Established in 1995 as a monthly music reviews site by recent high-school graduate Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork has grown into a unique cultural voice, offering an intelligent and heartfelt look at modern independent music, the bands and characters that populate it and the scenes that grow up around them.

Now in its fifteenth year, Pitchfork is the über-blog: a cultural heavyweight publishing five album reviews a day alongside regular columns about indie music culture, its own video concert series, its own festival and plenty of forthright opinions from the writing staff. Often parodied and frequently controversial, Pitchfork now has the power to exert influence over a band’s career. Many point to Arcade Fire as a prime example of this fact: their first record sold out its initial pressing after a Pitchfork review of 9.7/10.

"Our responsibility is to our readers first, but it would be ignorant not to consider the broader impact our words can have on artists," Schreiber says today: "It’s a tough spot to be in, because so much hinges on one writer’s opinion, yet those opinions are the reason people read Pitchfork. To account for that, we generally won’t review albums by unestablished artists unless we have something nice to say." This process is more organic than the major-label model of employing a publicist to push a band. "Publicity is marketing," insists Schreiber, "a publicist may truly believe in the artists they promote, but their pay cheques also depend on the success of the artists who pay them, whereas Pitchfork’s reputation hinges on whether our insight and general taste aligns with our readers."

And there are readers. The role of the independent music press has greatly expanded in the last decade, especially online. With financially troubled major labels unwilling to spend large promotional budgets on music that might not sell and artists making decisions not to take the corporate dollar, sites like Pitchfork have become the new curators of independent music, receiving hundreds of thousands of visits daily. Pitchfork alone receives half a million.

The importance of Pitchfork as a source of exposure for independent artists is perhaps easy to overlook in the UK, where radio stations like BBC6 Music, BBC Radio 1 and even commercial stations like XFM have space for unsigned indie on their playlists. This is pretty much unheard of in America, as Schreiber explains: "British radio actually fosters independent music, which is still incredibly rare in the US. The biggest independent artists will receive airplay, but it’s a shockingly small percentage. It’s not that people are any less accepting of indie music at all: it’s constantly being licensed for commercials, which kind of says it all. The problem is the pay-for-play system of commercial radio. Pay-for-play is supposedly illegal, but it’s one of the main ways the majors retain their chokehold on the mainstream, and, of course, commercial radio is haemorrhaging listeners on a daily basis, so they’re more than happy to cash the cheques. Independent labels don’t have the kind of budget it takes to get their artists on the air. And if they did, most of them are morally opposed to how the operation is structured in the first place."

Disillusionment with this kind of backhanded corporate dealing in the music business, and a desire to recognise the emotional and cultural resonance of music as its most important feature, free from the need to be catchy or accessible, lends the work of Pitchfork an element of morality. While this isn’t necessarily best understood as any kind of struggle against the mainstream, it is the need to provide a trustworthy alternative, to the mainstream music press, an alternative based on quality before popularity.

"It’s staggering the number of music magazines that are focused on celebrity first," Schreiber objects. "In a lot of cases, artists need to become popular of their own accord before they’ll receive any coverage. I’ve always felt that one of the major roles of the music press should be to recognise the under-recognised. If someone contributes something positive to the musical landscape, to me they’ve earned the right to exposure."

This bottom-up approach to new music is one of the keynotes of indie rock culture. Yet it often means that many of the bands that are fêted on the indie circuit are little-known outside its boundaries. Some snarky online commentators sneer at this mentality, deriding Pitchfork as a website that tells cliquey hipsters what to listen to.

"I hear this a lot," admits Schreiber, "that some people have this impression that Pitchfork is telling them what they are or aren’t allowed to like. We see our role as just providing our own opinions, and while those opinions may be strongly held, they’re not intended as any kind of strict regiment. I also think the assumption that Pitchfork’s readers are in total lockstep agreement with everything we say is pretty wildly off-base. Even our writers disagree with each other a lot of the time. Diversity of taste and opinion fuels creativity: it’s essential to the advancement of music."

Schreiber’s belief in the advancement of music gets to the heart of what’s great about Pitchfork. It is a positive endeavour; providing a lucid and balanced view of the music it reviews, without descending into irreverence or the reactionary tactics many reviewers use to look like they’re making a point. Whilst Schreiber is the first to admit that "we take it all a bit seriously," it can only be a good thing that there’s a website that does. Popular, and especially independent, music has never been more eloquent, more challenging - more poetic - than it is currently. There has also never been more of it available. In the face of this breadth of music both online and offline, it’s necessary to turn to Pitchfork, where good, earnest critics help to guide a listener from the lacklustre and pretentious to the rare and worthwhile gold.