If you listen to music and enjoy the activity, you most likely have at least a few songs in your playlist that qualifies as indie music. Whether it is a popular band or something with underneath 10,000 streams, indie music is everywhere. If you don’t listen to indie music then it should be something you consider because I can promise you that there are multiple indie bands and artists fit for your music taste, since indie music can spread across all genres. 

Indie music isn’t exactly its own genre. The word ‘indie’ is a shortened version of the word ‘independent’, and the definition of indie music would be music produced by the artist instead of a big company producing for them. So even big artists that everyone has heard of can be considered indie. For example, someone as big as Taylor Swift is considered an indie artist since, recently, she’s been producing her stuff. But not all indie can be linked to a separate genre as easily as Taylor, since the artists have full control over how the music sounds. For example, artists such as Jack Stauber, Lemon Demon, Alex G, and more can’t be linked to a certain genre other than indie, due to how unique they’re music is.

A fun fact about music is that no matter how popular an artist is a today, they all started out as indie artists. When an artist uploads their music on the internet or performs in popular places, sometimes a big producing company will recognize their work and ask to work with them. This is how most artists blow up but some choose to stay as indie artists or don’t get recognized by these companies, which is totally fine. Just because an artist wasn’t recognized or didn’t fit a big company’s criteria does not make them any less of an artist, and doesn’t make their music any less valuable.

If you’re interested in listening to more indie artists and use Spotify, I recommend you to open your Discover Weekly playlist once in a while since those songs might be from an indie artist and fit your music taste. If you use another app to stream your music, here are some artists I recommend.