Online indie-music critic has impact

By GREG KOT
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
CHICAGO -- Three Chicago music fanatics are holed up in a dimly lit, carpet-free West Side basement, hemmed in by 6-foot tall boxes of CDs. Posters touting Devendra Barnhart, the Arcade Fire and Future-heads provide ambiance. Empty soft-drink cans vie for desk space with laptops.
They click away on deadline for the latest daily edition of the Internet music magazine Pitchfork (pitchforkmedia.com). What they write will be read by 120,000 music junkies on this day alone: everyone from record company talent scouts, magazine editors, college radio programmers and record-store managers to just plain old fans ready to drop cash on the Fork's latest pet band.
Not all of its readers love the e-zine's often contentious writing or its occasionally mean-spirited reviews, but they depend on it as a convenient one-stop shopping site for music news. Even naysayers grudgingly acknowledge that Pitchfork has become the go-to national tip sheet for the indie-rock subculture.
"I'm not a fan of their writing," said Steve Sowley, product manager for the two Reckless Records stores in Chicago, "but they have an unshakable control over the indie-music scene. If they rate an album an 8.5 or above [on a 10-point review scale] and you're an indie store, you'd best be ready to stock a lot of those albums."
Or ignore the album if Pitchfork whales on it. Josh Rosenfeld, co-owner of Seattle-based Barsuk Records, says one Texas record store initially refused to stock one of his releases, Travis Morrison's 2004 release "Travistan," because it received a 0.0 review from Pitchfork.
"The review cast a pall over the record and actually predisposed people to not even listen to it," said Rosenfeld, who marvels at the site's sway over "a crowd of indie kids who want to be told what to like."
"A Rolling Stone review doesn't necessarily sell a single record for us," he said. "But with Pitchfork, you get a review, and you can see the impact on sales."
Virtual music
Since starting Pitchfork in 1995 in his parents' Minneapolis home, 29-year-old Ryan Schreiber has emerged as one of the leaders of a new generation of Internet music tastemakers. Music's cutting edge has shifted from radio stations, retail stores and monthly magazines to a virtual domain dominated by e-zine editors, MP3 file-swappers and audio bloggers.
"They absolutely have a tastemaking role," said Blender editor in chief Craig Marks of Pitchfork and other music-intensive Internet sites. "There's a certain youthfulness to the writing style that appeals to an aggressive community of indie-rock fan."
The plugged-in fans who run audio blogs spread not only news and reviews but wade through thousands of MP3 files, pick their favorites and frequently create instant underground stars. Electro-pop producers Junior Boys, Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. and Montreal rock band the Arcade Fire are just some of the artists who have emerged from obscurity to become indie hitmakers in the last year thanks to the Internet music gurus.
One of them, Matthew Perpetua, a 25-year-old indie-pop fan who runs the audio blog fluxblog.org out of his parents home in Cold Springs, N.Y., was recently enlisted as a talent scout by the U.K. office of Island/Universal Records.
"A lot of the stuff I post is in this big gray area legally, but I only post stuff I love and I've never had a cease and desist [order from a record label or artist manager]," Perpetua said. "The overwhelming majority of people are positive about it, because of the ripple effect something like this creates: fans start talking about music, and artists can get record deals because of a song being heard by the right people on the Internet. When you have all these options to listen to music any way you choose, it changes everything."
Replacing print
Nathan Brackett, a senior editor at Rolling Stone, says the alternative media guides have had an impact. "You could make the case that Pitchfork, blogs and e-zines have usurped the role that print fanzines once filled, and that Pitchfork in particular has usurped the role that certain midlevel alternative-rock publications might've filled," he said.
Brackett says he regularly reads the audio blog Cocaine Blunts and Hip-Hop Tapes (cocaineblunts.com), which "appeals to the music geek in me."
"The great thing about an MP3 blog is that it not only replaces the friend who tips you to all kinds of cool music, it replaces the friend who actually lends you the music to hear. It's instant gratification: You get a tip on music, and then you have it to hear."