Indie Music Moving to Mainstream

The movement of indie music to mainstream music has been happening for quite some time. Back in the mid 2000s, underground bands not previously known to mainstream music listeners suddenly found themselves being discovered---for better or worse. The rise of the Internet made it easy to find out about new bands, whether or not they were being played on FM radio stations. TV shows, movies, and businesses started to take notice, and soon some indie bands saw record sales and downloads of their music.

Joan Hiller, who was once a publicist at Sub Pop Records, put it this way: “It was definitely weird a few years ago when it no longer became strange to see your friends on television, or to be in Nordstrom looking for underpants and hearing your friends’ bands getting played.”

But moving from indie to mainstream can present problems for some artists dedicated to the indie ideal. Whereas mainstream music is often criticized for producing music for money, indie music prides itself for creating music that values artistic interest over commercial viability. In other words, these musicians aren’t in it for the money.

One aspect of indie music that’s not often pursued by mainstream labels like Sony is the release of music on LPs. Only a few labels still produce LPs for their artists.  One of these is Brooklyn’s Kemado Records, co-founded by Andres Santo Domingo.*

“I think that vinyl in a way represents slow,” he says of LPs. “And I think that’s something that’s attractive about it maybe on a subliminal level for consumers that are maybe on the internet, to get something that’s really physical, maybe archaic in a way, but the complete antithesis of what the speed of consuming music on the Internet is.”

And it’s not just consumers that like LPs; it’s the musicians, too. “I always have said… that I’ll never really feel like a real band until I can hold a record in my hands and look at it,” saidJenn Wasner of Wye Oak, who recently released their third album digitally, onCD, and as a vinyl LP.

For indie musicians finding themselves in the spotlight, there are both positive and negative aspects. While they may suddenly have more than enough money to get by, there’s also more pressure than ever to focus on their creative expression rather than what FM listeners might want to hear. But these artists are also seasoned from their time underground, which likely means they already know where they want to go with their music—and it has nothing to do with how many people listen to it.

*We have written about vinyl records and Andres Santo Domingo before.