Pitchfork Music Festival 2023/Photo: Alexa Viscius
This story appeared in the July-August 2025 issue of Newcity. Order a copy here.
Pitchfork was the first music festival I ever attended, and the first concert I’d been to without parental supervision. It was 2011 and I had just turned fifteen. I had asked for tickets to the Sunday set for my birthday, to see Odd Future play with a tight group of pals. For us, it was just a venue—the only place we’d be able to see our new favorite hip-hop collective we’d been obsessing over for the previous year. It was hot. We drank warm whiskey from plastic pints. It was an afternoon set. We moshed. We sang along, white, sweaty, lame and drunk. And then we stuck around.
The main act for us had already performed, so we had hours to explore Union Park and discover music. That day, I was introduced to Shabazz Palaces, Toro y Moi, Deerhunter, Kurt Vile, Yuck and Ariel Pink. All in one day, all artists still occupying my Spotify playlist fifteen years later, and two of which (Deerhunter and Ariel Pink) became favorites—folks I listen to more than Odd Future.
Pitchfork’s parent company, Condé Nast, announced the cancellation of Pitchfork Music Festival last November. This summer marks the first in two decades without the occasion, an event that drew close to a million fans over the course of its nineteen-year lifespan. The absence lands hard—not just for the city’s indie scene, but for an international cadre of rising artists still fighting for exposure. In an industry dominated by streaming metrics and social media, the role of large-scale live festivals grew more critical. They remain one of the few real-world platforms for smaller, independent acts to generate new and diverse audiences en masse.
Very few festivals upheld that spirit of organic discovery and community like Pitchfork. And in no small part, that community was built on the direct, symbiotic relationship between Pitchfork’s authority in music criticism, its publishing reputation—love it or hate it, it drew eyeballs to new music—and its curatorial hand in programming the festival. Festivals aren’t usually built by rock writers. Pitchfork was.
The festival’s legacy is permanent. The precision and curatorial instinct of Pitchfork’s editorial team amplified the careers of hundreds of artists—dozens of whom have since become household names, propelled in part by their performances at Union Park in front of Chicago’s musically literate and culturally textured audiences.
As Chicago moves through a summer without the engine of its live-indie music locomotive, it’s hard to forget some of the performances that helped define a generation of independent and alternative music—starting with a festival that, twenty years ago, opened with Yo La Tengo and The Mountain Goats as headliners.
Rosenstock performing at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2017/Photo: WRBB 104.9 FM
Jeff Rosenstock, who played a legendary 1:45pm Saturday set at the 2017 festival, shared his memory of that show. “We played early, and it was an expensive ticket compared to our $15 shows,” Rosenstock recalls. “So I didn’t expect it to go well… But Chicago showed up early and ready, and we just tried to match that energy and go lights-out as hard as possible in the blazing sun.”
He remembers expecting the crowd to be “kind of pretentious and uptight,” only to find it was “just full of chill, nice, happy music fans.” Pitchfork was the first traditional American festival Rosenstock ever played. “They paid us more than we’d ever been paid—we were stoked. The catering was lit. Everyone treated us really well.”
What stood out to him, though, was how present the audience felt. “We assumed we’d never be asked back, so we figured we might as well be fully ourselves,” he says. “It was a blast. It felt like a real celebration of music and community.”
The Dead Bolts/Photo: The Dead Bolts
Eddie Hennessy, frontman of Chicago’s The Dead Bolts, says that “Chicago is losing a massive spotlight on what makes it such a killer city for music. For years, the festival achieved a balance of showcasing popular music but also what was truly good across the board, regardless of hype.”
For smaller artists, that balance mattered. “Most of the artists outside the headliners weren’t being booked by huge agencies,” Hennessey says. “Some didn’t even have an agency—they were literally booked through their own email. That’s extremely rare now, and one of the most commendable traits of the folks putting the fest together every year.”
If it was new, independent, interesting, high-talent and high-potential music, the Pitchfork editorial team found it, wrote about it, and leadership booked it. If the music was good—and it usually was—new fans shared it, great bands found great audiences, and communities were created. An indie fan could walk into the festival not knowing a single name before the 7pm slots, walk out with two new favorite records, and feel part of a community of folks walking out the same way. Fans could count on a previous year’s daytime slot making its way to a headliner’s set or to Lollapalooza the following year, as well as the occasional indie giant—LCD Soundsystem, Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky—making appearances, as well as a cluster of local and national unknowns hitting the early-afternoon sets.
Ryan Schreiber/Photo: Chris Person
Chris Kaskie
Mike Reed
There are four main characters in this story. Ryan Schreiber, founder and owner of Pitchfork from 1996 to 2019, and the architect of its editorial vision; Chris Kaskie, Schreiber’s first hire, co-founder of the modern version of Pitchfork, and president from 2004 to 2017; Mike Reed, the man who directed the Pitchfork Music Festival from its first year in 2006 to its last in 2024; and the media conglomerate Condé Nast, which purchased the Pitchfork brand, website and festival in 2015. Kaskie, Schreiber and Reed remain in contact and closely connected despite having vacated the Pitchfork brand.
“Pitchfork was the only place a thirty-five-year-old lawyer and a seventeen-year-old kid could discover authentic new music together at volume,” says Kaskie. “Neither could hit the Empty Bottle every weekend, but they respectively could carve out time and money to see forty new artists one weekend a year.”
Bon Iver “SABLE, fABLE”/Photo: Graham Tolbert
It Didn’t Need to End
In 2006, a man called Justin Vernon began writing and recording music in solitude in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He threw together a band. In 2007, Pitchfork ran a piece on that band. In 2010, Vernon played Pitchfork with that band. That band is Bon Iver.
Perhaps nothing is more frustrating to Pitchfork evangelists than that the sunsetting of the festival was entirely unnecessary—begat by continuous mistakes, mismanagement and profligacy from one of the nation’s largest media companies. Condé Nast’s problems are not resolved or even significantly altered without the festival on its books, at least in its original form. Make no mistake: the monolithic publishing giant killed the festival via a thousand cuts over the last seven years.
While the end artistic product may have appeared to maintain its integrity since the 2015 acquisition, the bones of the festival’s production and identity were chipped away by new ownership from the beginning. Condé Nast’s and global chief content officer Anna Wintour’s vision, it would appear, was to emulate the notoriety and revenue-first posture of other major festivals—the partying, the pop platforming, the pricing. Their structure prioritized business mechanics over the ethos of the festival itself—a communal platform to connect exciting new artists discovered and covered by Pitchfork writers with an intelligent, dedicated and open-minded audience.
The dissolution of the festival coincides—comically, disappointingly—with a renaissance of new artists on the Chicago music scene, making inventive, urgent work that is begging for and deserving of an audience. The absence of the festival and its booking power may lead to new, more creative opportunities for booking agents and organizers—something Mike Reed is demonstrating with his innovative Sound & Gravity event, scheduled for September 11-13 at the end of this summer.
But there’s no escaping the Pitchfork-sized hole in the city’s musical landscape, a hole much larger than just Union Park. Here’s how it fell apart.
Vampire Weekend, performing November 2, 2007
Why Did Pitchfork Sell?
In 2008, Vampire Weekend performed at Pitchfork less than two years after forming and just months after releasing their debut album. Their rendition of “A-Punk” (2008) at the festival remains one of the most iconic live indie performances in Chicago music history.
The end of the festival was not signaled during the buyout in any way. It came with grinding inevitability—gradually and bureaucratically, and as a direct result of corporate ownership—not because of an “evolving festival landscape,” as described in Condé Nast’s official cancellation statement.
Condé Nast finalized its acquisition of Pitchfork Media in 2015. Nothing unusual: a major media company acquires a smaller but respected brand, injecting growth opportunities for the purchased publication while diversifying its own portfolio and expanding audience reach. Ultimately, according to Kaskie, Pitchfork leadership agreed to the acquisition as a way to expand media capabilities and resources.
“For a long time, the things we wanted to do and the things we needed to do were aligned,” says Kaskie. “As we kept getting bigger, the things we needed to do began to diverge from the things we wanted to do, and we viewed the buyout as something that would allow us to continue to do both.”
“I mean, I read GQ. I read The New Yorker. I read Vogue,” Kaskie says. “These are hyper-respected publications that put out incredible stories. We were super excited to join that table.”
Pitchfork had been approached by potential buyers before, including perpetual dealmakers Vice Media, without seriously entertaining any proposals. The publication was not looking to be acquired when Condé made its offer. The agreement was, according to Kaskie, an attempt to expand Pitchfork’s editorial footprint while protecting its original purpose. Condé Nast—a media conglomerate valued at more than $5 billion—was, perhaps naively, seen by the Pitchfork crew as the right steward to shepherd growth while preserving the meticulously authentic identity that Kaskie, Ryan Schreiber and Mike Reed had built for the publication—and the festival.
Crowd at the 2012 Pitchfork Music Festival. Saturday, July 14, 2012/Photo: Joseph Mohan
Condé Nast Killed the Best Indie Music Festival on the Planet
Kendrick Lamar, fresh off the release of “Section.80” (2011) and deep into the writing process for the then-unnamed “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” (2012), took the stage at Pitchfork in the summer of 2012. His performances of “Swimming Pools” and “ADHD” disseminated a novel energy throughout the crowd, drawing in new listeners and planting a flag as something different in hip-hop. While it would have been impossible to predict he would go on to become one of the most important musical artists of the twenty-first century, this performance cemented his stature as, at the time, rap’s most exciting new poet.
Side note: Drake never played Pitchfork.
Media buyouts can be profoundly successful. Condé Nast bought GQ in 1979, transforming what was then a niche fashion magazine into a leading global authority on men’s sophistication and culture. Just a few years later they bought The New Yorker, turning a fusty if beloved weekly into one of the company’s still-thriving flagship publications.
The problem with the Pitchfork buyout is that media brands generally don’t own and manage music festivals. Lollapalooza, Coachella and Bonnaroo are all produced by event management and promotion companies. But Pitchfork Music Festival was produced by the same leadership that curated the publication. The festival was an extension of the Pitchfork writing and content team’s mission of discovery—a manifestation of the outlet’s music criticism, and a curated garden of its findings. It was not a standalone business vehicle. The identity of the festival was rooted in the unveiling of new music and the creation of community in sharing it.
That model wasn’t supposed to work, but it did. According to Kaskie, from 2006 to 2017, Pitchfork Music Festival was profitable with the exception of a single year. Mike Reed, with the help of Kaskie, Schreiber and his festival production team, had run the show since its inception. They—and, by extension, the entire Pitchfork editorial staff—became experts at discovering fresh indie music, writing about it, and exposing it beyond their journalism through the fest. They had amassed more than fifteen years of experience running the event, a job that grew wildly complex as gig-economy costs ballooned and municipal bureaucratic minutiae compounded. Frankly—and bewilderingly—the festival didn’t need any help.
Enter Condé Nast. “They wanted to treat it like its own business unit, something separated from the media brand,” Kaskie says. “They felt this would make it more of a music experience product, more profitable, more marketable… I felt like a guy in front of this castle that we had been building for almost twenty years, defending it with my life, trying to preserve its identity. 2016 was the last year we did the festival without any real involvement from Condé—we’d basically finished everything before they could get their hands on it.” Kaskie would leave Pitchfork one year later, after the 2017 festival wrapped.
Pitchfork introduced a VIP tier to its ticket packages that year. “Speaking just for myself—though I’m pretty sure for everyone else—I hated this idea. But in the spirit of Pitchfork, where we want to try new things, listen to experimental stuff, be open-minded, we figured we should at least try it. Who knows, maybe it would be a big hit—maybe the fans would love it. I wanted to be proven wrong.”
Pitchfork Music Festival/Photo: Daniel Cavazos, courtesy Pitchfork Music Festival
From a fan experience, the VIP addition was a disaster. The concept clashed with the democratic spirit of the festival, an event that had always been cheaper, more independent, and more artistically pure than its summer counterpart Lollapalooza in Grant Park. VIP sections at Pitchfork became tented fraternities soaked in vodka lemonade, obstructing stage views for plebian fans now relegated thirty yards from stage right or left. After the 2017 festival, Condé Nast leadership applied pressure to find more lucrative sponsorship deals and expand the VIP packages.
“I couldn’t handle it anymore,” Kaskie says. “I couldn’t keep fighting against what they were trying to do. They had a completely different vision for what they wanted the festival to be, conflicting with what the identity of the festival actually was. So I left.”
After Kaskie’s departure in 2017, Condé formally split the event from the Pitchfork publication. It was given its own P&L and its own org chart. “Look, we weren’t opposed to making changes to the festival to make it better. You can go in with a scalpel and make things more efficient. That’s fine. That makes sense,” Kaskie says. “But Condé went in with a spray-paint can.”
The first changes were subtle. New job titles and hires, dedicated solely to the festival. The introduction of additional VIP tiers. Branded platforms that blocked views of the stage. A slow expansion of “sponsorship experiences” that felt more Coachella than curated. “You build a giant condo in the middle of the field so VIPs can stand on it—that’s going to cost you a couple hundred thousand dollars,” he says. “So then what? You have to sell enough premium tickets to offset that. You can’t sell more than twenty-five thousand tickets in Union Park. And if you just break even, what have you gained? Nothing. You’ve pissed off your core audience, and you’ve diluted the energy.”
After Kaskie’s departure, Condé reportedly pressured festival leadership to book bigger names. In a WBEZ interview with Mike Reed, it is implied that Condé had floated names like Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato as potential headliners. For Pitchfork loyalists, even Alanis Morissette—one of the headliners in 2024—felt like a minor breach of contract. I raise the topic with Kaskie, who remains close with Reed, hoping to verify the claim and get his take.
“That’s complete clown town,” he says, while not confirming whether Bieber or Lovato were specifically proposed for 2025. “I don’t know if those are the names they were actually looking for, but they were definitely starting to apply pressure for bigger names.”
“There’s no financial model that justifies paying Justin Bieber millions of dollars when you’re only selling twenty-five thousand tickets. That’s not Pitchfork. That’s not what it ever was. Mike [Reed] would never say, ‘I hate Bieber, we can’t book him,’” Kaskie says, while acknowledging the lunacy of hosting a stadium-headlining pop star at Pitchfork. “He wouldn’t even make it just about taste. He’d say, ‘That’s just not good for us.’ And he’d be right. It wasn’t about snobbery. It was about coherence.”
As Condé continued to reshape the festival into a standalone product, its profitability declined. By 2019, Ryan Schreiber—the man who launched Pitchfork as a music criticism site in 1996 and hired Kaskie as its first employee—had left the company. That left Mike Reed as the last remaining link to the festival’s first year in 2006.
Kaskie all but confirmed that the new structure—the separate org chart, the detachment from the media brand, the push for bigger sponsorships, more mainstream acts, and higher-tier ticketing—ultimately undermined the festival’s profitability. From 2017 on, after more than a decade of success, the festival lost money.
Pitchfork Music Festival 2009/Photo: Leigh Anne Hines
“If GQ Gets a Cold, We All Get Sick.”
In 1991, Matt Berninger met Scott Devendorf while they were both students at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design. They would eventually start an indie-Americana band in Brooklyn with the help of Scott’s brother, Bryan, and childhood friends Aaron and Bryce Dessner in 1999. Pitchfork would review their debut album in 2001 (while much of the group reportedly still held day jobs), and again their second album “Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers” the year of its release in 2003, scoring it an 8.4 out of 10.
The two sets of brothers would go on to play Pitchfork Music Festival in 2009. They would then play Lollapalooza in 2013, eventually headlining in 2018.
That band is called The National.
Inside Condé Nast, inefficiency wasn’t tolerated—it was institutionalized. “I’d be fighting tooth and nail to get our writers a little more than a cost-of-living raise,” Kaskie says. “And then I’d see someone’s T&E budget come through from another title and just laugh—like, what are we doing here?” As a smaller stakeholder in the Condé Nast portfolio, Pitchfork received more scrutiny but also fewer resources. “There was this thing we used to say inside Condé: if GQ gets a cold, everybody gets sick. And that was real.”
The discrepancy wasn’t just visible—it was lurid. Kaskie recalls reading a recent story by a Vanity Fair writer (another Condé Nast publication) who earned $500,000 a year to write three articles annually. “They were ten-thousand-word pieces, sure. But I’m fighting over a $4,000 line item for a writer who’s filing every week. Like, what are we even talking about?”
Even before that journalist’s confession, it was already obvious: if Condé wanted to cut fat, other publications were wildly indulgent. Pitchfork “was a low-risk endeavor. I think they just saw Coachella and Lollapalooza as examples of what, in their mind, this could be revenue-wise,” Kaskie says. “The festival was never going to be some billion-dollar revenue machine. But it meant something. To people. To the culture. And when you kill something that meaningful over pocket change—especially while the rest of the building is on fire? That’s not strategy. That’s negligence. And when you’re a small piece of a big company, and the big company starts swinging an ax, you’re just easy to lop off.”
Notably, Pitchfork doesn’t even make the index of Michael M. Grynbaum’s buzzy new history of Condé Nast, “Empire of the Elite.”
I ask Kaskie if he ever felt undue pressure or influence on the Pitchfork editorial team’s coverage or creative direction. He takes a long pause before responding: “No, not really. We did some more video stuff, and that was actually really great. But, speaking for myself, I didn’t feel that while I was there, and I didn’t hear anything about that after I left.”
Until, of course, January 2024, when half of the Pitchfork writing team was laid off. Weeks after the holidays in 2023, Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork would be merged with GQ. Most of the writing staff, including writers who had contributed to the site for more than a decade, was gone.
Even with all of this in motion, Mike Reed persisted in running the festival, maintaining Pitchfork’s original identity and impetus as best he could, according to Kaskie. After the 2024 edition wrapped, Reed was told the next one was greenlit. The plan was to center the 2025 festival around its twentieth anniversary—an obvious hook. The vision, according to what Reed told WBEZ: a lineup that looked both backward and forward, bringing back early Pitchfork alumni now playing amphitheaters—Bon Iver, St. Vincent—alongside a new crop of artists shaped by their influence.
Reed got to work. The team started booking talent, filing permits with the Chicago Park District, locking in vendors, staging and lighting. Then, on November 11, the rug was pulled: Condé informed him the festival was canceled. No explanation. With no festival to produce, Reed was out. Ninety minutes later, the announcement was live on Instagram. The cancellation from Condé Nast read: “As the music festival landscape continues to evolve rapidly, we have made the difficult decision not to host Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago in 2025.”
There’s more to the announcement than that, but that’s the headline. The remainder offered platitudes to fans of the publication and the festival, along with vague and tepid promises that Pitchfork would explore event programming in the future.
Pitchfork Music Festival 2022/Photo: Alexa Viscius
It’s Not Coming Back. Be Sad, But Be Appreciative
In 2011, hip-hop consortium Odd Future played a 4pm Sunday set. At the time, the group resembled a Brockhampton-like amalgam of talented misfits, buoyed by a feral teenage fanbase. That performance included Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator—who, then just twenty years old, crowdsurfed while performing in a boot with a broken ankle. Both have gone on to be laureate voices in contemporary music, recognized as creative authorities in their own right.
That was my first Pitchfork. I went back every year after that. For as many days as I could. I would research the lineup and look for names I’d never heard before. I’d read the Pitchfork pieces on those bands. I’d download their music, sit, listen, look up their lyrics so I could follow along properly, and map out a plan for which acts I needed to see each year.
Sometimes I’d hit the festival with friends. A lot of the time, it was a solo ritual, something sacred and secret that I didn’t want to share with friends or family—I wanted to share it with strangers. Meet weird people with different personalities. Sing along with new faces.
In Kaskie’s estimation, a new version of Pitchfork is, at best, wishful thinking. And in the unlikely event Condé Nast and GQ decide to launch a new festival under the Pitchfork name, it almost certainly will not include original leadership or the curatorial acumen that longtime fans came to expect.
Mike Reed remains ambitious, launching the first edition of Sound & Gravity, a multi-venue event featuring forty-eight artists across six venues—all within walking distance—scheduled for September 11 through September 13. It’s a reimagining of what a live music festival can look like, and is worth penciling in for Pitchfork fans still in pain. Still, Hennessy of The Dead Bolts offers a note of conciliatory realism about what might come next. “Pitchfork was very selective—it didn’t include the full scope of Chicago’s scene,” he says. “So yes, it’s a loss, but the scene is massive. And there are still hundreds of neighborhood fests and a ton of venues packed every weekend.”
His view on the broader picture was clear, and cynically optimistic: “It’s left a vacuum, and it will be filled one way or another in a city like this. Music never stands still—and neither does the beast of the business that engulfs it.” Venues across the city may feel more freedom to book acts that would have been discovered and hosted by Pitchfork. But they’ll need to do the discovering themselves—and for artists, the exposure will be limited compared to what a festival platform can offer.
Ultimately, the dissolution of the festival was avoidable. The buyout wasn’t just bad for the festival; it was bad for the editorial team, which has been dispersed. I don’t think we’ll ever again see a group of people who are as gifted at finding, listening to, writing about, and booking new music who will be afforded the liberty and resources to run their own festival. And if we do, it almost certainly won’t happen in Chicago.
There will be attempts, but they won’t last. Our city is a graveyard for festivals—see Mamby on the Beach and Re:Set. Chicago hosted the greatest celebration of independent music there ever was. There won’t be another Pitchfork, but nothing before ever came close either.
We were lucky.
