Indie as a Music Publishing Model

‘Indie’ was originally simply the shortened form of ‘independent’ and was used to describe bands who were independent of any major record label. These were bands who were signed to small start-up labels or who for one reason or another chose to publish their own music without using a label at all.

It is thought that the first example of a band publishing their own record was the 1977 Spiral Scratch EP by Buzzcocks

Whilst they are often described as a punk band, Buzzcocks certainly possessed an indie ethos (see below) and they were at the vanguard of the trend to find a way to get your records into the hands of the kids by circumventing the major labels. Spiral Scratch gives us a useful chronological backstop - for a band to be considered ‘indie’ they need to have emerged no earlier than the late 70s or early 80s.

Why did bands want to self-publish? There were several reasons - not least among these was the fact that getting signed to a major is by no means easy.

The second important reason was artistic control - when you were signed to a corporate it was because you were expected to make some money for the label. This profit imperative gave the labels a mandate (in those days at least) to interfere in the artistic process and push output towards the commercial end of the market. A highly polished, radio friendly product is definitely not ‘indie’.  

In the 1980’s small labels sprang-up across the country to release vinyl on behalf of a wave of post-punk bands. These were DIY outfits - they would print their own record sleeves and centre-labels and would assemble the finished product by hand before loading a box of the records into the boots of cars and driving them to sympathetic record shops such as Rough Trade in London (Rough Trade also had it’s own indie record label).

In the 1990s indie music made the transition from ‘alternative’ to mainstream. In the UK this change was, in part, a backlash against the massive success of American grunge acts in the early 90s - chief among these being Nirvana. The UK media (with the help of some of the major labels) created ‘Britpop’ -primarily as a marketing device. Nirvana had shown the majors that people were willing to buy ‘alternative’ music by the truckload and the majors wanted a piece of that action.

It is here, in the early 1990s that the idea of indie as a publishing model comes to grief. The major labels were signing alternative bands left-right-and-centre or, failing that, the majors just cut out the middleman and bought the independent labels wholesale - see, for example, the sale of Oasis’ label - Creation Records - to Sony. Inevitably, it wasn’t long before ‘indie’ ceased to mean ‘independent from a major’.

But who cares?

When The Strokes released ‘Is This It?’ they were signed to a big label (Sony’s RCA) but this doesn’t stop them being indie - The Strokes are as indie as they come.