-based schedule in the early 1990s. The service is used primarily by music fans in their twenties and thirties who dislike MTV’s shows and feel they have outgrown the media giant’s target group.
The Pitchfork indie magazine already records 250,000 visits per day, making it one of the internet’s rising attractions. Behind it is a company founded in 1995 that currently employs 15 permanent staff and more than 40 freelancers around the world. Their salaries are funded entirely by the website’s advertising revenue. Online advertising experts estimate Pitchfork’s advertising revenue—said by Kaskie to have risen by 70 percent in each of the past four years—at around $5 million per year. Its advertisers include companies such as Toyota and American Apparel. According to the organizers, income from the Pitchfork Music Festival, launched in 2006 and attended by 60,000 fans last year, is used exclusively to organize the following year’s festival.
Further Links:
- Pitchfork
