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"How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock"
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IanB
IanB
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Re: "How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock"
Nov 18, 2013, 09:57
Citizensmurf wrote:
IanB wrote:
some of you may have already seen this but thought it worth a post ....

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicahopper/how-selling-out-saved-indie-rock

I guess the other question is whether 37 years later saving "it" is actually worth the bother. The dividing line for me is probably where indie ceased to be primarily an economic model and became a style to sell stuff with.


What would the difference between an economic model and a style to sell stuff be?


I have no particular axe to grind on this issue but I just thought the premise was interesting.

In the purest sense I saw Indie as a largely DIY methodology of reaching the market place as unmediated by the mainstream industry as possible. Of course most of what got through was mediated by the three inkies so it stopped short of being truly outside the system of gate keepers. When I was booking bands at a fairly well known 400 cap black box venue in the early / mid 80s I saw a sudden shift between what was at first an astonishing variety of artists that were being pitched for shows into a broad homogeneity in terms of what was on offer and what agents were picking up for representation. Indie from 84-ish became a shadow mainstream with its own fairly hard wired style book and run for the most part in exactly the same way as the majors but on a smaller scale. There were shifts in musical fashion from season to season and competing factions but it felt as if the church got a lot narrower post the commercial breakthrough of The Smiths / James / JAMC etc etc. From then on the music press was torn between the majors that bought most of the advertising and the indies who supplied most of the subject matter. I didn't see much business innovation in the vein of say Dischord. More's the pity.
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