Condé Nast is suing a co-founder of the defunct Pitchfork Music Festival, and the lawsuit is essentially tied to the demise of that festival. It’s also surprisingly personal, using barbed language to argue that Michael Reed is trying to run out with half a million dollars of Condé Nast’s money.
The publisher of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Wired, Vogue and other media brands, Condé Nast gobbled up Pitchfork Music Festival with its namesake website in 2015. Pitchfork Music Festival (hereafter just “Pitchfork”) began in 2006 and was shuttered in late 2024. No real explanation was ever given: Pitchfork’s parent company would only allow that “the music festival landscape continues to change” in their announcement, which had followed news that Pitchfork (the site) being subsumed by men’s magazine GQ. We wrote at the time that
According to the text of the lawsuit filed in Federal Court in the Northern District of Illinois, Pitchfork has been wrestling with co-founder Michael Reed almost since the festival’s 2024 demise. Reviewing the suit, it appears that Pitchfork sent Reed a contractually-obligated notice in late August 2024 that the festival would continue, but Pitchfork held off on substantive planning for the 2025 festival. Reed cautioned that agents were getting antsy. Pitchfork replied that there was “no movement” on 2025 planning before announcing that the Chicago festival, at least, was finished.
Just after New Year’s 2025, Pitchfork claims their finance director noticed that $564,680 in funds which had been earmarked for the now-canceled 2025 festival had not been returned from one of Reed’s companies called “Big Stik.” Reed claims (and in a statement to Block Club, continues to claim) that the funds had been eaten up by “2025 wind-down costs” — expenses incurred in planning the canceled 2025 festival and wrapping the whole thing up.
Pitchfork disputes this, and that’s essentially where things stand. Pitchfork’s lawsuit demands their $564k back, plus costs, interest and damages, and a declaration that Reed is the “alter ego” of his companies.
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Stik & Move
But you have to read the lawsuit to understand that the dispute is much more complicated than most of the top-line coverage of it. For one thing, both Pitchfork and Reed’s “Big Stik” company are currently engaged in contractually-mandated “independent arbitration” over essentially the same issues, sidestepping the courts altogether.
It was during those arbitration proceedings that Pitchfork claims it learned Reed had transferred the $564k out of Big Stik to a second entity, called “At Pluto” (Honestly, you have to admire Reed’s commitment to the indie rock aesthetic in naming his companies after what sound like Athens, Georgia-based electronic jug bands.)
This arbitration agreement binds Pitchfork and Big Stik to the process, but not At Pluto or Reed personally. This lawsuit appears to be an extension of that arbitration, seeking to bring At Pluto and Reed personally in line with Big Stik.
Pitchfork calls Big Stik “insolvent” and worries that funds transferred out of it would be beyond their reach — that Reed could “retain $564,680 of Pitchfork’s funds personally while presenting an empty shell — Big Stik — to satisfy any judgment.” The lawsuit is seeking a preliminary injunction to freeze the funds they claim are held by At Pluto as “specific identifiable property” under Illinois law.
In the meantime, the lawsuit accuses Reed of significant misdeeds orchestrating a “deliberate scheme” to defraud and describes his actions in language more lurid than most mundane court filings over disputed property. Reed is accused of fabricating documents, misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. Each are cited while tiptoeing around the issue that the ongoing arbitration process may already cover these matters.
This really should be a simple property matter associated with a failed business venture, and whether Reed’s “wind-down costs” are real or not would would be provable by the production of receipts. You simply can’t fake paying the city of Chicago for event permits to rent out Union Park. It’s been a year and a half since Condé Nast claimed there was a discrepancy, though, and the dispute centered on the controversial decision to shut down the festival is not just ongoing but still expanding.
Pitchfork Festivals LLC vs Michael Reed and At Pluto LTD is filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, case number 1:26-cv-07884.
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