Indie Music Universe

By Kristin Anderson

Hey my festival junkies. Although I am a seasoned professional when it comes to festivals (15 years and going strong), my mom still insists on reminding me how to get back home safe and in one peice. So in an effort to put all moms at ease, I have compiled Mama Maria's list of helpful hints for your festival security.

Thanks mom! ( see I was listening…)

Crowd surfing: What's better than a bunch of strangers holding you up for your favorite band to see. Ladies especially — but guys have junk too — please rememeber that crowd surfing is permission for a lot of strange hands to roam your body in the name of assisting you. This can backfire. In a party environment, people's decision making may be askew. Be careful who's got your back and make sure you have friends around.

Mama Maria says: "What if the people holding you up have dirty hands or pull up your shirt and your special parts end up on tv?"   Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 16% [?]

By Kristin Anderson

Festie fans unite.

If you have survived your summer festivals and are up to some fall excitement, I have put together a list of some favorite fall festivals you may want to check out. The fall festival line up includes indoor and outdoor festivals. They're perfect for anyone — whether you wanna party in New York City or get down at the Red Rocks in Colorado. Cooler weather aside, these fall festivals are sure to satisfy, and a long cold festivaless winter is on its way. Who doesn't love hoodie weather anyway?

Break your piggy banks, get your tickets and use up the last of this year's vacation time. The party's not over yet, and festie goers never say die.

Fall Music Festivals Lineup 2009

Bumbershoot 2009

Where: Bumbershoot takes place at the Seattle Center, between Mercer Street, Denny Way, 5th Avenue North and 1st Avenue North, in the lower Queen Anne neighborhood, just north of downtown Seattle Washington.

When: September 5-7th

Bumbershoot®: Seattle's Music & Arts Festival is now in its 39th year. Since 1971, Bumbershoot has drawn artists representing the best in music, film, comedy, spoken word, dance, theatre, performance, and visual arts to the Seattle Center over Labor Day weekend. North America's largest urban arts festival, Bumbershoot takes place in the heart of the city at the 74-acre Seattle Center. Over 150,000 visitors from near and far spend the weekend reveling in the world of Bumbershoot, experiencing everything from regional favorites to international superstars across all arts disciplines.

Get more info at http://www.bumbershoot.org

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Popularity: 39% [?]

By Kristin Anderson

Alright you festie fanatics, I know you're just twitching with excitement about all the summer music festivals going on. Being a seasoned festival fanatic myself, I have put together a realistic survival guide to attending that will cut down on any disruptions in your outdoor celebration. And who doesn't love some dirty-footed outdoor fun?      

Things not to forget, and why…

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Popularity: 28% [?]

If you’re new to independent music, you probably already know that it can be a pretty difficult task to find artists, groups, and bands that sound similar to your favorite mainstream artists.  Most of the recommendations you get from sites like Pandora or Amazon are for other mainstream artists and really don’t touch the indie genre too much.

Well there’s good news for those seeking a great resource for finding indie artist equivalents to mainstream songs — Newtunes.com.  When you get to the site, simply enter an artist name and a song title to get a list of artists and groups that sound similar.  Don’t worry, if you don’t have a particular song in mind, just enter the artist’s name and hit "go." On the next screen, you’ll get several song choices from the artist to choose from.  Once you figure out which song you’d like to see equivalents of, simply hit the "similar songs" link and see the results.

The nice thing about Newtunes is that the search results are based on user input, not by staff choice.  As you listen to song samples you find on the site, you can adjust their ranking according to how similar you feel they are to your original search term. And if you think a song doesn’t match at all, you can delete it from your search results entirely. Newtunes search engine will then store and apply that new data and weight it against what others have said about similar results, giving everyone increasingly relevant results, time after time after time.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Amazon.com has released a list of The 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of All Time on their website.

For the purposes of compiling the list they decided to use a combination of hard and fast rules and gut instinct.  Here are the four rules they used for their selections:

• One album per artist.
   
• No EPs or singles, this list is about albums.
   
• No greatest hits collections or compilations of previously released tracks.
   
• Nominations must have been originally released on an independent label. Albums released on indies which were later acquired and/or re-released by majors are allowed (like Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, originally released by a pre-1989 major label merger Enigma Records).

Amazon has also set up a discussion forum, which allows visitors to voice their opinions about the list.  Naturally, there are customer disagreements (and surely there will be more), but this is a great starting point for music fans looking to get into the world of indie rock.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 21% [?]

Independent music involves multitudes of signed artists and groups on indie labels as well as unsigned artists.  Practically anyone with recording abilities — which pretty much describes anyone with a computer and a multi-tracking audio program — can create music, put up a MySpace band page or personal blog, and call themselves an artist. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to indie music there is very little "quality control," which makes it difficult for many music fans to figure out who’s actually decent and who’s a "work in progress."  Sure, you can click on artists’ song players and decide for yourself whether they are of high caliber and suit your tastes in music, but this task can be very daunting as it soon becomes a frustrating and time consuming task. At least with mainstream music, the list of artists is significantly smaller and we can quickly determine who is worth a listen, thanks mostly to marketing and a healthy dose of media coverage.

Now there are definitely those fans out there that enjoy the process of digging up and discovering new music.  The joy of finding that "needle in the haystack" is well worth the time of sifting through the sand of indie artists.  However, the majority of us do not have much time during the day to do this and must rely on the recommendations from others for discovering new music in the indie realm. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]