What Even Is ‘Indie’ Music Anymore?

The Pixies pioneered the 1990s alternative rock scene. Photo: Wikipedia

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed the term ‘indie’ being applied to a lot of subgenres of music. Just one search on Spotify or Apple Music for the term ‘indie’ and you’ll be met with results such as, Alex G or Florence and the Machine, both signed to RCA Records (a subsidiary of Sony) and Universal respectively.

So this got me thinking - what does ‘indie’ music actually mean anymore?

‘Indie’ or ‘independent’ refers to the artist releasing the music themselves, or in collaboration with a smaller label with a much tighter budget, compared to the financial black holes that are the big labels.

Indie has also become more of an umbrella term, with lots of historically ‘indie’ bands being referred to as ‘alternative rock’ too. It had a similar trajectory to the term ‘alternative’ in the context of rock and pop music. When you call something ‘alternative’, it has to be ‘alternative’ to something. Back in the 80s and late 90s, when the popular rock was classic rock and hair metal, the term ‘alternative’ was used to differentiate between music that wasn’t easily characterized as solely punk, but was pulled from other influences too. Bands such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Replacements, and maybe most famously the Pixies all fell under this category.

Even though there’s a lot more nuance and diversity that the term fails to capture, it made it easier for publications and fans to talk about the movements more generally. Alternative became a term that was tied to the aesthetic and culture rather than the actual music. The same can be said for Indie. Many of the bands mentioned were also considered ‘indie bands’ due to its original meaning of being independent. 

In the early 2000s an online subculture of music began to pop up that was attracted to certain genres and sounds coming from some indie labels, particularly the garage punk revival pioneered by The Strokes, Interpol, and The White Stripes… three non-indie bands. Indie now represented a band’s sound. Ironically, bands labelled as ‘indie’ centred on the increasingly popular “hipsterdom” and "hipster culture”, movements which have ultimately changed the meaning of indie rock and indie music that we know of today.