Silicon Bowery

Pitchfork/Fader Team Up…

Really interesting news coming out of the online music space recently – Pitchfork and Fader have joined forces [kind of] to achieve economies of scale and make bank.  Each company will keep its ad sales and editorial teams intact but will maintain an extensive advertising and sponsorship relationship across print, online, festivals, events and unique content exchanges.

This reminds me a lot of the early days of when sports-centric content sites decided to combine forces.  You saw blogs with audiences of 500K-1M users combining forces to achieve scale in selling more ads and doing bigger ad deals.  Today this space has matured so much that now most of the smaller sites have been rolled into big aggregation plays.  Companies like Yardbarker, SB Nation and Mike Levy’s Open Sports Network dominate.

Will this happen in the music space?  Will smaller niche sites like Earplug, Prefix, Idolator, etc team up or join forces with Fader/Cornerstone/Pitchfork?  Makes sense to me…