Even Pitchify Founder Has Moved On After Combining ‘Pitchfork + Spotify’
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
The top-ranked Spotify app, most days, is TuneWiki. This app plays lyrics in real time as you listen to music in the desktop version of Spotify. Holding down the number two slot on a fairly consistent basis is the Pitchfork app, which presents the top-rated freshly-reviewed music on the Pitchfork music reviews site.
But before Spotify had become an app platform, we were blown away by the simple utility of Pitchify, which did pretty much what today’s Pitchfork and Any Decent Music apps do: It turns new reviews with high ratings into Spotify album links.
As such, we figured we’d get in touch with Anders Austad, the Norwegian IT consultant, web developer, and music fan who made Pitchify, to see what he had to say about these new apps becoming so popular within Spotify, supplanting his one-man, hand-crafted labor of love.
To our disappointment/relief, Austad only had nice things to say. There goes our hot interview. Instead, he replied with the following:
“Pitchify.com is not really an active project at the moment and I don’t think I will develop it further,” said Austad. “It met a need in the time before Pitchfork launched its own Spotify app, but now I guess most people, myself included, just use the various Spotify client apps for discovery.”
There you have it — not only is the creator of Pitchify, which pioneered this idea of slapping Spotify links on top of Pitchfork reviews with high ratings, not bitter that Pitchfork has stolen his thunder in a sense, but even he simply just uses that and other Spotify apps to discover music.
Pitchify still works today, even if it’s nowhere near as popular as number-two-in-Spotify Pitchfork. A few hundred people appear still to be using it, whether by checking out the site itself, loading a random album,or following the Twitter or RSS feed. We music fans are lucky to have all of these tools at our disposal, Pitchfork (and Pitchify) included.
