Indie-vidualism: A Push Towards Independence as Niche Counterculture Floats Mainstream

“You’re impossible to nail down, and no premade playlist can ever do right by your taste.

…

Except YouTube Music, that is, with mixed-for-you playlists based on your listening habits, however eclectic they might be,” spoke a new YouTube Music ad.

Welcome to the hyper-niche hegemony. Where Big Streaming knows you’re not like anyone else, just like everyone else. From music and film to fashion and the general way we carry ourselves, we are each completely unique in our own way. Right?

“We’re drowning in subculture, but there’s a huge death of counterculture,” says Liz Pelly, a music journalist, and professor at New York University.

Indie culture, which once centered around small communities, house shows, and passed-around tapes or zines, now leans towards the individualistic. Indie-pendent has become Indie-vidual. With companies accentuating the growing desire to separate oneself from others, hyper-niche genres of music bleed into all forms of life. And the less other people know about it, the better.

Oh, you like Sufjan Stevens? I used to, but he’s a little too mainstream for me; I only listen to artists with less than 10k monthly streams. Didn’t you hear balaclavas are in this season? I got mine handmade on Etsy. If the early aughts were popular culture’s high school years, set on fitting into the beige color palleted decor and uniform puka shell necklace Abercrombie outfit, culture is finally exploring its collegiate life. Now seeking to stand out and push away from the mainstream, the hordes of adoring counterculture fans, with a little help from mega-corporations, have turned the Status Quo alternative.

In his 1993 article “Alternative to What,” Thomas Frank took note of the commodification of the “alternative” aesthetic in the ’90s, posing the question: if alternative music is mainstream, what is it an alternative to? This phenomenon and counterculture, along with it, is once again making a comeback with the masses. With indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo topping charts and playing at sold-out amphitheaters, the lines between independence and mainstream have become blurred. With everyone seeking individuality, Indie culture has become its own mega-popular not-so-niche niche. And companies like Spotify love it. “Bubble grunge” was my top genre of last year. Do you know what that is? Because I sure don’t.

Pelly finds a key distinction in the counter/sub-culture debate. Historically Counter has been “cultural movements that are antagonistic to power, questioning the status quo or have some sort of political aim to provide an alternative in a politicized or anti-capitalist way,” said Pelly. With subculture on the other hand, “it’s like the niches within broader culture that are maybe obscure, small, and weird. But I don’t always think of scenes that are subcultural as necessarily having a goal to hold power accountable or challenge the status quo even if they inherently sometimes do.”

But with the rise of a culture that centers itself solely around the desire to be different, the element of community begins to fade.“The community element of music or underground music or independent music is basically everything that makes it meaningful,” Pelly notes. From shared Wu-Tang mixtapes to graffiti as political protest, New York has historically exemplified the intersection of counter-culture and community. However, Pelly, like many others, has felt its loss over the last decade. “The extent to which it has become so utterly impossible to sustain underground music spaces has really affected the feeling of a cohesive underground,” she says. She points to gentrification as a potent threat to underground scenes, “even as recently as five, 10, 15, 20 years ago, it felt like there were more spaces where different scenes overlapped, true community spaces where scenes could flourish.”

The loss of these community elements is only compounded by “the current paradigm of platform capitalism, and the creator economy, and streaming [which] atomizes artist into these hyper individualist ways of being in the world, whereas what has made underground and independent music historically has always been people working together” says Pelly.

Pelly details the commodification element Thomas Frank describes in the ’90s. “You had labels and genres and scenes that were very much rooted in actual counter-culture, people in their communities working together to create alternatives in an anti-capitalist way. And then major labels saw the success of a lot of bands that came out of these communities and wanted to figure out how to take these real countercultural communities and turn them into a market demographic to sell music,” she says. Marketers are just giving us what we ask for, “corporations and different social media platforms today have really pinpointed this reality that people really do want to be individuals and want to have their uniqueness reflected back at them” says Pelly.

There is a clear pattern emerging within our current system of music pushing our interests into the niche, but could it be a sign of a deeper cultural trend? John Jost, a professor of psychology at NYU, notes the trends of a psychological herd mentality in culture. He says, “anything that becomes culturally and commercially successful eventually becomes a part of mainstream society and, in a psychological sense, part of the status quo.” He references Punk music in the 1970s and Indie throughout the ’90s and 2000s and says that the next phase occurs because “young people get bored and want to try something new, and they, almost invariably, react against whatever they perceive as the status quo, which serves as a kind of reference point.” There is a continual and cyclical ebb and flow from the way we define cool in and out of the mainstream.

While some take issue with the move of underground culture into the mainstream, Indie Label Fire Talk owner Trever Peterson only sees value for his business. “If a particular sound enters a wider consciousness and there’s more people that are there to consume that type of music, then that can only benefit a label like mine,” he says. Even further, Trevor says he doesn’t notice much of a hyper niche-ification as “Indie Rock is a hyper niche in it of itself anyway, so there’s always been an urge to set yourself apart within it. I’m not seeing anything different now than 20 years ago”

The push into a digital landscape offers new hopes and obstacles for displaced underground scenes. “There are interesting ways in which the internet and digital tools facilitate community building in music,” says Pelly. The accessibility at home recording techniques have made it possible for any fan to get more involved in the music making process and sites like bandcamp shorten the gap between artists and consumers. However, Pelly also says, “we are currently in a really centralized corporate version of the internet that makes it really hard for things like music blogs and forums, ways of communicating that aren’t underneath the gaze of surveillance capitalism trying to pin us in these market demographic niches.”

But to all you burgeoning scenesters, don’t give up quite yet, Pelly outlines a possible way forward in the shift “away from the idea of independent culture and towards interdependent culture because so much of independent scenes and culture has always been about people working together.”

Learning to harness the internet is a challenge, sure, but she finds that it comes with “the opportunity to try something new… responding to limitations is a huge part of not just like being a good artist but also being part of a counter-cultural community.”

While many are unsure of what comes next, Jost wagers that an inevitable “something new will come, and then eventually that will become the new status quo that people in a future generation will one day react against. Rinse and repeat.”