Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I was reading a discussion on another board about music, and basically the question was 'how do you find great new music?' And a lot of the replies were 'I listen to indie music' or 'I listen to radio stations/podcasts/twitter feeds that play up and coming indie music.' It seems indie music is a well-respected way to discover new artists and uncover great hidden gems.
Contrast that to the attitude about indie publishing, which most people seem to think is amateurish, poorly edited and full of authors who only publish independently because they are not good enough to get a 'proper' contract with a 'real' publisher. Why do people not believe this about indie musicians? Surely there is just as much bad amateur music on the internet as there are bad amateur authors. Surely those who slog through the equally vast internet slush piles of amateur music and amateur authors will find just as many hidden gems. And yet, indie music has 'cred' and indie publishing does not. I wonder what's going on with that?
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To offer a slightly more cynical point of view, especially as a big music listener... I'd say it's because the general public will listen to whatever crappy garbage music their friends tell them to because they don't have the wherewithall to generate their own opinion on something as sophisticated as music anyway. All they hear is the growl of bad guitars and the thumping of overdriven bass guitars and pawn-shop bass drums.
The people I know who are truly into music, the indie scene is as rife with disgusting specimen as the indie writing scene.
That said, some of my favorite music was independent at some point. It's obviously not all bad. And the same goes for reading. But, and this is paramount, the audiences are entirely inverted from one another. In the general audience of readers there is a higher expectation of structure and skill. In music, there is just the opposite, a whole subculture dedicated to caring nothing about the skill of the artists and focusing on the simplistic emotional response to what said artists are screaming and the basic beats they produce.
The one thing indie music has that indie writing doesn't have so much is a large network of people helping each other separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I firmly believe this will come about for writing, around the same time people get off their past-attachment and forget about archaic concepts such as "book" and "novel" and focus on "story."