Pitchfork Doesn’t Need Comments

As a longtime Pitchfork reader, it’s actually refreshing that the site has never had comments, ever.

It forces you to have to take the debate about a rating elsewhere, where people get into arguments over the decision to give Black Kids a 3.3 out of 10 with no explanation. Sometimes, the publication’s reviews just need to live on their own, and when the albums are strange or obscure, it’s necessary to give those ratings some space, so the criticism can breathe.

But apparently the powers that be at Condé Nast feel otherwise, as Pitchfork (which blew up its staff nearly two years ago), is apparently playing with the idea. As the site put it this week:

Coming in 2026, as Pitchfork celebrates its 30th anniversary, we’re finally planning to add a comments section to all of our album reviews. That’s over 30,000 pieces of music criticism on which you’ll be able to leave your own Pitchfork review for the very first time. We can’t wait for your takes to be on our website.

In addition to commenting, you will also have the opportunity to add your own score to an album review using Pitchfork’s rating system. This score will be shown next to your comment and will be aggregated with other readers to form a “reader score” alongside Pitchfork’s official score. One album review, our score, your score, followed by some comments.

As longtime fans expressed over on Bluesky, myself included, this feels like a huge mistake. It also feels like a misunderstanding of what makes Pitchfork special. It dilutes the website’s most important resource: The ratings system.

The reviews are great, but the ratings make it memorable.

I have thought about this more than the average person, and I’d like to explain why. Back in the early 2000s, I (along with a number of folks on a Something Awful music forum and related MP3-sharing forums) helped launch a review website called Epilogue Music. (Archive site here: You’ve been warned!) The site was essentially a response to the single-rating format that Pitchfork used—every album had the possibility of multiple reviews, maybe even as many as four or five. The site was exceedingly democratic, as highlighted by the fact that it had five executive editors, of which I was one.

A modern equivalent of what we were doing might be something like Sputnikmusic or Album of the Year, two platforms explicitly built to allow fans to have a dialogue about the reviews. After all, they had access to the music as well. You go to those sites not for critic reviews, really, but the comment section.

Epilogue Music didn’t have a comment section—it was more about offering multiple perspectives and using those to set the exact score. That ensured my too-friendly review of that All-American Rejects album did not shape the site’s overall critical opinion.

I think we were happy to do it, but the fact that it was built by committee created problems, as it was tough to make decisions about where to take things next. The biggest failing of this approach came about six months in, when it was obvious that the guy who built the website and owned the domain had gone M.I.A., and we were without a website. Them’s the breaks of early-2000s blogging.

Obviously, I moved on, but I still kind of look back fondly on what we built, while still seeing the faults of it. “A more democratic Pitchfork” sounds good in spirit, but messy in practice. That’s the epilogue of Epilogue Music.

Even as a Brent DiCrescenzo’s reviews infuriated us at times, I think it’s obvious in retrospect that Pitchfork’s magic was in driving a reaction out of the reader, whether good or bad. To put someone else’s comments into the mix threatens to dampen the visceral response that for better or worse, makes Pitchfork special.

But like anyone, I can see the calculus of putting comments on Pitchfork from a bean-counter’s point of view. These reviews sometimes draw a lot of conversation … yet almost none of it happens on a platform Condé Nast owns. Comments could fix this, but they could also lead to 15-year-old Bonnie “Prince” Billy reviews where the comments sections are overwhelmed with trolls and spam (watch out, Beware), or people brigading reviews of old Drake albums based on his inability to win rap battles.

And given the large number of alumni that have passed through Pitchfork’s doors, it feels strange that they apparently don’t get a say in this discussion.

In a sense, I get it. Perhaps, once you’ve dug into a review, there isn’t really anywhere else to go afterward. It’s not like you can listen to that Tame Impala album they gave a 4.8 to on the website proper. You’re going to Spotify or Qobuz to listen for yourself, or maybe to click on another album.

Honestly, it feels like the addition of a comments section is attempting to solve a design problem with the infusion of user-generated content, when really what it should be doing is building more interactivity into the reading experience. If a Remi Wolf album has a banger of a first single, it should be easier to listen to that first single, just as an example. Or there should be more data to help tie albums together. If there’s another album that sounds like it, or there are influences that the listener can tug on, make them easier to tug. Yes, Spotify does a lot of this already. But they’re in a different business from you. Your goal is to build sticky, deeply engaging content that keeps the reader engaged.

And yes, people are going to comment on social media—or notice when an iconic record doesn’t appear in the site’s deep archive. Let ’em. It only increases the publication’s notoriety, while helping you avoid the hardest job in the world: Content moderation.

All of this is to say: Just because I will soon have the option to put a snarky comment on Ryan Schreiber’s 2002 review of I Get Wet doesn’t mean that I will. But I may post about it on Bluesky.