Nobody puts indie in a corner

“We’re beginning to see the outlines emerge of what a post-algorithmic indie music ecosystem could look like.”

A parallel music universe

If you were a young indie head in the 1980s or ’90s, you knew how to get your music fix. Instead of listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, you would tune in to Snap! on KCRW in Santa Monica. Rather than picking out 12 tapes for 1¢ from Columbia House, you’d sign up to have the K Records cassette fanzine snail-mailed to you from Calvin Johnson’s kitchen in Olympia. Or if you were Down Under, you’d subscribe to the Fast Forward “tapezine” from two DJs at Melbourne’s 3RRR radio station.

In London, you could read indie album reviews in GirlFrenzy at an underground comic book store, instead of lusting over the latest boy band in Smash Hits magazine. (Or maybe both, no judgment.) From New Jersey you’d ride the bus to Manhattan to shop at Other Music in the East Village, since you wouldn’t be caught dead at the Sam Goody chain store in the Paramus mall.

In Berlin, you’d see the newest bands at SO36 in Kreuzberg. In Amsterdam you’d go to Paradiso. If you lived in L.A. you’d hit up Spaceland in Silverlake. In New York you’d try to get into CBGB rather than queueing up for Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. And you wouldn’t do it alone—you’d do all these things together with your friends, each of you spending a sizable chunk of your paycheck from low-wage service jobs to do it.

“Starting in the 1970s with tiny U.K. punk labels, this ecosystem was hand-built by music industry outsiders.”

What “indie” sounds like

Before becoming another node in the Spotify music taxonomy, “indie” was more than a genre tag. It was a decentralized global network of bands, their fans, and not-so-big businesses sharing a collective mission: to discover and support musicians working outside of the major label system (and to look really cool doing it).

Starting in the 1970s with tiny U.K. punk labels, this ecosystem was hand-built by music industry outsiders who craved hearing bands that the charts-driven majors wouldn’t take chances on. Over decades it evolved into a mature industry, eventually becoming the launching pad for whole-genre mainstream breakouts like New York hip-hop in the late ’80s and Seattle grunge in the ’90s.

Significantly, all the elements in the ecosystem—indie labels, indie radio stations, indie publications, indie promoters, indie distributors, indie record stores—operated parallel to, but mostly separate from, the economic engines of the mainstream music business.

Some of the distribution and revenue channels were totally different. College radio stations didn’t run ads, they ran week-long pledge drives to augment their tiny university budgets. Indie album reviews appeared in photocopied zines that would mysteriously show up on a local book shop shelf. Young rappers dropped off stacks of homemade CDs for sale at their nearest indie record store. Sweat equity was the only form of venture capital available.

In those days, “indie” was a vague and confusing label for a music genre, because it didn’t describe a specific sound. It described a genre-spanning cultural industry that was literally independent from Big Music. Indie was a homegrown parallel music universe.

Then came the algorithm.

“College radio listenership plunged.... Thousands of indie record shops vanished.”

We were promised jetpacks

If not jetpacks, we were at least promised a delicious, ad-free feast of only songs that we were sure to love. What we got was a giant all-you-can-eat cruise ship buffet filled with stolen mp3s. Of course, the major labels fixed everything by taking Spotify to court—it was only the indie bands and small record labels that couldn’t afford lawyers.

Suddenly beholden to a business model that they didn’t design and never asked for, much of the indie music ecosystem got washed out by streaming. The parts that remained standing were left to cope on their own, their support network now fractured. College radio listenership plunged, along with pledge revenues. Thousands of indie record shops vanished. Respected indie music journalists got displaced by automated discovery playlists. The superstars of the ecosystem, indie musicians, could no longer earn money from their music by selling CDs, while the too-clever “pro-rata” royalties model decided that indie songs were worth about $0.003 per stream.

Some 20+ years later, the streaming tide has begun to ebb, and the edges of the new music landscape that it wrought are now firmly in view. The streaming market’s developed regions are nearly saturated, but streaming still makes way less money than physical music did 25 years ago. Streaming fatigue is real, especially among Gen Z and younger audiences. And it’s become quite clear that, despite vastly expanding the potential listening audience for emerging indie bands, the financial fundamentals of the streaming-buffet business model simply make it incapable of nurturing a truly independent music sector. At least not one that’s as culturally vital as it once was.

But you know what? Fuck that. Nobody puts indie in a corner. Music outsiders are already creating a new independent infrastructure to break out of the boundaries set by the streaming-industrial complex. And this time, we’ve got computers.

“If you ask, they’ll tell you: ‘We need our own thing.’”

Cue the indie ark

This is no ship of nostalgic fools hoping to return to “better days.” Indie never looks back. And to be clear, many of the pillars of the original indie economy weathered the storm and they’re still standing tall, having adapted to the new reality. But if you ask, they’ll tell you: “We need our own thing.”

Fortunately, folks are already stepping up to build it. The new crew is scrappy, determined, and laser-focused on solving the problems of new generations of streaming-native indie fans. It’s early days, but we’re beginning to see the outlines emerge of what a post-algorithmic indie music world could look like.

Community-owned collectives

After streaming washed away the CD market, Bandcamp was manna. It gave indie artists a way to sell music directly to their fans again; i.e. actually earn income. But then the company got sold to a big music licensing firm who immediately laid off half the staff. Bandcamp is still around, for now, but bands who built their livelihood on that platform are justifiably nervous.

So how do you build a future-proof indie digital distribution platform that can’t be sold off to a corporate investor and gutted? If you’re Austin Robey, you invite the entire indie music community to form a collectively owned business cooperative. After years of work to establish a solid legal footing, build an app, and recruit artists, subvert.fm went live in May 2026 with more than 150,000 tracks already in the catalog. Many more bands will join, because it’s free for musicians and labels to become member-owners, which means they also get a vote in how the platform develops. Subvert’s goal for their first year of operations? Just to become the largest artist co-op in world history, with 100,000 members.

There’s still a lot of work ahead to expand Subvert’s features, but it looks like we now have a dependable long-term solution for selling digital downloads, and it’s permanently owned by the community that it serves, not by corporate investor overlords.

Anti-algorithmic music curation

One of the good news/bad news paradoxes of the streaming revolution is that whilst it removed barriers to music distribution for new bands, that also meant flooding the marketplace with new bands. (And that was before Suno. Let’s not talk about Suno.) Taste curators like college radio DJs and indie music journalists were a critical linchpin of the old indie discovery model, and they were among the hardest hit by the streaming takeover.

Trying to fill that role, Cantilever aims to help indie fans sort through the constant cacophony of the new music landscape by giving us a digital version of old-school-style music curation. Similar to the “rotation” concept at indie radio stations, only a limited selection of albums are available on Cantilever, and their tenure is limited to one month. And like the old Pitchfork, they each get a detailed review, thoughtfully written by a serious music journalist. Most importantly, Cantilever is squarely focused on indie music, and only features full albums. They just raised a pre-seed investment round (see global resource pooling below), so let’s see what they do with it.

Street-legal bootleg tapes

It’s not all about software, folks (but mostly it is). UK startup Setmixer invented a machine for making automatic, high-fidelity recordings of concerts straight from a live club’s sound board, so bands could sell their shows to superfans as digital downloads. The great thing about this idea is that it represents a net add to the indie ecosystem. It provides musicians with a brand new income stream from an activity they were doing anyway: playing gigs. Setmixer basically just gave indie musicians a raise.

Founder Pascal de Mul and his team also knew that they needed to deliver recordings that actually sounded good, so they built some very smart software into their hardware to optimize audio from a live sound board and automagically mix it down, master it, and post it online—overnight. As with any live gig, you need a good sound engineer to place your microphones and set the levels properly, but the results are impressive. Go listen to some recordings for free on their streaming page, they sound great.

Promotion without payola

As evidenced by the blowup around Geese hiring a social marketing agency to engineer “organic” virality, the indie community has always had a complicated relationship with promotions and marketing. We’d love to believe that our precious ecosystem is a benevolent meritocracy free from the scourge of manufactured hype. But deep down we know that’s a bit unrealistic.

That being said, Repost Exchange is making a pretty good run at it. Unlike the raft of pay-for-playlisting services that sprang up in the wake of the streaming coup, the currency on Repost Exchange is purely participation. The more you share and comment on other musician’s tracks, the more credits you earn to use amplifying your own songs. No fake TikTok accounts, no bot-stream farms, just musicians sharing music. On the merits of this model—and no doubt the half a million bands already using the service—Soundcloud recently made Repost Exchange an official platform partner, which will allow them to integrate more deeply.

Payout models that don’t suck

Speaking of Soundcloud, they were the first streaming platform to give the finger to the pro-rata payouts model and shift to what they call “fan-powered royalties.” That means if Susie the Soundcloud subscriber only ever listens to your band, you get every dollar of royalties coming out of Susie’s subscription fee. There’s something weirdly logical about that, right Spotify?

That shift rolled out back in 2021, but Soundcloud is still actively evolving their product and business model, in a way that suggests maybe they actually get what indie artists need. Their latest moves include commission-free distribution to other streaming services, buttons for listeners to pay tips to artists, direct-to-fan merch stores, and even on-demand vinyl pressing. (Bandcamp tried selling vinyl too, and gave up, so we’ll see.)

Global resource pooling

The Organization for Recorded Culture and Arts (ORCA) isn’t a startup, but they recently helped fund one. ORCA is an international think tank for indie labels like Sub Pop, Beggars, Domino, Secretly, and more labels from Paris, Madrid, Nashville, L.A., Berlin... well, you get the idea.

In addition to collectively sponsoring detailed research on how to build a stronger indie music ecosystem, several of ORCA’s member companies recently pooled a quarter-million bucks to lead a pre-seed funding round for Cantilever. So I guess indie labels are angel investors now? Oh wait... they always were.

Are we there yet?

There’s no single unicorn startup or magic wand to build a new indie infrastructure overnight. As before, it’ll take a wide range of products and industries, some new and some renewed, to create a different kind of indie music ecosystem that will thrive in the context of major-label streaming dominance.

Organizations like ORCA, subvert.fm, and Repost Exchange signal a new era of global collaboration in the indie music sphere that wasn’t possible in the old scheme. It used to be that ideas like cassette fanzines could only spread slowly and organically from city to city. Now we have fancy electronic mail and video telephones. (Still working on those jetpacks.)

Nonetheless, as before, a new indie system with a shot at real longevity will have to be architected parallel to—not inside—the mainstream music matrix, in order to realize cultural and economic sustainability. That will take some time.

Skipless is developing a new product for indie music that will be announced soon. If you sign up for our mailing list, you’ll be the first to hear about it.