Majors vs. Indies vs. DIY Last month the president of a well-respected indie label sent me a fearful IM. To paraphrase: “After Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arctic Monkeys, and Tapes ’n Tapes, a band can’t be cool unless they put out their own music.” He wondered where his 15-year-old indie label fits in this new equation. Ex-Pitchfork writer Chris Ott pursues this line of thought to its logical conclusion in a post to his Shallow Rewards blog: “Indie rock’s lost its mystique . . . I can see a future where . . . [b]ands on labels will be viewed as lazy, or greedy, or too stupid to do it themselves, regardless of what their music sounds like, and the DIY bands will be these little autonomous cults of cool . . .” Ott ignores the fact that blogs and indie rock are still invisible compared to television and other mass media, and that none of these bands have proven they’re more than flavors of the month. Still, he makes some great points.
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