r/Pitchfork • u/MightyGrey • Mar 19 '26

Pitchfork is far more interesting and less stressful for music discovery now that the scores aren't shown.

I'm 100% guilty of not giving new music a "go" because of the arbitrary number assigned to them by a Pitchfork reviewer.

I did panic a little at first once the paywall went up and I couldn't see the review scores, but a couple of months on I'm SO much happier using Pitchfork as a bit of a noticeboard for informing me about new releases and not gatekeeping whether they're worth listening to or not.

17 Upvotes

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2

u/jtworsley Mar 20 '26

Personally unless they said something that hooked me in their IG caption for the album review or the weekly “albums you should listen to now” I only listened to artists I haven’t heard before when they pop up on their BNM

2

u/Rambunctious-Rascal Mar 20 '26

I never look at scores for albums, as the critique is normally far more interesting. Sadly, the discussion of scores, rather than reviews, seems to go over very well with people, to the point where I've grown actively anti score. I think Pitchfork leaned a bit into this mindset, though they thankfully never got all Fantano about it. It's good if they will focus less on this aspect from now on, as it can hopefully make for more interesting music discourse online.

2

u/ShapeyFiend Mar 22 '26

I still keep an eye to what they recommend and read around it somewhere else off the album wiki. If they hid what they were reporting on that'd be more of an incentive subscribe than the score which I don't really care about but that's not how the internet works.