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As others pointed out before: Indie music really is a different beast from the current scene of "indie publishing" as far as print publishing goes.
Indie music labels are more like small publishers (e.g. Baen) - they cater to a niche market, but the pay their artists money for the right to distribute their music. Indie labels make money from the consumer who buys their CDs, so they try to bring out as good a product as possible.
"Indie publishing", however, is a term that has been adopted by the vanity presses to seem more respectable. Vanity presses, however, don't care about sales: They make their money from the writer who has to pay for all the costs involved plus a fee for the management on top. So they don't care about the quality of work, they care about quantity. It doesn't matter if the books don't sell, the writer already paid for everything. In that respect, they're not a publishing house, they're an expensive alternative to a xerox shop; just in the same way a studio that records and copies whatever you croak into their microphones as long as you pay for it, cannot be considered a record label.
And just like a sound engineer wouldn't refuse anyone's money because the can't sing, a vanity press will not turn you away because you can't write. The result: Lots of crappy books.
Maybe ebooks will change that, maybe they won't: Producing an ebook is much cheaper than a pbook, so it might open the floodgates of crap even wider, making it hard for a good writer to be noticed without the marketing muscle of a publisher.
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