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.
Thankfully, there is a great resource out there that takes a lot of the guesswork out of this process — The Independent Music Awards. The Independent Music Awards is an influential & effective international program that helps top-ranked indie artists & releases overcome mainstream obstacles and reach millions of Fans, Programmers, Talent Buyers, Film, TV & Gaming Music Supervisors, Press and other industry movers & shakers.
If you check out the IMA page at http://www.independentmusicawards.com/ima_new/jukebox2009.asp, you’ll see the album category winners in a wide variety of musical genres. You can also conveniently listen to a sound sample of their top single as well as get their email and website addresses.
The Independent Music Awards site is definitely a place to check out if you’re interested in a quick and easy way to get into indie music but don’t have the time to go through the "discovery process" just yet. The IMAs are on their 8th year and you can also check out past winners from the site as well.
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