Pitchfork ran a festival for 19 years — Condé Nast cancelled it with 2025 set

Pitchfork — the music publication founded in 1996 — launched its own festival in Chicago's Union Park in 2006, and it became an institution: nineteen consecutive editions, 20,000 fans a day, headliners from Outkast to Mitski.

The warning came in January 2024, when Condé Nast merged Pitchfork into GQ, cutting half the editorial staff including founder and editor-in-chief Ryan Schreiber. Then on 11 November 2024 Pitchfork announced that the festival was cancelled entirely, pointing to 'a rapidly evolving festival landscape and other factors' and saying it needed 'to find a more sustainable path forward.' The 2025 lineup had already been announced.

The timing stung: 2024 had sold out, and the cancellation was not about one bad year but about a publisher pulling the plug on a live-events arm that had outlived its economics.