Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber talks Pitchfork.tv, the future of criticism

The video site is the latest part of Pitchfork’s expansion, along with the just-announced music licensing for the MLB 2K8 video game and the yearly Pitchfork Fest. What's next? Pitchfork Records?

You can count on us never starting a record label. We do have some other cool stuff coming up, but for the most part, I think we're good for a little while.

Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis just took you to task about conflicts of interest. As the guy in charge of the whole operation, how do you draw the line between criticism and everything else?

It's largely the same way that print media and newspapers have drawn the line between advertising and editorial for decades, which is by keeping each department separate. That was a great devil's advocate discussion [with DeRogatis], actually, which I think somewhat helped me clarify some of my thinking on this. He said he would never host his own concert nights because he sees that as promotion rather than his job and our job, which has always been criticism and journalism. I don't see what we do as promoting bands. It's us being able to designate through different mediums which artists we like and approve of -- it's experimenting a bit with the form. To me, why should the marketing departments and advertising departments of the music industry dictate what gets exposure? Why not people who actually like it and care about it?

With print publications dwindling and music easier than ever to download, it seems like having that critical voice is becoming less necessary to the consumer. Is stuff like Pitchfork.tv a way to draw more attention to the critical end?

I always thought that too -- that criticism would become less necessary as downloading became more popular, but our readership keeps rising. I think that has a lot to do with the purpose we serve as a filter, because the other side of that argument is, if you can access a basically infinite amount of music online, how do you determine what you're interested in hearing to begin with?

Does Pitchfork still have the influence it did a few years ago? Now you have people like Perez Hilton getting A&R contracts and blogs like Stereogum and BrooklynVegan are becoming more important all the time.

I'm probably a little too close to it to have any real perspective on that. But one nice thing about how the Web has changed things from the old print model is that people tend to have multiple resources -- they check Pitchfork and Perez and Stereogum and all kinds of others, so we're all able to co-exist pretty peacefully, whereas with print magazines, it seemed like having to pay for them meant that most people generally seemed to swear allegiance to just one.

With so much out there, now it seems like the traditional media are getting to some of this stuff even before you have the chance to hype it, like Vampire Weekend.

Well, there was a real reluctance from me toward Vampire Weekend -- I hated them probably the first five to six times I heard them. And I mean, sincerely hated. Eventually, they clicked for me in a really big way, which I'm still sort of conflicted about, because it was pretty vehement. I had to go through a whole period of indie guilt and self-loathing before I could admit to myself that they write a lot of great songs.

Photo of Schreiber by Anthony Robert La Penna/For The Times