The fact is that the type of music Pitchfork covers no longer drives enough traffic to allow the site to remain profitable. The site's editorial philosophy of building artists up only to tear them back down in dramatic fashion left many of their marquee names floundering after being blindsided by backlash, and readers who were put off by the constant cycle of hype followed by disavowal simply stopped tuning in to find out who the new sacrificial lamb was.

The period of time directly before the Condé Nast acquisition, before the site finally relented and just started covering mainstream music was amongst the most awkward and unpleasant in the site's history. Knowing their traffic was cratering but unwilling to just give in and post photo galleries of Ariana Grande, they treated the biggest artists in their wheelhouse like tabloid fodder, exhausting readers with daily updates about Win Butler's social media use or Ariel Pink calling Grimes "retarded".

The best option that allows them to continue to function as a business seems to be focusing on coverage of mainstream music in their news posts and staffing their festival lineups primarily with reuinted bands from the time before Pitchfork had an influence, and also artists from other communities like Rap and R&B that don't need Pitchfork's stamp of approval to succeed and aren't vulnerable to the kind of backlash that's caused problems for many of "their" artists in the past.

It's like that brief period of time where the site was influential and you saw a lot of "Pitchfork bands" on festival lineups never happened. Probably for the best, given how poorly they dealt with the power they had when they had it.