Indie Music

[DoktaLuv]

I'm really into indie music (Broken Social Scene, Mogwai, etc.) and was curious as to whether anyone knew of a place to obtain some excellent indie bands? I'm working on an indietorrents.com invite, but they're a bit too *cough* elitist *cough* for my tastes, what with the flagrancy of their invite message. At any rate, any other sites would be cool! :D

[sparsely]

www.musicmule.com

[DoktaLuv]

danke, Sparsley! Excellent place for posting about the indie scene -- much appreciated!

[callum]

If you use newsgroups, alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.indie is good

[oloz]

Soulseek is very good if you know the right rooms to go into.

[Vargas]

http://www.iuma.com/
http://www.archive.org/audio/collection.php?collection=netlabels

[trajillo]

Interpol

[DoktaLuv]

Holy crap it's a vertiable group of indie goodness! I see you're a man who loves his taffy trajillo...heh heh

[sparsely]

you don't need no indietorrent :P
just hang out at musicmule & such places, or if you ever see me on emule, I have loads :P

[DoktaLuv]

I'm finding that out, I just got a truckload of indie rock off soulseek the other day. Found a really nice guy who's expanding my knowledge in indie bands, unlike all the other pretentious jerks who frequent that room. Hope to see ya on emule!

[pusher]

ccmixter.org

but you may have to dig through a lot of crap to find a treasure.

[Vargas]

Indy is a music discovery program that learns what you like, and plays more of it. And it's free.

Indy makes it easy for you to find great new independent music. Just download Indy and double-click: as it plays songs, you rate what you hear. Indy quickly learns what you like and gets really smart about sending you more music you'll like. Let Indy help you find your place in the collective conciousness as you help other people find theirs.

Why Indy Rocks
You aren't just a target market - Indy can help you find your own path to the music you like. There are tons of great bands out there that don't have big labels promoting them; Indy helps you find them. And once Indy downloads a track, you can add it to your music collection, listen to it whenever and wherever you want. For musicians, Indy gives you a chance to reach a whole new audience that's excited about what you're playing. Best of all, it's free for everyone!

How Indy Works
Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you'll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don't like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same song, Indy guesses that you'd probably like other music that they enjoyed. As you rate more songs, Indy will gets better and better at picking songs that you'll really enjoy.

Indy contains no adware or spyware.

http://indy.tv/

[sparsely]

that reminds me,Vargas, of that groovy musicplasma (http://www.musicplasma.com/) search.

not strictly for Indie music, but it's quite helpful to diversify your musical taste.
just plug the name of a band you kinda like into the search field, and you'll get connected membranes of similar music, which you can explore until you're completely lost :P

[turtlehead]

www.pitchforkmedia.com
just found the site recently good info on new albums

[turtlehead]

p2pnet sounds really cool

[wholesome]

you can read about a bunch of indie bands (and electronic music as well) on this site:

http://www.welovemusique.com

[Djtima]

try Spoon... there a good indie band also as trajillo said Interpol...

[Gluehead]

Don't trust Pitchfork Media for reviews. They're a bunch of pretentious pricks. But it's good for news.

[micolithe]

See, the thing about people who listen to indie music, they're generally elitist bastards and think their musical taste is above everyone else's. This includes me, I won't deny it. But seriously, it gets to a point where when someone says that there's no good music coming out anymore and then they say that their favorite band is My Chemical Romance, it makes you want to strangle someone.

BUT I DIGRESS. Anyway, you can find out about a good amount of indie music on Pitchfork Media, or alternately you can go to the VG Cats forum and ask for me and this guy named Echoes to help you out in discovering some bands.

[3RA1N1AC]

the music reviews on stylusmagazine.com cover some of the same ground as pitchfork, but i think they generally have more interesting things to say about music than pitchfork does. either way, indie review sites can pretty wordy and don't always offer a lot of simple comparisons ("this band sounds like [band] mixed with [another band]"), and then when they do offer simple comparisons they're simple comparisons to bands that a newbie would never have heard of anyway. the writing on a site like pitchfork tends to be dense and often unnecessarily beatnik-ish, too.

OH WELL. at least it's easy to find out about indie music nowadays. BACK IN THE DAY, there was no worldwideweb (or it was just being born and there was barely any info on it) and you had to listen to college radio at 2am in the morning, read through huge piles of fanzines & catalogues, and order everything in the mail because they didn't carry slanted & enchanted, spiderland, fuck pussy galore, or there's nothing wrong with love at the mall. it used to take a lot of effort, just to be an indie fan. :P

i guess trouserpress.com is a good resource for a newbie, but i reckon it'd get exhausting just clicking randomly through their pages looking for interesting things. prolly better just to buy the paper version of "the trouser press guide to 90s rock" and thumb through it once in a while, which would lead you to a lot of the stuff that's directly influenced what's going on currently in indie music.

[nostalgia]

try Spoon... there a good indie band also as trajillo said Interpol...

Interpol listened very closely to The Chameleons, so if Interpol is mentioned The Chameleons myst cerainly be mentioned!!!

[needatire]

so doktaluv,
you say you found a ton of new good indie stuff recently. what bands? i am also a big fan of mogwai, broken social scene so i'd be interested to know what you've found that you like.

[SpecialAgentPunk]

what's that site where you can find similar artists and top songs of a band?

it was like... audiocity, audio..something.

[micolithe]

liveplasma.com even though it's not that accurate.
or maybe you were thinking of audioscrobbler.com

[SpecialAgentPunk]

yep, audioscrobbler. Thanks, all my bookmarks were lost.

[mooSa]

hey www.indietorrents.com is a great indie site :), its invite only, so if you want an invite go on mIRC, they will have their irc address on the site

[3RA1N1AC]

www.epitonic.com , man.

[muchspl3]

anyone like block party or the decemberists or Kaiser Chiefs

thats about as indie as I get if that even is indie (not sure)

[3RA1N1AC]

anyone like block party or the decemberists or Kaiser Chiefs

thats about as indie as I get if that even is indie (not sure)
i really tried to give Bloc Party a chance but it just struck me as very, very average. i'd recommend Gang Of Four's old "Songs Of The Free" album instead, or even Hot Hot Heat's "Make Up The Breakdown"... similar style, that whole funky new-wave sound, but stronger songwriting than Bloc Party imho.

for something maybe a little more adventurous, try The Au Pairs' "Playing With A Different Sex" or something by James Chance & The Contortions. oh and this band too... !!!... their self-titled album (the one with "there's no fukking rules, dude") is wicked sweet: http://www.epitonic.com/artists/chikchikchik.html




personally i'm really into Of Montreal's latest two albums right now. "Satanic Panic" and "The Sunlandic Twins." i liked their earlier stuff which was a lot like the Beatles circa Sgt Peppers, but they mix things up a bit on the newer albums (synthpop, glam, some Queen-like falsettos).

[micolithe]

The Decemberists are awesome, no question about that. I haven't heard anything by Bloc Party or Kaiser Chiefs.

[ogie1konobi]

you can go to the cellar a torrent website that gives a lot of back info to the group which is great cause then they might mention a another simliar band also i just found out about http://www.epitonic.com/, plus pitchfork gives a lot of good bands unheard to many people and what i sometimes do is go to amazon.com and see if they have sound bites for the band im curious about.