The Pitchfork Music Festival came very close to celebrating its 20th anniversary this July in Union Park. But late last year, the festival’s parent owner, Condé Nast, announced that it was permanently shuttering the Chicago festival.
The news surprised many Chicago music fans, who’d come to rely on the festival as a place to discover music outside the dominant pop mainstream — music that spanned different genres and generations.
As for festival co-founder Mike Reed, whose Chicago-based company At Pluto put on the massive event every year, the cancellation left him “relieved and happy” that it would not continue in its current incarnation.
“It started with me, and it ended with me,” he said on a call from Amsterdam, where he was on tour as a musician. “I’m also glad I didn’t have to make the decision myself. I drove it until the wheels came off.”
The relief Reed expressed came, he said, from witnessing Pitchfork stray from his original vision of a curated weekend of independent music, designed for audiences and artists whose tastes don’t fit with more corporate bashes like Lollapalooza and Coachella. In Reed’s first interview since Condé Nast pulled the plug, he talked to WBEZ about why the writing had been on the wall since the New York–based media conglomerate took over Pitchfork Media in 2015. Escalating costs from all corners of the concert industry, from production to artist fees, contributed to the festival’s eventual demise, he said.
He warned of other potential pitfalls for large-event promoters in the area.
“The costs are out of control,” he said. “The compromise you have to make on festivals like this is not something I’m deeply interested in.”
Can’t you book Bieber?
Producing the 19th incarnation of the festival last July was, according to Reed, “increasingly difficult.”
The debut of pricey VIP tiers, announced in the spring, received a tepid response from fans. Some took to social media in July to blast organizers when owners revealed new “double-decker” private viewing platforms that blocked views near the soundboard, plus a front-of-stage viewing pit that obscured views and sound for regular ticketholders. Unlike many previous years, the 2024 festival did not sell out.
As for Reed, he felt increased pressure from the festival’s new owners to chase after commercial pop acts such as Justin Bieber or Demi Lovato. That signaled to him that the owners were unaware of the alternative nature of the music that made Pitchfork special in the first place. Alanis Morrissette headlined last summer, but Reed and his producing team already “had our fill” with the festival once it ended.
Soon after wrapping the 2024 event, Condé Nast notified Reed in August that the 2025 festival was moving forward. He felt pitching the festival’s 20th anniversary as a theme was “an automatic win,” combining former Pitchfork headliners who have since become major stars — acts like St. Vincent and Bon Iver — with up-and-comers influenced by their legacy.
Reed and his team got busy: hitting the phones with talent reps, formalizing applications with the Chicago Park District to reserve Union Park for July 2025 and securing production elements like lighting and staging. Then, on Nov. 11, Condé Nast gave him notice, without explanation, that the festival was canceled. Ninety minutes later, Reed said, the media giant made a formal announcement on Instagram.
Their explanation for keeping him in the dark, Reed said: worries over leaks. But being kept in the dark until the last minute made him look bad and prevented a “gracious exit” from a festival he helped create.
Condé Nast declined to comment for this article, referring only to its November statement announcing the festival’s departure.
The new money squeeze
In its first decade, Pitchfork established itself as a three-day weekend for audiences interested in discovering new music outside the mainstream, spanning all genres and generations. In past years, artists as varied as Tortoise, Mitski, GZA, Kim Gordon, Yoko Ono, Animal Collective, George Clinton, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slint, Giorgio Moroder, Neutral Milk Hotel, Björk, Mavis Staples, A Tribe Called Quest, Angel Olsen and Chaka Khan played its stages.
The festival’s mission to highlight music outside the mainstream was important for bands like Brooklyn’s Les Savy Fav, which headlined Pitchfork’s Blue stage last summer. But because the art-punk band did not make mainstream music, it would typically “not be on beyond 3 p.m. at Lollapalooza,” said Mahmood Shaikh, the band’s booking agent.
“Pitchfork was the last of that type of festival to exist in the U.S. There are fewer and fewer of these niche-leaning festivals,” Shaikh said. With Pitchfork gone, bands like Les Savy Fav will likely be playing more headline shows in small theaters, at the expense of picking up new fans in a festival environment. “Being able to reach 20,000 people at one time is much different than playing your own show,” said Shaikh. “There’s a lot of artist development through festivals.”
The challenge for Pitchfork became the same for most festivals its size: money. Union costs, insurance, taxes, security, fuel and anything related to production all skyrocketed in recent years, he said. The worst culprit: artist guarantees. More than a decade ago, Reed said Pitchfork headliners cost between $12,000 to $20,000. Now, they start at $1 million.
“If you saw that in any other industry, it would be insane,” he said.
Matt Rucins, senior talent buyer at the Auditorium Theatre, witnessed a similar price hike when he booked now-shuttered Chicago summer festivals Mamby On the Beach and Spring Awakening. He said festivals “have no control over” rising production and talent costs, which forces a heated competition to book marquee artists, which inevitably only spikes prices higher. “If you don’t spend enough, you don’t sell enough” tickets, he said.
Rucins said that in today’s climate, artists “can make 20% more at a festival” compared to an indoor venue show, and those economics are transforming summer touring. Now, some acts just play a handful of festival dates. “Everyone is trying to do that,” he said. For festival promoters without deep pockets, the new economics often means moving from your first choice to your “second and third options.”
The demand for higher guarantees is the direct result of slumping music sales, said Shaikh.
“The devaluation of recorded music on the user end through streaming has made it so artists make very little income from their recorded music,” because the returns on streaming are miniscule compared to physical sales. “That was a huge hit for artists,” he said.
Whereas touring was traditionally the vehicle artists used to boost music sales, the reverse is happening today.
“The earner is the live show,” Shaikh said — a phenomenon that is driving up ticket prices as well.
Festival promoters are caught in the middle. If the majority of their budget is reserved for headliners, “there’s just a little less space to experiment,” said Shaikh. “There’s just less room in the middle and lower end of the festival to get more creative and go for [acts] that are developing and might grow in the future.”
Future of Festivals
VIP offerings and corporate sponsorships have become a cash lifeline for festival producers seeking to offset rising costs, but to Reed, they force an uncomfortable compromise. The appeal of Pitchfork in its early days was that the event had neither.
To Rucins, chasing sponsorship money appears unsustainable. “There’s only so many major sponsors to go around. It’s a piece of the pie everyone is going after,” he said, making it another reason bigger festivals “are becoming more difficult to pull off.”
Rucins said he imagines future summer concert seasons will be dominated by fewer major destination festivals per market — Coachella on the West Coast, Lollapalooza in the Midwest, Austin City Limits in the Southwest and Governor’s Ball on the East Coast. “They’re going to be a regional thing,” he said. Outside of those tentpole events, local festivals will likely shrink to become more niche.
“There is a market for a Pitchfork-type festival, but one that is just scaled properly,” he said. Examples include Cruel World, an ‘80s-goth festival in Pasadena, California; Best Friends Forever, a post-punk festival in Las Vegas; Slide Away, a shoegaze festival in Philadelphia; and Big Ears, an esoteric and multigenre festival in Knoxville, Tenn.
Shaikh believes a more cost-friendly alternative is a festival in a pre-existing venue, like last summer’s Rose on the River festival at the Salt Shed, where production costs less. “Maybe we hit a point where there are too many festivals and the costs involved can’t be covered by demand,” he mused.
For Reed, a future without Pitchfork means a refocused effort on his two Chicago venues, Constellation and Hungry Brain, the Roscoe Village clubs he owns and programs. He also still helps drive another notable Chicago music event: the Chicago Jazz Festival, where he serves as programming chair.
Reed has been touring Europe as a jazz drummer in recent months; he’ll play Big Ears in March and is planning to release a series of new and archival recordings. All of it, he says, connects to practicing his “musical faith” like religion.
“Sometimes, that faith is challenged,” he said, “and you have to find ways to reconnect and realize why it was important in the first place.”