Stylus Magazine

» see stylusmagazine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Stylus started in 2002. Nobody wrote down the month, which tells you what kind of publication it was at the beginning: a website one person put up, edited by Todd L. Burns, staffed by people who were not being paid and in several cases were still in school. It reviewed records, and after a few years it reviewed films as well. The competitive position was never in doubt. Pitchfork was the one everybody read, and Stylus was the one that the people who wrote for Pitchfork read. The Observer's obituary put it precisely: never as widely read or as immediately influential, but with a name among specialists who wanted rigorous and often personal criticism, applied to obscure artists and to Top 40 singles with the same seriousness.

The ending is the unusual part. There was no collapse, no lawsuit, no acquirer, no advertising market falling out from under it. On 26 October 2007 Leon Neyfakh reported in the Observer that the site would fold after Halloween, and the reason Burns gave him was this: "I just got off the subway one day and said, 'I don't want to do this anymore.'" The piece notes there was no immediate impetus behind the decision. Five days later the site put up its year-end lists alongside a set of farewell essays, with a last piece by Burns rounding up the best work it had ever run, and stopped.

Those years, 2002 to 2007, line up almost exactly with the period I was getting music out of internet cafes and off a home connection in Turkey. The files crossed borders instantly and the argument about them did not. Anglophone music criticism was a closed room you could see into, and what came through to a Turkish university student with a download folder was the record itself, never the four hundred words someone in New York had written about where it sat in the year.

~ the case file ~

~ playing god ~

Reviews carried a single letter grade, A through F with pluses and minuses, sitting under the release information with no decimal place and no pretense of precision. Set against Pitchfork's famous scores out of ten with a decimal, the letter was a small act of deflation: an opinion, given a shape everybody already understood from school.

The recurring columns were where the personality lived. "On Second Thought" went back to older records and re-reviewed them properly, taking the position that a verdict reached years ago was not binding. "Playing God" was the strange one and the one people still bring up: a writer took a famous album apart and re-sequenced or re-edited it into the version they thought it should have been, then defended the result. Synchronicity and Songs in the Key of Life both went through it. "The Singles Jukebox" ran daily and looked at pop singles from around the world, several critics grading the same track, which is a format that has since been copied almost everywhere.

~ where everyone went ~

Pitchfork had hired Mike Powell, who had written for Stylus since 2005 and served as an associate editor, before the site had even finished closing. Scott Plagenhoef had already gone the same direction and was Pitchfork's managing editor by then, and he spent the week of the shutdown publicly recruiting. Andrew Unterberger, who started writing for Stylus in 2003 while he was still in high school, went on to a long career in the music press. For a publication that paid nobody and lasted five years, its record as a training program is the most durable thing about it.

Two of its features outlived it. "The Singles Jukebox" relaunched as a standalone site in March 2009 and is still publishing today. "The Stylus Decade", a retrospective on the 2000s put together by former senior writer Nick Southall with Burns's blessing, went up on 4 January 2010 and was the last thing published under the Stylus name.

~ rebuilt in 2026 ~

The original domain is gone at the DNS level. It has no reachable authority, so there is no parked page and no squatter, just a lookup that fails.

The magazine itself came back this year. Todd Burns pulled roughly two thousand pages out of the Wayback Machine and restored them to the original design at stylusmagazinearchive.com: the reviews and the features, the interviews, the movie section, The Stylus Decade, even the reader comments off the old message board. The man who decided on a subway platform that he was done spent 2026 putting all of it back.

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