Asthmatic Kitty to Price Records Based on Pitchfork Scores

Asthmatic Kitty, the indie label home to Sufjan Stevens, Half-handed Cloud, and the Curtains, announced today that it would begin pricing records based on the scores given to them by critics at the music Web site Pitchfork. Ropechain, an album by the band Grampall Jookabox, for example, received a 5.4 (out of a possible 10) from Pitchfork, so for the next 54 hours, says the Asthmatic Kitty Web site, it will be available for $5.40 plus shipping and handling.

The idea, says Asthmatic Kitty Assistant Director Michael Kaufmann, belongs to John Beeler, who manages the label’s Web site. “[W]e anticipated a negative review of the album,” writes Beeler via instant message. “We figured it’d score in somewhere between 5-7.”

“And it dawned on me,” he writes, “that that is also a great sale price point.”

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