Pitchfork's exit from Chicago a ‘loss’ for music community

The hole in Chicago’s 2025 summer concert season left by the Pitchfork Music Festival will be difficult to fill, not just because of its adventurous annual musical lineup but because of the community it built among music lovers, record buyers and local artists.

For nearly two decades, the July weekend was viewed as “a musical safe space for truly alternative people,” said Mike Bennett, a CHIRP Radio host. “It was a place they could really congregate and feel they were a part of something. That’s a loss for Chicago.”

New York–based media giant Condé Nast, which owns Pitchfork Media, the longtime online music criticism website, broke the news on Instagram Monday that the festival would no longer take place in Chicago, where it originated 19 years ago. Condé Nast did not explain the decision.

“Pitchfork will continue to produce events in 2025 and beyond,” the message read, suggesting the festival could find life elsewhere. In past years, Condé Nast expanded the festival outside its home in Union Park to Paris, London, Berlin and Mexico City.

Pitchfork’s long journey from a largely homegrown gathering featuring independent artists to a corporate-owned blowout — complete with pricey VIP tiers and megawatt stars like Kendrick Lamar, R. Kelly and Alanis Morissette — was an improbable one.

The festival’s brand was shaped in its first year, when it originated as the Intonation Music Festival in 2005, with artists like Chicago’s Andrew Bird and Tortoise. Local artists within the city’s music community helped conceive the festival as a true alternative to Lollapalooza and other tent pole rock events in outdoor amphitheaters.

“The first year that we did it, it felt homemade. The headliners were paid in the four figures, and it felt like a whole community of people coming together to put on a show in the old barn,” said musician David Singer, an Intonation co-founder and the organization’s current board president.

The next year, musician Mike Reed, who helped book the festival, partnered exclusively with Pitchfork Media to create a separate festival in the same space. Both Intonation and Pitchfork operated dueling festivals in Union Park in 2006, but “as the competition for acts and for audiences heated up,” Singer said, Intonation could not survive a third round, which paved the way for Pitchfork to dominate the independent summer concert space in Chicago over the next two decades.

“The fact that Pitchfork and Mike Reed managed to put on a great festival year after year is testament to the fact that they cared about the music,” Singer said.

On Instagram Monday, Reed said “one’s word and hard work” was the special formula that made the festival distinct.

“From the independent labels, agencies, and, of course, bands, the idea of hard work and trust was the ground floor to any small or large amount of success that could be imagined. These ideals are what made the event special,” he wrote. “Those times are long gone, and the principles that built the event are as well; those things can’t be bought.”

Condé Nast purchased Pitchfork Media, along with the festival, in 2015. Last January, former Pitchfork president Chris Kaskie told WBEZ he “felt pressure” to introduce higher pricing tiers that he said “felt empty in the sense it didn’t serve any purpose of trying anything but to make more money.”

Last summer, the festival pushed VIP tiers farther by adding a new “elevated” tier that gave users access to a “double-decker” private viewing platform near the soundboard, side-stage viewing bleachers and a front-of-stage viewing pit for the two main stages.

The festival did not sell out, and concertgoers on social media complained the tiers blocked views and felt unnecessarily disruptive to the festival’s original spirit.

A past spokesperson for the festival redirected questions to Condé Nast. Condé Nast did not respond to requests for comment.

Pitchfork had long established itself as a no-nonsense, three-day weekend for people interested in new artists on their way up, established independent bands and heritage artists across multiple genres, from early hip-hop to experimental jazz, many of whom would likely never get booked on larger festivals like Lollapalooza or Riot Fest.

Artists as varied as Mitski, GZA, Sonic Youth, Yoko Ono, Animal Collective, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slint, Giorgio Moroder, Neutral Milk Hotel, Björk, Mavis Staples, A Tribe Called Quest, Angel Olsen and Chaka Khan played its stages.

Bennett remembered attending the 2019 festival and seeing a wide spectrum of artists, from avant electro-pop band Stereolab to Scottish indie darlings Belle and Sebastian and R&B vocal powerhouse the Isley Brothers.

“No knock on bigger festivals, but to have that wide array of talent, holy cow,” he said. “They hit a lot of marks over the years. You really had a sense that something was happening.”

The independent spirit extended to local food and art vendors, plus a long-running record fair hosted by CHIRP Radio, an independent music station located on Chicago’s North Side.

Lou Berkman, an independent record seller who worked the fair nearly every year, said for music lovers, no other summer event was comparable to Pitchfork.

“We would talk to people all day long about records and music. We met people all over the world and the country. And we’d get a lot of younger and newer collectors coming through, which would be fun, unlike other festivals where people are a little more jaded,” he said.

Foot traffic for the fair was so robust, Berkman reported record sales topped 1,000 on average each summer. “It was a lot of work,” he said, “but it was always very fun.”

In recent years, competition from venues like the Salt Shed and Wrigley Field, plus megatours like Taylor Swift and Metallica at Soldier Field, tightened for Pitchfork.

Continuing inflation at the box office also persuaded ticket buyers to become more cautious about where to spend their concert dollars. The average ticket price increased 9.4%, from $116.41 to $127.38 — a hike that marks the third year on record with an average ticket price over $100, according to the 2024 mid-year report from Pollstar, which covers the concert industry.

Then there are rocky times at Pitchfork Media itself. The festival’s shuttering comes less than a year after Condé Nast announced its absorption by men’s magazine GQ and staff layoffs at the music site.

In his post Monday, Reed, who operates music clubs Constellation and the Hungry Brain, thanked the musicians and others who helped bring the festival to life and suggested the ideals that launched it are still possible: “Behind the scenes, in the early morning load-ins, weather disruptions, and, of course, in the roar of a crowd, hard work and trust can still transform a dream into reality.”

Mark Guarino is a journalist based in Chicago and the author of Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.