Next year, Pitchfork will have been The Most Trusted Voice In Music for exactly three decades, and Condé Nast’s hallowed music publication has chosen to celebrate by trusting its readers to use their own voices to rate and review albums for the first time. “Coming in 2026, as Pitchfork celebrates its 30th anniversary, we’re finally planning to add a comments section to all of our album reviews,” the outlet announced today, noting that this update encompasses “over 30,000 pieces of music criticism on which you’ll be able to leave your own Pitchfork review for the very first time.”
That means Pitchfork‘s infamous 0.0 review of Jet’s Shine On will soon be accompanied by more than just a video of a monkey peeing in his own mouth. Users will be able to add their own takes on the album (or Pitchfork’s incisive coverage of it), along with their own personal ratings on the outlet’s 0.0 to 10.0 scale. Those scores will be aggregated into a brand new “reader score,” which will be shown alongside Pitchfork‘s official score.
Readers should make sure they know the difference between these two numbers going forward. It will likely be a lot easier for an album to score the elusive perfect 10.0 on the reader side of things—if it doesn’t get review bombed into oblivion by biased assholes or an opposing fandom first, of course. As we’ve seen on other fan-driven review sites like Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is often a reflection of reactionary politics or fandom maneuvering rather than the actual quality of a piece of art. Hopefully the comments can remain about the music.
At least Pitchfork says it’s taking its time to get this right. The outlet is currently beta testing the new features with a pool of 500 readers “to make sure that we build the best comments section and reader scoring system possible,” as it wrote in its announcement. It hasn’t laid out a specific timeline for a wider rollout as of this writing, but shared that it would be back with more information whenever these tests are complete.
