Please raise your hand if you ever imagined that Pitchfork and The New Yorker would ever be published by the same conglomerate.

While I'm waiting to see a single hand, I'll mention that the NY Times reported a couple hours ago that the influential music website Pitchfork had been acquired by the Condé Nast media empire "for an undisclosed sum." In that article, Condé Nast's chief digital officer, Fred Santarpia, boasted that the acquisition "gives Condé Nast a stand-alone music publication with a strong editorial voice," and further, that it would bring “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster.”

In that same piece, P4K's editor/co-founder Ryan Schreiber said that, just shy of 20 years after its launch, “Pitchfork is incredibly fortunate to have found in Condé Nast a team of people who share our commitment to editorial excellence. Their belief in what we do, combined with their additional expertise and resources, will allow us to extend our coverage of the artists and stories that shape the music landscape on every platform.”

Pitchfork's own announcement put it like this:

Condé Nast believes, as we do, that Pitchfork has built an editorial voice that stands strongly alongside its others, and that the integrity of that voice— and our opinions— are fundamental to our identity. We’re incredibly fortunate to have found in Condé Nast a group of people who share every aspect of our focus. Their 100+ years of experience in building brands marked by editorial integrity makes them a natural fit for Pitchfork, and their belief in what we do, combined with their additional expertise, will allow us to extend our coverage across all platforms while remaining true to the ideals that have made Pitchfork the most trusted voice in music.

But the thing is, Schreiber is right. Welllll, if not "trusted," Pitchfork is unquestionably the most influential music publication of the past 15 years. However that influence may have manifested in the culture (I hope they send my old friend Travis Morrison a bottle of the most expensive champagne in the world), the site is also full of good and even great stuff. Of course it wouldn't have caught on without the opium of the numerical grading system—which was a great boon to people who don't like to read words but still want to be able to sing praises and talk shit—what they have put in front of that big audience is reliably ambitious and admirable. Despite the lightweight-or-worse reputation it earned during its early years, Pitchfork has long been a repository of a lot of really smart critical writing, ambitious design, dogged reporting, and fantastically successful experiments—most notably the sumptuous print publication The Pitchfork Review (whose long-form criticism, deluxe packaging, and cover stars like Grace Jones, make it an unlikely magnet for Santarpia's millennial males). Nonetheless, I was very happy to see him tell the Times that the Review would continue.

I don't know what I think about it yet, or if I even think anything about it, except to say that in lots of ways, this is more startling than yesterday's news about Playboy's deciding not to publish pictures of naked women anymore. People will undoubtedly speculate about the nature of independence and what kind of editorial control Condé Nast will be looking to exert. (Will Schreiber go the way of Jann Wenner and Graydon Carter, hanging out in the Arcade Fire's private jet, texting with Demi Lovato? That's hard to feature.) Some people will bemoan the further consolidation of culture, and some will say what people always say when bands sell songs to commercials: "good for them for getting some money."

The main thing people will do, however, is get all up in arms for a week or two, then forget this deal ever happened. Pitchfork didn't invent this phenomenon, but they did sprinkle a ground-up cross top in the 64-oz. Mountain Dew of pop culture's metabolic rate at a crucial moment, and they have been reaping the benefits all along.