'Fork in the road

Video killed the radio star. And now Pitchfork Media is setting its sights on sniping the YouTube star—or at least luring in some of the website’s audience.

That’s the hope of Ryan Schreiber, the founder and head honcho of Pitchfork, the tastemaking, Chicago-based online music magazine that’s gearing up to launch its Internet music channel Pitchfork TV ( pitchfork.tv ) on Monday 7. Schreiber says the site will be a supplement to Pitchfork’s obsessive coverage of independent music, giving the visual treatment to niche artists whom most broadcast media outlets ignore.

“We’re trying to take the video medium and bring out the side of artists that is more difficult to get in a written feature,” says Schreiber, who was raised in Minnesota on a heavy diet of ’80s MTV shows like 120 Minutes. “[We’re] covering the bands and actually trying to get to know them as people, which is something that you can do to a point in features, but to actually see how somebody talks and how they behave and what they like to do—those are sides to artists you can’t really get as much of a feel for [in print].”

The site will cover artists through tour diaries, as well as through shows like Juan’s Basement, in which a band plays a set in a basement and afterward sits down for an interview, and Don’t Look Down, a series featuring bands performing on a rooftop. An episode of the show Daytripping captures the high jinks that ensue while “Viking-vaudeville” band Man Man records its new album. (Shenanigans include Man Man recording the sound of fireworks going off inside a trash can outside the studio—until the cops show up.) In addition to the original content, Schreiber and his minions are also digging through video archives of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Pavement and the Pixies, obscure public-access music shows like the local program Chic-A-Go-Go and the occasional old doc such as Fugazi’s Instrument.

Schreiber conceived Pitchfork’s expansion into the televisual arena a couple of years ago, when YouTube’s explosion rekindled his love of consuming music in visual form. “When YouTube came out, it was kinda like, Oh, this is interesting, now I can see a lot of these music videos,” he says. “The thing YouTube doesn’t do, it doesn’t really suggest videos to you. You can go and watch them if you know what you’re looking for, but there’s no way of suggesting things to you that you might like, or you being able to queue up a lot of videos you would watch in a row.”

Pitchfork TV will make those video suggestions, Schreiber says, and will allow users to create playlists of favorite videos. Like Pitchfork’s popular hierarchy of most-read reviews, its visual sister site will track and rank the most-watched shows and videos.

Schreiber’s banking on the site drawing Pitchfork readers and piquing the interest of those who are more inclined to watch a video than read Pitchfork’s signature lengthy reviews. “It’s the same idea as Pitchfork—building a lot of content that people want access to,” he says. “There’s so much out there people haven’t seen.… So hopefully a lot of people who are being fed music through the conventional channels turn us on to hear music they’ve been looking for.”