Pitchify: Spotify’s Music + Pitchfork’s Taste

Love them or hate them, it’s tough to deny that online music review outlets Pitchfork Media and Drowned In Sound are tastemaking kings when it comes to influencing trends in new music. Combining long-form reviews, analysis, and commentary with user-friendly number ratings, both Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound provide one-stop, easily navigable guidance in the often-daunting world of new music and up-and-coming artists.

Pitchify makes the process of discovering new music even easier, at least for those with access to Spotify. Pitchify combs through Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound for albums that have received a rating of 8.0 or above, automatically generating links to these albums available within Spotify.

Pitchify creator Anders Austad explains, “Lots of albums are reviewed every day, and thousands of tracks added to Spotify every week. Pitchify tries to sort through the pile, throw away the Gagas and the Nickelbacks, and present you with the very best that Spotify has to offer.”

Pitchify also offers links to reviews of the albums via other music review sites such as The Skinny, Prefix Magazine, and Subba-Cultcha, Twitter and RSS feeds that list the new music posted to the site, and a Similar Artists section which recommends related music. Those unable to use Spotify can still access Pitchify’s content, but obviously, can’t access the Spotify links.

Music outlets such as the ones listed on Pitchify – especially Pitchfork – have been criticized in the past for having too much power when it comes to hype and their trendsetting abilities. One could perhaps make the argument that Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound already filter down music, and Pitchify is filtering it down even more, limiting listeners from new music they may not discover otherwise.

But Pitchify is a useful content aggregator – curation by Pitchfork, Drowned In Sound, and other online publications continue to play a major role in the way consumers discover music, and filtration is necessary when so much music is now available through different online modes.

Now if we could only get Spotify here in the United States…

Alison McCarthy is a Brooklyn-based writer who focuses on the intersection of music, technology, and community. She’s a second-year graduate student of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. You can follow @aliiimac on Twitter.