Best new music site: Five Pitchfork alums bring us Hearing Things
Founders Ryan Dombal and Jill Mapes on how their worker-owned site strives to be different than the Condé Nast powerhouse
At the beginning of the year, publisher Condé Nast laid off about half the staff of Pitchfork and announced that it was folding the pioneering music site into the men’s publication GQ. The move was a crushing blow to those who worked there. “I think everyone was in shock,” Ryan Dombal, who lost his longtime job as Pitchfork’s features editor, tells Depth Perception. “I had a mental breakdown, basically.”
But Dombal bounced back, and last month, he and four other Pitchfork staffers who’d been let go — Andy Cush, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Dylan Green, and Jill Mapes — launched a new music site called Hearing Things. It’s backed by former music promoter Vaughn Millette, who owns half the site; the other 50% is split evenly between the five founders. “He’s passed the smell test,” Dombal says of Millette. “And we’re journalists, so we’re very skeptical about this sort of stuff.”
The site differs from Pitchfork in a number of ways, most notably in that it doesn’t rank the albums it reviews on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s also got a more intimate feel. “There’s no way to cover the ground that they covered, that they do cover, especially in a reviews realm,” Mapes tells Depth Perception. “I don’t know how five individual critics compete with a monolith. So we’re offering people a different way of speaking to them.”
Dombal and Mapes recently spoke to Depth Perception about their new site, which runs on a subscription-based model, in a video chat from their office in downtown Brooklyn. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm
What are the lessons you took from Pitchfork as far as what you do and do not want Hearing Things to be?
Mapes: I was the first person who came on at Pitchfork after they were acquired by Condé Nast. I felt like the Condé moment was this feeling that they needed to scale: How do you engage with some of this more pop stuff in a way that feels Pitchfork? Coming out of that, I am not super-interested in popifying a space and thinking about scale of audience. I’m interested in engaging with very popular music when I like it, or when there’s something interesting to say. Legit music fans who read music journalism don’t need more spaces to read about the 1% of pop music.
Dombal: There’s something freeing about not being in an institution like Pitchfork. Obviously there’s a million other things that we have to worry about. But at Pitchfork, there would be moments when people were talking about giving an album a score: “Is this album better than this other album that we gave a 7.7 to?” And to me, that’s a waste of time. I’m 42. I’m over talking about, “Is this album three decimals higher than another album?” It’s just not where my critical brain is at.
Another thing that we’re doing is having the writing be a little bit more personal. At Pitchfork, I felt a little bit weird getting personal in my writing, just because you’re representing this whole entity. There are notable writers there, for sure, and a lot of them are my friends, and I love them dearly. But there is this kind of Pitchfork hivemind, like the general consensus. And I think getting away from that is nice.
Beyond Pitchfork, what are the biggest problems with online music journalism these days?
Mapes: That it hardly exists? [Both laugh.] Sites certainly still do exist and put up a good fight and have their audiences, but even with sites that I really like, there are frequently conversations about them not being edited.
How are you countering that at Hearing Things?
Dombal: We’re all editors, and we all have pretty high standards. We’re all looking at each other’s pieces. Another thing is that we don’t want to be one of these content farm sites that’s putting out like 20 short articles a day. We’re only really planning to do two or three things a day and have them be pretty thoughtful. We’re covering things that we really are passionate about, and have something to say about. It’s not just “This exists” posts. If someone announces an album, we’re not gonna do a story on that. We might review it later on or do an interview with the artist if we enjoy the record or think it’s interesting.
A good example of what we’re trying to do is when Jill wrote about Brat, the Charlie XCX album. This album has been written about a lot, but I would challenge anybody to find a piece that makes almost any of the same points that Jill’s making in her article, or presenting it in the same kind of fun way.
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How did you land on a subscription-based model as opposed to an advertising-based model?
Dombal: It was in part because we don’t have a salesperson, to be honest. But we also talked to all the worker-owned folks, like 404 [Media] and Defector and Hell Gate and Aftermath and Flaming Hydra. We walked away from all those meetings extremely inspired, and everyone was so encouraging. I was like, “I kind of want to be in the club.”
Mapes: We want to stand on the work and trust the audience. There’s faith there that the audience will follow. And I think part of it too is that we worked on a site that had an enormously loyal audience, and we know that people will show up to a homepage if they’re invested and they care.
Dombal: Over the last 25 years, Pitchfork has been arguably the biggest, most influential music publication. And they laid off more than half of the people there. So something wasn’t working. It felt weird to think that just with us five, with way less resources, we could follow that same path and it would magically work. It made us want to not try to copy their business model, because we were laid off from that business model.
What’s the scariest part of launching your own music publication in the year 2024?
Mapes: It’s not related to the work at all. The scariest part is: Will people care? Will they like it? Will they subscribe?
Dombal: This is kind of nuts and bolts-y, but my wife, Shena, helped design the website, and we got a developer to develop it. So the last couple weeks have been me talking to Shena and then QAing [quality assessing] this website. To see it working now, and, like, it didn’t explode, is wildly gratifying.
“We worked on a site that had an enormously loyal audience, and we know that people will show up to a homepage if they’re invested and they care.”
— Jill Mapes
You have plans for a podcast and have spoken about a possible print product. Do you have any other big hopes or goals for the site?
Mapes: I hope people subscribe to the paying tiers, because obviously we would love to make this sustainable. Also, we are genuinely very interested in having a commenting community, which is something I never, ever would have said. Why not? Because the audience is pretty hostile to certain ideas and groups of people at times. The commenting thing is also us saying, “We trust that our audience will be smaller [than that of Pitchfork, which has never had comments], but maybe they will be more inclined to not hate us.”
Dombal: We just want to have this little community of people who are happy to be there and want to engage with what we’re writing. It’s a little bit of the organic, farm-to-table version of comments, as opposed to whatever the hell is happening on Twitter at any given moment.
Mapes: With [music site] Stereogum comments, it’s well known that this is a community that sometimes will write their own reviews back to the writing. And I really love that. I read the piece, and then I go and look at the comments, because anything could happen there. It doesn't even have to be related. We’d be very happy to have that kind of energy. If people want to use a post as a jumping-off point to talk about music among themselves, we’d freaking love that.
Further reading from Hearing Things
“100 Songs That Define Our Decade So Far” by Andy Cush, Ryan Dombal, Dylan Green, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, and Jill Mapes (Oct. 14, 2024)
“This One Weird Email Helps Explain the Horrible State of Concert Ticketing” by Andy Cush (Oct. 14, 2024)
“What Would Sophie Do?” by Jill Mapes (Oct. 14, 2024)
“Ka Gave All of Himself at His Pop-Ups” by Dylan Green (Oct. 18, 2024)
“The Music Industry Can’t Silence Nemahsis” by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (Oct. 23, 2024)