Indie music is a general name for various musical genres that are positioned as independent of popular commercial music and mainstream trends, and also promote the so-called DIY ideology.
Initially, indie music was understood to mean any musical compositions that were not released by major record companies. At the same time, most independent bands and performers opposing the mainstream at that time played various types of post-punk (gothic rock, dark folk, neo-psychedelia, etc.) or alternative rock music (noise rock, shoegazing, etc.), which influenced the emerging image and content of indie music.
The origins of indie culture
In the broadest sense, indie is any independent music of various genres, including indie rock, indie pop, indie electronica, indie folk, and independent music labels.
Indie rock, which emerged in the 1980s, was a genre of alternative rock music that existed on the underground scene. During this period, the concept of indie rock was used as a synonym for alternative rock music in terms of content, but it allowed distinguishing musicians by geographical criteria: it was assumed that in the first case we are talking about performers from the UK, in the second – from the USA. However, in the 1990s, when American pop-punk and grunge musicians, as well as English Brit-pop musicians, became incredibly popular and entered the mainstream, the concept of indie rock began to denote representatives of the underground alternative rock music scene. In the 2000s, the development of the music industry and Internet technologies led to the fact that indie rock became a commercially successful trend, so the meaning of the term was rethought again.
Indie rock as a musical genre implies freedom for various creative experiments with emotional background, sound, and lyrical component, carried out in accordance with the vision of the performer, not the mass audience.
Today, indie rock includes many genres and performers associated with alternative culture and having some relation to rock. In addition to rock itself, indie music genres include indie pop, noise pop, dream pop, Brit pop, etc. All these styles are united by the fact that they were formed on the basis of indie rock.
As a rule, indie rock is soft and melodic music with a slight retro touch, without aggressive sound and sound effects such as distortion. Among the representatives of this musical genre are The Shins, Snow Patrol, and Coldplay. Thus, although indie music is derived from post-punk, it has a light and positive sound.