Pitchfork: Ryan Schreiber

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2022

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While working at his local record store at age 20, Ryan Schreiber dreamt that his scrappy music review webpage might one day grow into an influential music publication. Working out of his parents’ house, he wrote about indie music because he loved it, and recruited like-minded friends to do the same. In 2000, a rhapsodic review of Radiohead’s “Kid A” got huge attention online, and soon Ryan’s site began to attract tens of thousands of users—building a reputation for pointed reviews that could make or break careers. In 2015, Pitchfork joined The New Yorker and Vogue when it was acquired by Condé Nast, one of the most prestigious magazine publishers in the world.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	I love doing the creative side of this so much that I like never focus on my business,
0:16.8	but I did have one advertiser who would actually reach out to me and said, hey, we want
0:22.4	to advertise at the top of your site, how much will it cost?
0:25.6	What was the advertiser?
0:26.6	They were an online record store called In Sound.
0:29.8	And what would they pay you a month, do you remember?
0:32.5	They asked me to name a price and I went, oh my god, I wonder how much.
0:37.6	So I just pulled out the biggest number that I could think of, which was $500 a month.
0:43.9	Wow, how about $500?
0:49.4	I was like, oh my god, that'll pay almost, that'll almost pay my rent each month.
0:54.0	And there's Sina gone.
0:55.0	Sure.
0:56.0	Oh, yes.
0:57.0	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories
1:10.2	behind the movements they built.
1:16.6	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today, how Ryan Schreiber taught himself how to write reviews
1:21.5	about the music he loved and grew that into pitchfork, one of the most influential music
1:27.0	publications in the world.
1:36.8	If you met Ryan Schreiber in 1995, you'd be hard pressed to predict that his webpage of
1:43.0	his own music reviews would one day become a powerful media company.
	...

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