This is a mock up Client Profile and analysis of Pitchfork’s branding and how I would contribute to maintaining the image while extending the brand’s reach.
Brand Image and Audience
Pitchfork is an online music publication. They publish music reviews, interviews, features, videos, and more recently podcasts. They are known for their indie music leaning roots in the 00’s. They have also been known to be very insular and pretentious, although in recent years after their Conde Nast acquisition that has been changing and loosening up. Men make up 82 percent of Pitchfork’s audience and a majority of users are between the ages 18 and 34. Conde Nast sought this out when they acquired pitchfork as they knew pitchfork readers were very passionate about the publication and also music itself. Conde Nast is also trying to see out that their engagement from women increases. Pitchfork’s fans are always actively seeking out their review of the next big album.
Client Social Media Feedback
Pitchfork posts on a multitude of social medias to promote the posts on the website. Pitchfork has a small social media team of only 5 people dedicated to writing and developing the posted content. Most of the social media posts are to direct users back to articles on the website itself. They seem to post around 10 times a day to their instagram account. Once again most of these are to direct people back to the website’s articles, but some of them shout out artists on their birthdays, repost artist’s announcements, or even reminisce about important events in music history. Pitchfork has around 1.1 million followers on instagram and their likes, comments and overall engagement of their posts highly depend on the artists that they are posting about at the time. As we can see on a post of one of the most popular popstars right now, Billie Eilish, their post of her received 16.6 thousand likes and 170 comments, but on a post of an indie artist like Weyes Blood, they will only receive around 3.4 thousand likes and 15 comments.
Client Audit
Pitchfork has 3.3 million followers on Twitter. It seems most of their posts garner around 50-1,000 likes, while occasionally when they have a good headline or scathing statement that generates interaction it will shoot up to around 20k likes. Pitchfork uses their twitter like their instagram and uses to promote the websites features and articles. They tweet very often throughout a day and sometimes post videos on their page.
Pitchfork could stand to be more engaging with the audience, especially in a time where other brand accounts on the platform try hard to be relatable and connect with their followers. Their Twitter account seems to get around 6 billion impressions, around 60,000 retweets, and 400,000 likes a month. Their account’s engagements spike on important days for music such as Grammys night, where their tweets were getting close to 5,000 likes for each announced award. You can see a really big spike for the album of the year award announcement that went to Taylor Swift making it an obvious candidate for a tweet with 15,000 likes. Pitchfork has its own festival that helps bring in some money and recognition, they have it in Chicago and Paris, but over the last year it has been cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic. They typically host bands that receive high scores from them. Pitchfork’s high scores also sometimes come with their badge of authenticity called “Best New Music.” Which denotes an album that they think everyone should give a listen to. These are highly sought out for approval from pitchforks fans.
Pitchfork has endless brand recognition as the “most trusted voice in music.” In the past they had made that extremely clear that that’s what they set out to be. Their vision hasn’t completely been compromised, but it’s obvious that they have strayed away from it a bit. In the early days they focused on records that most people hadn’t heard of or only other music snobs. They have opened up since, and it isn’t that reviewing pop music compromises their vision, but when they are overtly praising a pop album it does come across in a bit of a strange way when they didn’t do such in the past. It is obviously a great move business wise, but I think they could do it in a way that still follows the original vision of the website.
Audience Analysis
Name of Audience group
- Existing Audience – Instagram
Key Audience Characteristic
Taken from starngage.com
– 76.2% Male and 23.8% Female
– Age Range: majority between 18-34
– Top Locations: Chicago and Los Angeles
– Interests: Independent music, festivals, music reviews, journalism
Key Messages to Communicate to this Audience
– Pitchfork is interested in honest music journalism
– Pitchfork wants to recommend you albums you nay not have heard of before
– Pitchfork dives into more obscure genres than other mainstream publications
Content Types and Platforms
Pitchfork’s website is already getting more engagement than comparable websites and the only similar music journalism sites than are beating them in engagement are websites that tend to focus on more pop music such as, NME or Billboard. They are doing very well in that regard, I think this is a very healthy position to be in as the leading independent music journalism website.
Name of Audience group
Women 18-34, A demographic that Pitchfork needs to try to continue to grow
Key Audience Characteristic
Age Range: 18-34
Top Locations: Chicago and Los Angeles
Interests: Indie music, festivals, music journalism,
Key Messages to Communicate to this Audience
Pitchfork can convey that Independent music and it’s journalism is for all
Pitchfork promotes many women in indie rock
There is room for more women to write for Pitchfork
Content types and Platforms
Pitchfork can definitely continue to grow their female viewership. There are many women who both enjoy listening to the music styles Pitchfork promotes and want to write about the music too.
Best Practices
Part 1: Industry Best Practices
Taking a look at other accounts from music reviewers and publications we can see that others, such as the most known standalone music reviewer at the time, Anthony Fantano, tries to do new things to connect with his audience. His Instagram, handle @afantano, has 623,000 followers, and he uses a multitude of ways to engage with viewers. For one, he uses a more modern way of publishing reviews by posting them as Youtube videos and he notifies followers when a new video review is out but posting the thumbnail.
Other things we can notice is that in between the thumbnails he uses the account to announce interviews and posts memes or other interactive videos between the actual content. This creates a very approachable public figure and an intense, responsive community. This responsiveness now more than ever is a good thing, as people like insular groups, but also don’t want to feel like they are being pandered to. There are many videos posted that are music related that generate discussion that become jokes in the community or are potentially insightful for a certain genre or style.
Anthony Fantano’s twitter account is more focused on his joke telling and “fun side.” While he still posts about his music reviews and other relevant YouTube channel posts, he mixes it up with a ton of jokes being told and conversations with other users like the artists he reviews. He often promotes up and coming artists and tweets out links to their music, which is one of the best things you can do as someone with a lot of influence in the music community.
Moving back to a more traditional publication let’s look at Stereogum. Stereogum also uses their Instagram account to post about new reviews, but they also add in memes and/or reposts from relevant artists. In between there is also announcements of milestones for the publication itself or artists. I think most publications and public figures are doing this now because it creates more talk than if you just post the same content over and over and so I think that pitchfork could definitely look into that.
A look at one last publication, one more traditionally pop oriented, we’ll take a look at billboard. They have an overall different focus, where maybe they don’t need as much engaging content since they focus on pop music acts. Their posts are already focusing on the biggest stars so they naturally attract a ton of engagements already. Pitchfork is already starting to look more into pop music and its stars but going as far as billboard hot 100 artists would be more than they need and would remove them from their indie oriented beginnings too far.
Part 2: Social Media Platform Best Practices
When is the ideal time to post?
- For instagram it seems to be ideal to post around 11AM to 3PM and it peaks for users during that time especially on Fridays.
What components make the most successful posts?
- Posting engaging videos and memes in between the real review content seems to work very well for other brands.
Are there industry-specific best practices for posting on the platform?
- There doesn’t seem to be, other than posting consistently and engaging the audience with posts outside the main review content.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
- Pitchfork is good at breaking new artists through and it is always entertaining to see when they give a glowing review to an artist.
- Pitchfork has devout fans who are constantly anticipating reviews whether they want to learn about someone new, be supported in their already existing belief, or just get a nudge to check out an artist they might have already been thinking of.
- Pitchfork has an enormous back catalog of reviews, videos, and documentaries about an albums making or legacy. Which is seemingly endless content for them to promote and they do promote them often especially the documentary oriented series dubbed “Liner Notes,” which tend to carry the most informative material.
Weaknesses
- They don’t seem to have too much content that is sharable to a wider audience like some of the others that make memes or videos that have an element of humor in them.
- Pitchfork still needs to work on expanding their female fanbase. They should be encouraging more female voices into the publication and promote the women in the scenes they already cover.
Opportunities
- They could focus on the headlines they share to platforms such as Twitter, because whenever they have particularly humorous headline people engage with it more, ultimately leading to better publicity and interactions.
Threats
- The only real threat I can see is the aforementioned Anthony Fantano he is constantly gaining fans and he is already the most well known standalone music reviewer at the time. He seems to have a more consistent opinion and explains them well and he really connects with his audience more than anyone else around at the moment.
Recommendations
Client Success
- Pitchfork still has the most solid brand image in music reviewing with their fabled Best New Music Award.
- Pitchfork’s festival is one of the most anticipated each year for its smaller acts that you might not see at the bigger festivals.
- They are incredibly known for a wide variety of things all the way down to the style of writing they post in their reviews.
- Their end of year lists always generate insane amounts of buzz as people want to know what the best albums and singles of the year were.
- They are very consistent in their posts which is good for frequency and great for such a small team.
Recommendations for Improvement
- As mentioned many times I think they could open up and try to connect on a humorous level that will allow them to gain more fans that look for funnier content in the music world.
- They can work with on their engagement with a female audience, as it is and has been in the past very male-dominated.
- They may want to add alternative forms of consuming their reviews such as them in video format or something else to diversify the ways in which they can reach people, especially with the most popular reviewers at the moment uploading their content to Youtube.