Pitchfork.tv — The Critics Give Back (or, I give it an 8.3)
Look, I have no idea if Pitchfork Media is still the indie-rock behemoth it once was. Maybe it’s bigger. Either way it is an unmistakable brand and is one of the few sites formed in the 90s that hasn’t either dissolved or been purchased by some major media conglomerate, so love it or hate it, accolades should be given. Monday, the site launched a spin-off called Pitchfork.tv with the stated goal of creating the first television channel to exclusively showcase independent music. On face value it seems like yet another web-video portal of the YouTube age — something akin to Funny Or Die. To my great pleasure, it isn’t anything like that, and in fact works so well because it just may be the first website that actually reproduces a reasonable facsimile of what watching television is actually like.
There is no user-submitter material here, and thank god. If I’m tired of anything in the web-video revolution it’s trolling through piles and piles of crap looking for the one or two gems. Web-video needs programmers, and this site is meticulously programmed. It’s broken down into sections labeled, Featured, Shows, Pitchfork Live, One Week Only and Music Video, each category with a small collections of video clips to be played one after another or on demand (one especially cool feature is that if a video ends the next one in sequence is cued up immediately and played).
As for what those videos are, there is a pretty even collection of repurposed material and exclusive content — right now the feature-length documentary LoudQUIETLoud: A Film About the Pixies is being show in the “One Week Only” category in its entirety.
The big question is where advertisements eventually fit into the equation. Right now there isn’t a single sponsored frame on the site (it’s like in high school when a new FM station used to launch and would be wall-to-wall music for the first week), but one has to imagine this will change — probably sooner than later. I’m guessing it will be a mix of banner ads and video spots though the site is so expertly crafted, I’m hoping they’ve found a way to make their business model just as seamless.
Being an independently-operated shop probably makes all of this a lot easier on their part in terms of rights acquisition and reason enough to suspect it may be some time before more “web TV channels” start popping up, but it is an optimistic sign of things to come.
