Pitchfork Music Festival: music festival, Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Pitchfork Music Festival, annual summer rock festival, held in Chicago’s Union Park, that focuses primarily on independent artists from the alternative rock, electro-pop, and hip-hop genres.

Pitchfork Media, a Chicago-based Internet publisher of music news and reviews, curated the Intonation Music Festival in 2005. The following year the company organized its own Pitchfork Music Festival. It was held over two days in July and attracted more than 36,000 fans to hear some 40 bands, including Band of Horses, Yo La Tengo, and Mission of Burma, on two main stages. In 2007 the festival expanded to three days and was attended by some 48,000 visitors. Musical guests have included Animal Collective, Pavement, Modest Mouse, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, and the Flaming Lips. In 2011 the festival expanded to Paris, with a two-day lineup that was organized by Pitchfork and Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon.

Activism has gone hand in hand with the Pitchfork Music Festival. In 2008 concertgoers could register to vote, for example, and organizers said that more than 1,200 people did so. In 2010 the organizers purchased carbon credits to offset the traveling the musicians would do to reach the festival. The organizers also encouraged festival attendees to recycle, to utilize greener methods of travel to and from the festival, and to purchase their own carbon offsets.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Michael Ray.