Happy Lana Del Rey Dey! Via Getty.

Yes, today, Lana Del Rey (the singer formerly known as Lizzy Grant only two hype cycles and one lip injection ago) will see the release of her album.

Despite the fact that 'relevant' tastemakers like Brian Williams, Pitchfork, Hipster Runoff, along with approximately 3/5ths of the people you hear overhear talking about Lana Del Rey all despise her music and/or artifice, and despite the fact that everyone (including The Observer) is tired of hearing about her, the fact is that the people still have yet to render their verdict through purchases and/or illegal downloads of her album.

Vox populi, vox Lana Del Rey.

As such, today is also the day the Lana Del Rey corporate hype machine goes into overdrive. This includes but isn't limited to, of course, internet banner advertising on sites that ideally target Lana Del Rey's presumed audience; for example, a site like Pitchfork Media, which originally gave Ms. Del Rey's single "Video Games" a Best New Single designation. That'd be a great place to advertise her!

Except, not: Ms. Del Rey's album was panned by Pitchfork Media yesterday. Even so, the "ad buy" on the site likely happened weeks ago, and nobody's going to let good advertising go to waste. So instead, Pitchfork Media now looks like a cross between The Lana Del Report and the result of a revenge tactic.

It's really just an obvious ad buy, but it's fun to imagine, and the incedentialism makes the entire thing just funnier and weirder and takes us all further down this veritable K-Hole of pop culture and ideas about "tastemaking" and how the democratization of "cool" is generally leading to the end of it.

This is far from the first time this has happened with the site. When Band of Horses' sophomore album was panned, Band Of Horses' advertising folks bought out all of the site's display unit inventory to fill with their album's banners.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Can you guess how she scored?

If you guessed "not well," then you're quite adept at guessing the answers to easy questions. Yes, in Lindsay Zoladz's review for quintessentially hip music site Pitchfork of Lana Del Ray's full-length album Born to Die, Lana scores a mere 5.5. Not worthy of brickbat-style derision, nor serious praise.

Mind you, it hasn't been but four months since Pitchfork's Ian Cohen scored Ms. Del Rey's track "Video Games" with the coveted "Best New Track" designation that set off an indomitable firestorm of hype.

In the time between the two reviews, public sentiment for Ms. Del Rey has, well, dwindled.

Ms. Del Rey's career was found to be one of corporate construct and deliberate artifice, flying in the face of the "indie" image of her that was carefully cultivated (the starter pistol if which, for all intents and purposes, was started by Pitchfork).

Whether consciously or not, Pitchfork's reputation for building an emerging act's hype in one hand only to swat it down in the other continues to be cemented herein.

Another recent example: Mr. Cohen reviewed Queens rap act Das Racist's mixtape with an 8.7, one of the highest scores a mixtape has ever received on Pitchfork. Mr. Cohen was subject to a second-hand derision by the group after a blogger noted that he had mis-identified some of the rappers in his review and highlighted the jokes, thereby missing the ideas core to the album concerning race and identity. When Das Racist's full-length album came out, like Ms. Del Rey, their single was given a "Best New Track," though not by Mr. Cohen, who gave the album a 6.3/10.0.

Furthermore, while Ms. Zoladz acknowledges the early critical success of "Video Games" (as it, to her, "felt frank, pointed, and true, and it had a chord progression and melody to match") it would appear a final paragraph vaguely acknowledging some of Pitchfork's responsibility in Ms. Del Rey's hyperinflated rise in popularity (one that could be on the precipice of crashing down to earth) was scrubbed from the review shortly after it was posted last night.

Music writer and journalist David Greenwald caught the scrub, and posted it on his blog. The paragraph read:

Given the lengthy build-up and all the YouTube leaks, think-pieces, and controversy that followed, you can only spend so much time in Born To Die’s nihilistic Never Land before Peggy Lee’s famous question starts to nag: Is that all there is?

Ms. Zoladz has not returned The Observer's immediate request for comment, though to be fair, last-minute edits happen all the time. Sometimes, something goes up on a website and just doesn't read well. It happens. Yet, it's been noted: "That seems like a pretty hefty edit to make after pushing the post live."

One wonders if Pitchfork couldn't rescind their entire history with Ms. Del Rey's rise, or if they will. One musn't forget the classic Best New Music review Pitchfork bestowed upon 90s ska-act Save Ferris in the site's salad days. For the record, you won't find it on Pitchfork, because they scrubbed it out of existence.

Either way, you can expect Pitchfork to say very little on the matter. Why would they? The conclusion to this saga demonstrates— inadvertently or not—Pitchfork in the role of tastemaker. Just like Google with their top secret algorithms, whether the site has an awareness of this role while writing reviews or not, they stand to gain nothing by giving up their secrets.

One of the great secrets of rock and roll, after all, involves the preservation of mystique, even if you're playing nothing but up-and-coming music acts and the people who buy into them.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

On one hand, the site purports to be indier than indie, with its focus on "leftfield pop, experimental, and home-recorded sounds."

On the other hand, it's being covered in the Wall Street Journal.

"There's definitely a subculture of blogger music that's, like, super youthful," Mr. Schreiber said, sounding more like a surfer from Southern California than the Midwesterner he is. "It just seems like almost everybody who's starting a band now and coming out and sort of establishing themselves—it definitely seems like a whole bunch of, like, really young kids." 

The four young men of Beach Fossils, a delicate indie pop group who sound like Joy Division covering early R.E.M., are all either 24 or 25. Here's how young they are: During their set on Thursday, one of them wore a Zwan shirt, which if you don't remember was Billy Corgan's band for about five minutes after the Smashing Pumpkins broke up. They're so young that the night before the Pitchfork show, when they played at Death by Audio in Williamsburg, the boyish bass player John Pena finished the set by smashing his instrument through the floor tom, for fun, and breaking all of his tuning pegs. They are so young that Mr. Pena has been reading Pitchfork and listening to the records Mr. Schreiber and his cohort have been recommending since he was just 15. 

That's true of many of the youngsters whose music Pitchfork is championing lately. And while Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Payseur says he never read the site until they started writing about him, and Mr. Pena insists he just likes what he likes, it would seem that much of the music getting written about on the site today—Beach Fossils included—has Pitchfork built into its DNA.

Drinks on Thursday night were provided by Tito's, the vodka manufacturer sponsoring the show at the high-ceilinged, windowless space near the BQE that serves as Pitchfork HQ. The arrangement, brokered by the site's advertising department, was that the Beach Fossils set would be taped for Pitchfork.TV, and then promoted on the site's front page alongside ads for Tito's.

The ad guy spearheading the campaign—way more of a bro, personality-wise, than the nerds in editorial, according to one Pitchfork contributor—asked the editors to find a band to play the show. They chose Beach Fossils because they were "available," Mr. Schreiber said, and because their music had been praised on the site. The band wasn't paid for the performance, but they didn't mind. After the set Mr. Pena hung out by the keg and at one point cartoonishly licked a girl's face.

"We're happy to do this," said Mr. Payseur. "This is good."

BEACH FOSSILS HAVE been playing together for a little over a year. Pitchfork first wrote about them last December, when one of the MP3s the band had posted on MySpace caught the critics' attention. At that point, Mr. Payseur didn't even have a full band together, let alone a record out. He doesn't know how Pitchfork heard about him, but one day there was an email in his inbox saying the site wanted to review one of his songs.

"It kind of made me nervous," Mr. Payseur said. "I feel like a lot of people are impressionable, and a lot of people don't know how to make up their own minds so they look to somebody who, you know, has a lot of power." He went on: "A lot of blogs will say a lot of good things about a band and then the band might get a bad review on Pitchfork and all the blogs start saying bad things about the band." 

He offered an example of Pitchfork's power in Wild Nothing, the band Beach Fossils shared a bill with the night before at Death by Audio.

"That's a guy out of Virginia that nobody knew a few months ago—he just got 'Best New Music,' and now everybody's listening to him. I think that's awesome." 

Mr. Payseur was referring to a coveted designation that Pitchfork bestows upon albums beloved not just by one writer at the site but by a whole bunch of them. Getting "BNM" can launch a band from zero, generating interest not just among music fans and retailers but assigning editors at other publications who use Pitchfork as a guide for what to cover. Whether or not an album gets "BNM" depends on whether a critic who's really behind it can rally enough support on the internal Pitchfork staff board, the password-protected forum where most of the interaction between the site's writers—including those who live in New York—takes place.

Pitchfork has famously brought a number of previously unknown bands to prominence, such as Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire, whose success in 2003 and 2004, respectively, served as two of the earliest unqualified demonstrations of the site's muscle. That mechanism is still very much at work, as one look at the lineup for this week's Northside Festival — full of bands championed early by Pitchfork — would tell you. Beach Fossils have so far received consistently favorable coverage from the site, getting several of their songs written about over the course of the past six months and most recently earning a respectable 7.8 out of 10 for their first LP, out now from the small Brooklyn label Captured Tracks. The album did not make Best New Music, but the momentum the band has achieved—they're about to tour all over the U.S., as well as Japan, Europe and Australia—has been stoked largely by Pitchfork's sustained interest in them. 

Mr. Schreiber at this point has very little to do with the reviews posted on Pitchfork, though he has been attending about five shows a week ever since his recent move from Boerum Hill to Williamsburg. Most of his focus is on the site's video component and "other projects" he would not discuss; editorial is still run almost entirely out of Chicago.

Ryan Dombal, 28, is the only Pitchfork writer in New York who actually comes into the office every day. On Thursday night he wore a tie and spoke appreciatively to a guy who recently graduated from college and has been writing an anonymous blog about Pitchfork in which he excitedly scrutinizes every review published on the site. In a recent post, the 21-year-old compared his five favorite writers on the Pitchfork staff to the starting lineup of the Los Angeles Lakers. Evidently, some of the writers wanted to meet the blogger in person, and Mr. Dombal emailed him an invitation to the party. (Full disclosure: The Observer came as his guest.)

"If you're following Pitchfork since you're 19 or whatever, it's very—it's beyond the moat," the slender and unassuming Mr. Dombal said. "It's this thing that's castled up. And then you go to something like this and you're like, these are regular guys, and they work in an office that's kind of shitty, and they're kind of approachable and awkward."

"You guys are less awkward than I'd imagined," said the blogger, who was standing nearby.

Awkward though they may be, Pitchfork writers are aware of their power—many of them because they themselves are longtime readers of the site, and are conscious of the profound effect it had on their taste growing up.

The consequence, Mr. Dombal reasoned, is that musicians who were in their 20s or younger when they started reading the site are making records directly inspired by Pitchfork itself. "It's a perfect storm, you know?" he said.

Maybe not perfect: The truth is that Mr. Dombal is not Beach Fossils' biggest fan in the world. Not that he dislikes them or anything. It's just—"The people that I really love are these kind of larger-than-life figures—somebody like Lil' Wayne, who's, like, the same age as me," Mr. Dombal said. "For me, loving somebody involves an element of unapproachability." 

The Beach Fossils guys, in other words, are nice and everything, but it's almost as if they fit the profile of a Pitchfork band too perfectly.

"They look like how I look," Mr. Dombal said. "They went to similar schools as me. Similar backgrounds, similar references. It's like talking to one of my friends. Which is O.K., but . . . that's not what I want to really grab on to as far as music goes."

Outside, back on the steps, Mr. Schreiber was talking about an earlier conversation with one of the boys in Beach Fossils.

"He was asking me questions about Pitchfork, which was interesting," Mr. Schreiber said. "He was asking about old writers—he was asking about Jason Josephes, who wrote the Flaming Lips Zaireeka 0.0, and he was like, 'I always really liked that review!'"

That review, one of only a handful of 0.0s that Pitchfork has ever bestowed, was published more than eight years ago, when Pitchfork was a very different Web site, and appears to have since been taken down.

"At that point, we were just like, a zine—no one was fucking reading us," Mr. Schreiber said. "We didn't give a shit what we said, so we would just do shit like that."

The Beach Fossils kid remembered the review in detail. "It was cool," Mr. Schreiber said.

Did he think the guys in the band felt any kind of funny about playing in this particular office, in front of these particular people?

"I dunno, man," Mr. Schreiber said. "I try not to think about things too much from a band's perspective, you know what I mean? You try to remain critical and distant, for sure. But I guess I would imagine that it's pretty surreal more than anything. Like, just a weird thing, you know?"

lneyfakh@observer.com

Despite L-train maintenance and the kind of steady rain that can wreck perfectly asymmetrical bangs (not to mention a recent attempted occupation by students), about 100 attendees packed the Eugene Lang Center for a ridiculously wide-ranging discussion of hipster culture, which included heady thoughts on post-colonialism, deregulation, easy credit, Chinese ownership of U.S. debt, Leon Trotsky, Slavoj Žižek, Pavement, Nirvana, Debbie Gibson, and Scott Baio.

It was one of those kinds of events.

Mr. Lorentzen, who penned a polemic called “Why The Hipster Must Die” for Time Out New York in 2007, declared the idea of the hipster a great fraud, and said he had come to apologize for his part in it. “No member of my family, no close friend, no enemy, no rival, no dance partner, no party guest, no barkeep, no doctor, no lawyer, no banker, no artist, no guitar player, no deejay, no model, no photographer, no author, no pilot, no stewardess, no actor, no actress, no television personality, no robber, no cop, no priest, no nun, no hooker, no pimp, no acquaintance known to me, has ever been a hipster,” Mr. Lorentzen said.

“The fraud held that there are people called hipsters who follow a creed called hipsterism and exist in a realm called hipsterdom," he continued. "The truth is that there was no such culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young, and, more often than not, funny-looking.”

Mr. Lorentzen, dressed in a black suit, seemed to be the only one poking fun at the topic. N+1 editor and Eugene Lang assistant professor Mark Greif (grayish suit) offered a more academic talk, positing three definitions of the hipster, post-1999—which the panel seemed to agree was the year the neo-hipster was born. (No matter that by 2004, New York magazine was already declaring the end of them all in a satire by Zev Borow.)

There were some uncomfortable moments: the one guy sporting a trucker hat stared straight ahead as Mr. Greif talked about how guys in trucker hats were striving for some sort of faux-authenticity. And when Mr. Greif hit upon the prevalence of pornographic and pedophilic moustaches among hipsters, one heavily moustachioed man seemed to listen more intently, while his thinly ’stached friend mustered an awkward laugh.

Jace Clayton (black jacket, black t-shirt, and faded black pants), aka dj/rupture, wrapped up the panel portion by saying that artists, not hipsters, are “gentrification’s shock troops,” and that the hipster was just a “straw man in tight jeans.”

“I imagine that folks moving to Bushwick open their closet and find no tube socks and think, ‘I’m not a hipster, my parents don’t pay my rent, I listen to classic country music, without a trace of irony,’ and then go on being the same arrogant, over-privileged people with the smug satisfaction that it’s only hipsters who destroy neighborhoods, not them or their friends.”

During the question and answer portion, several people wondered whether hipsters were intellectuals beneath their fashionable get-ups. “I would dispute that at the core of hipsterism is intellectualism,” Mr. Lorentzen said.

“I say this based on my living in Williamsburg for two years. In Williamsburg, where everyone looked like that, a lot people didn’t know a damn thing.”

The moderator, who happened to be Mr. Lorentzen’s sister, Allison, challenged him on that: “Can you name the other places where you lived where people were well-read?”

“Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Cambridge, Somerville,” he replied. “Not necessarily Hoppington, Massachusetts.” (Mr. Lorentzen has written about at least one of these neighborhoods before.)

Later, there was a discussion about Mr. Žižek, who apparently stands as the Father of Modern Hipster Thought. “I used to work at American Apparel, and he was the only intellectual anyone had heard of,” a woman chimed in from the crowd. (Maybe it's Professor Žižek's shared affinities with American Apparel founder Dov Charney?)

Another woman asked about nostalgia (which felt, indeed, like a nostalgic question). “Do you guys think nostalgia is the right term for it? To me that sort of implies that we would have stopped talking about Charles In Charge, but I’m not sure that that conversation ever stopped,” she said.

“Why would nostalgia make you stop talking about Charles In Charge?” Mr. Greif wondered, which seemed to flummox the questioner.

One young man in wire-frame glasses and a green flannel over a button-up shirt bravely admitted to liking the idea of hipsterism when he read about it on Pitchfork in 2002 or 2003.

“The moment we’re pronouncing the death of the hipster is, in itself, something of a hipster moment," he said.

“I think we in New York have just reached a point of fatigue in talking about it,” proclaimed Mr. Lorentzen.

“People have stopped calling me up and asking me to write articles with the h-word on it.”

From what we can gather, Pitchfork and Fader plan on sharing editorial and advertising content across a range of platforms—including print, online, and festivals—while keeping their ad and editorial teams fully intact at each publication. "The goal for us is to figure out the crossover where it makes perfect sense from a partnership standpoint,” says Pitchfork publisher Chris Kaskie. “To see where all our extremely loyal readers can be coupled with Fader's and what we can offer them in return." The key words here may be “readers” and “coupled.” With Pitchfork’s 1.6-million-strong online readership and Fader Media’s 1.3 million readers, the companies' partnership doubles the audience each can offer its advertisers—which, of course, is something of a priority in this economy.

"There's too many good records here," he said in his thick English accent (although the actual records, those measuring 12-inches across, were downstairs). He was perusing the "C" section, and picked up a disc by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. "I could do some real damage in this shop for sure."

At 36, Mr. Hogan is hardly archaic himself. In fact, the festival he created nearly a decade ago, All Tomorrow's Parties (commonly referred to as ATP), has become one of the most highly anticipated events of the indie music world.

Barry Hogan, the British music promoter, was at Bleecker Street Records last Thursday afternoon partaking in what seems like an archaic ritual: CD shopping.

"There's too many good records here," he said in his thick English accent (although the actual records, those measuring 12-inches across, were downstairs). He was perusing the "C" section, and picked up a disc by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. "I could do some real damage in this shop for sure."

At 36, Mr. Hogan is hardly archaic himself. In fact, the festival he created nearly a decade ago, All Tomorrow's Parties (commonly referred to as ATP), has become one of the most highly anticipated events of the indie music world. This weekend marks its first ever New York installment—although to the dismay of anyone who prefers not to venture above 14^th Street, it's taking place at a woodsy family vacation resort and country club in the Catskills of Monticello, N.Y.

Held on weekends in small, quirky venues, and often curated in part by a particular band or musician (this time, Kevin Shields has the honor), All Tomorrow's Parties—named after the Velvet Underground song—provides a more intimate, perhaps classier, alternative to the standard rock mega-fest that massive outdoor concerts like Coachella, Lollapalooza (the post-2004 version, of course) and New York's own Siren Festival have re-popularized in recent years. Since ATP's inception in 1999, it's hosted acts ranging from classic rock artists like Yoko Ono, Cheap Trick and Love, to contemporary indie stars like Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, and Belle and Sebastian (who gave Mr. Hogan the idea for ATP in the first place).

This weekend people are flying in from countries as far away as Japan, Australia, England, Spain and Italy, to name a few, and Mr. Hogan said there's a "healthy" New York draw as well. (Not surprisingly, he noted, many of the city's ticket holders seem to be from Brooklyn.) The main attraction is Mr. Shields' My Bloody Valentine, the recently reunited early '90s fuzz-rock band from Ireland, which is making its first U.S. appearance in 16 years. As of Wednesday, all of the roughly 3,000 tickets had sold out.

"We try to make it intimate," said Mr. Hogan of his preference for venues that are a bit off the beaten path, like the tiny seaside resort in the south of England where he sometimes holds the festival, or the deck of The Queen Mary, a legendary ocean liner now permanently docked in Long Beach, Calif. "Nobody wants to be stuck in a field with 50,000 people," he said.

But ATP's success boils down to a single element: nostalgia. Usually, the lineup is more or less a dream set list for people who got into cool music in the '80s and '90s. Between My Bloody Valentine and longtime indie staples like Low, Yo La Tengo and Dinosaur Jr., among various others, this weekend's festival is like a long-lost mix tape made in one's college dorm room. Most exciting, Mr. Hogan often convinces a band to do an entire set of one of its classic albums, a trend that has taken off in its own right since the idea first came to him one night in 2005 when he was sitting around drinking beer and listening to old records. That thought evolved into a concert series called "Don't Look Back" (like the classic Bob Dylan documentary), which has featured everyone from Ennio Morricone to the Stooges to GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, and is typically held in conjunction with ATP. Among the artists joining in the fun this weekend are Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, doing his 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts (at Mr. Hogan's behest, Sonic Youth did an entire tour last year of its 1988 masterpiece, Daydream Nation), and Built to Spill, doing 1997's Perfect From Now On.

"I'm totally intrigued by the idea," said Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch, who is perhaps more excited to see the Meat Puppets perform their 1984 classic, Meat Puppets II, one of his favorite records of all time, "but mostly I'm just flattered that people are actually interested."

So why are people so interested in rehashing the past? And what does it say about, well, new music?

"I think it says that on the one hand, indie rock has now become entrenched for a long enough amount of time for people to be nostalgic for it," said Amy Phillips, senior news editor at Pitchfork Media, which hosted a "Don't Look Back" series at its own festival last summer.

"Something can definitely be said for the fact that the way we consume music now isn't as much of an ‘album' experience as it was when a lot of these records came out. People certainly felt a strong connection to the notion of the album and they want to feel that way again," she added.

"I think people are starving for it," said Syd Butler, the bass player for New York's Les Savy Fav, which has played several of ATP's European incarnations and is also on this weekend's bill. "For me it's [Built to Spill's] Perfect From Now On—the time it came out, the culture of that time. It still has that feeling to me of buying a record and going to see a band live and growing with them. Now, it's like, I listen to people's MySpace pages."

Back in the Village, Mr. Hogan, who's been in town from England with his wife and business partner, Deborah, for the past month making preparations for the festival, was a bit more blunt.

"There are some good bands out there today, but a lot of the new stuff just doesn't inspire me," he said. "We're not trying to promote what's trendy and hip. This is all music we still listen to, things we want to hear. It's like making a mix tape. You're gonna put on what you love and things that are meaningful to you."

Works for us!

ATP New York, Sept. 19-21, Kutsher's Country Resort, Catskills, N.Y., atpfestival.com

According to Pitchfork editor in chief Scott Plagenhoef, the book will be a paperback guide to the 500 best songs released since 1977. It’ll be out in November from the Touchstone/Fireside imprint of Simon & Schuster, and will feature contributions from Pitchfork writers past and present.

Pitchfork’s president and founder Ryan Schreiber will co-edit the book with Mr. Plagenhoef. The two of them chose the songs covered in the book, Mr. Plagenhoef said in an e-mail, “with a bit of advice and assistance from a handful of staffers.”

Asked why they decided to do a list of songs instead of albums or artists, Mr. Plagenhoef respectfully cited the culture. “Listeners are increasingly engaging with songs outside of their parent albums, and some of the most influential and exciting music of the past three decades was released on 7” and 12” records or EPs rather than on LPs—not just in stereotypical ‘singles’ genres such as pop, hip-hop, dance, and dancehall, but in punk and indie as well.”

Jud Laghi, a young agent at LJK Literary Management, negotiated the deal. Mr. Laghi has previously repped Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook, John Sellers’ Perfect From Now on: How Indie Rock Saved My Life and Jason Bitner’s Cassette From My Ex, a book about love and “the lost art of the mixtape.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Inside Baseball: Also in Time, Michael Kinsley exposes the long-simmering feud between writers and editors and offers "an apology to any writers I may have treated callously over my years as an editor. If I didn't answer your e-mail, I'm sorry. If the check was late or the amount less than agreed on, please forgive me." He also asserts that "On the Internet, they don't have editors," which is more or less what Ken Auletta fretted about twelve years ago in a New Yorker profile of Mr. Kinsley called "The Re-Education of Michael Kinsley" in which he wrote, "If [Esther] Dyson's guess—and it can be only that—is correct, then Kinsley the editor is destined to become another middleman, another roadkill in the abyss of cyberspace." (Remember 'cyberspace'?)

Breakfast with George: Nick Paumgarten sits down for breakfast with legendary ad man and Esquire cover guru George Lois in this week's New Yorker. Over sherbet with berries, and "a thin omelette, prosciutto, homemade Greek bread, and a scoop of caviar," Lois holds forth. "Magazine editors regularly call Lois to tell him that they have produced Lois covers of their own—worthy homages, at least—and his response tends to be 'I don’t think so.' In general, he disdains the wan, cluttered magazine covers of today. 'They go out and test: Do you like this person? Do you like this blurb? Do you like this blurb better than this blurb? It’s unbelievable. I’d do a cover that would knock your eyeballs out ...'"

Too Cool for School: The Guardian's Jack Schofield crowns music site Pitchfork a 'taste-setter' (only about two years too late), deeming it "more polished, more professional and more responsible than it used to be, and deservedly more popular. It is even making money."

"I just got off the subway one day and said, 'I don't want to do this anymore,'" he said.

Scott Plagenhoef, who was a top editor writer at Stylus before becoming the managing editor of Pitchfork, said the site would be dearly missed.

"Todd has done an exemplary job of providing an outlet for content that is writer-friendly and allows them to stretch out and explore ideas," Mr. Plagenhoef said.

"One disappointing thing about it is that there aren't very many music magazines anymore," he said. "Even online, since having a blog has simply been a matter of hosting a song and then saying, 'hey, here it is.' That's been pretty much the end of the conversation in a lot of places about music."

Mr. Plagenhoef said he has been talking to Mr. Burns about Stylus writers who might now find a home at Pitchfork. "We've consulted with Todd and talked about certain writers who are a good fit, and we're in the process of possibly bringing on board a few people," he said.

Mr. Plagenhoef said Pitchfork has already hired Mike Powell, who wrote regularly about music for Stylus and served as an associate editor.

Stylus will publish its last reviews this week, and close out on Halloween with a "Greatest Hits"-style retrospective.