Seven years ago, the Pigeons & Planes team shut down its music publication website, thinking it might be better to connect with people on social media platforms. Last month, it started up its website again. Here’s how founder Jacob Moore explains it:
All that said, we’re not sure what a music website’s role is in 2026 and beyond, but we feel like it’s a necessary piece for Pigeons & Planes to be the brand we want it to be. We’ve always aimed to be a platform where artists could dig deep and tell their stories, where writers could share opinions and start important conversations, where fans could get the context needed to form real, lasting connections with music and a better understanding of the artists they love. A lot of that has been replaced by the immediate payoff of social media dopamine hits but after a while, it doesn’t hit the same.
In other words, knowing the problem, and not waiting for a solution—but actively building towards one. Trusting that you’ll find it along the way.
A person—or group—who writes at a website can get stronger with time, as the library grows, whereas that seems to be the opposite in the case of social media. A website offers a strong foundation, whereas social media is shaky.
The half-life of a social media post is much shorter than the half-life of a publication article. (In other words, consider this question: a month after you post, do you think more people will see your website article or your social media post?)
Unless you’re extremely organized, it will take effort for you to find your own best social media posts, because paywalls and non-descriptive URLs prevent search engines from indexing it. Imagine how that feels for your readers, who say something like, “I saw a great tweet the other day,” and summarize it without being able to find it again. With a website, you could easily search for your own keywords and dig it up. I have written 1,000+ posts at this blog, and I have never had a difficult time with this.
Depth, as Jacob writes, is another; social media is not conducive to encouraging a reader to focus, whereas you can design your website to be clearer and less stimulating. Compression, by definition, removes depth.
Because it draws fewer readers right away, a website also allows its creators to take a bit more creative risk—to be more spontaneous and random, too—which creates openings for deeper connections. As J. Cole writes at his blog, “I been wanting a lil blog for years. Somewhere to post random shit I fuck with where the audience is way smaller than it is on the social media platforms.”
It’s great to see a team come back to a website after betting on social media. And even if Pigeons & Planes doesn’t know what the role of a music website will be in the future, I have a feeling that nobody else does either, which creates the unique opportunity for them to help define it.