There are a lot of things about “festival culture” I don’t care for. These include but are not limited to: crowds, weather, being outside, human beings, shitting in any space other than a luxurious indoor toilet, and music. OK, saying “music” is a joke, mostly, but by and large the local options just don’t book good enough acts to make it worthwhile to endure all the terrible things about festivals. That said, I’ve always found Pitchfork’s annual party in Union Park (which started in 2006—or 2005, if you count the year it curated Intonation) to offer the most comfortable experience and interesting bill of the summer. Naturally, when I spoke by phone last week with Pitchfork founder and editor in chief Ryan Schreiber and Pitchfork president Chris Kaskie—who announced in May that he’s leaving the company in late July—I asked about how such a massive event gets planned. We also discussed Pitchfork’s remaining ties to Chicago aside from its festival, its gatekeeper role in a streaming-music future, and much more.

In terms of your talent buy, do you work with outside bookers or the Pitchfork staff or a combination that comes up with the lineup?CK: We’ve been working with the same production partner, Mike Reed, since we were kids just starting this thing out in 2004 and 2005. Since we have so few slots to actually fill, it’s obviously a very careful process in terms of submissions or thinking how every slot is as important as the next. It’s a really tight-knit group, and with that comes the expected discourse and disagreements, but the beauty is you get a bit more flexibility at the festival to not be so homed in to what’s happening today. You can kind of look at more music—take a breath and have a broader scope.

I’m interested in the events surrounding the festival that are involved with community outreach. How did you develop Beats Over Bullets with MASK and Everytown?CK: Pitchfork is emotionally headquartered here in Chicago, even though we’ve been acquired by Condé Nast and our official HQ is in New York. A goal we have is to do good for the community that surrounds and supports us. Every year we come up with a charitable-giving option for our guests and artists to raise awareness and donations. Last year we were helping to support organizations that provide voter accessibility in underserved markets. MASK, we had employees that were supporting and volunteering for. At the same time, there was some outreach from Everytown. It has become an international thing to raise gun awareness and gun-violence awareness across all cities, not just Chicago. What we were able to do was take MASK, which is our local focal point, and broaden that purview into something like Everytown, and then allow Pitchfork to integrate that continued awareness beyond the three days of the festival. There is obviously a charitable-giving component to it, but it’s more important to be something that is ongoing. As a festival it’s hard to get political, but on a community-based level we want to find ways to integrate meaningfully.

Are you working on strategies to engage with listeners involved in a streaming environment and less of an authoritarian “gatekeeper” idea? Do you see that as a direction Pitchfork moves into in the future?RS: I think our objectivity and our reviews are really central to our editorial mission. I think because it’s an aspect of what we do, it separates us from streaming music services and algorithms. For us, we treat streaming services almost as an extension of social media. We aid music discoveries, and we find that our readers are really eager to engage with us on those platforms. Pitchfork provides context. We keep readers posted on new developments; we tell stories. For us, where the music comes from, what inspires it, who made it and why, and connecting with musicians as people matters. Our obsession with music and our readers’ obsession with music runs pretty deep. I think there are a lot of casual listeners out there who’ve always been OK with having music fed to them, but Pitchfork was really designed with more serious fans in mind. While some of those fans are finding more music through algorithms as well, our approach is still really resonating. Our traffic is growing, and a more human, personal connection is very much what people are looking for.