BY GRAHAM CORRIGAN • JUN 17, 2019

If you’ve been a part of music in the past 10 years, the bright-eyed pitch for independence is a familiar refrain: DAWs and DSPs opened the floodgates, SoundCloud rappers are signing huge deals with songs mixed on Bluetooth speakers—in short, you don’t need a label to succeed.

There’s some truth to it—but our current definition of an “independent musician” is murky at best. Does it mean you own all your masters and distribution? Or does independence apply to artists signed to independent labels? What about joint ventures? What about artists using a Renaissance playbook, funded by a patron that can support them in lieu of a label?

Before looking forward, we’d do well to start by looking back. A decade before the digital revolution cut the music industry off at the knees, independent music had another day in the sun. Until recently, the indie heyday was widely recognized as the grunge and indie rock wave of the ’90s—bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam proved that “alternative music” could be commercially successful without sacrificing its edge. Indie labels like Sub Pop and ANTI- outflanked the majors and made space for challenging, unique music. The revolution was short-lived, however, and major labels controlled about 72% of industry revenue by 2005.

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