From Pitchfork to Q, music criticism is under attack. We must fight for the magic it can inspire

Katherine Paul, of Black Belt Eagle Scout, plays the Pitchfork Music festival at Union Park, Chicago on 22 July, 2023. Photograph: Michael Casey/AP

Last week, it was announced that the influential and widely read music website Pitchfork was being folded into men’s magazine GQ, with the loss of many jobs.

The title, which started as a blog in 1996, rapidly rose to become the dominant voice in music criticism for millennials. To many of the site’s millions of monthly readers this news means a great deal more than simply the decline of a large website: they see this, with some justification, as an existential threat to worthwhile music criticism itself.