Pitchfork and Vogue’s owners are building a (pay) wall

If Pitchfork is part of your staple, your days of feasting for free are (nearly) over. By the end of this year, the influential music news title and all its sister sites will go behind a paywall, parent company Condé Nast announced overnight. Yes, you’re going to have to pay for your Pitchfork music buffet. How much, we don’t yet know.

We do know content from Vanity Fair to GQ, Vogue, Glamour and Wired will also sit behind paywalls which, the publishing giant notes won’t be a “one-size fits all model.” According to a memo to staff penned by outgoing CEO Bob Sauerberg, “every brand is distinct, and every brand’s paywall will be its own distinct product.”

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, explains that paywalls for some Condé brands may affect only specific content, while paywalls for others could reach deeper.

“These paywalls have proven the ultimate measure of our audience engagement — beyond time spent, it’s money spent,” Sauerberg’s message continues.

Condé Nast first built a wall, a digital paywall, back in November 2014 for its New Yorker title. Others followed, including Wired and Vanity Fair which require a passcode for readers wanting to access to more than four stories each month.

Paywalls are nothing out of the ordinary for Australian newshounds. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation titles, from The Australian to the Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, and others, routinely restrict their online articles to fully-paid-up subscribers. The world of online music press has stayed largely password-free, until now.

The news comes just weeks after Pitchfork’s mastermind and founding editor Ryan Schreiber announced his departure from a company he dreamed up in 1995 while working in a record store in Minnesota. The site went live a few months later and would go on to champion countless cool, hip, underground acts who wouldn’t get a look-in from the mainstream press. Many others have emulated – or flat-out copied – its template.

Read the WSJ’s article here. A word of warning: You’ll need a subscription, because it’s behind a paywall.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.