Can indie rock survive the Millennials?

When I first started playing in bands hoping to make a splash in the East Bay scene a decade ago, it was common knowledge that the way to attract indie label attention is by not needing a label. For the bands themselves, this makes perfect sense: self-reliance through promoting and distributing your own music allows you to negotiate from a position of strength. When you consider what's in it for the labels, though, it's exactly as strange as it sounds.

Imagine this McDonald's billboard: "Anyone can put meat and cheese between bread, really. The real exchange takes place between our suppliers and our customers, which we merely facilitate. We're not really needed!®" This would make for a pretty lousy business strategy, which is why no business works this way. The ideal model for a business is interdependence, where every single part and person is needed to play a unique role.

The model for indie rock, by contrast, is indie-pendence, where no part nor person is forced to rely on any other. But despite its reduced efficiency, this strategy has worked pretty well these past two or three decades, precisely because we value artist empowerment so strongly. We support the indie labels that refuse to exploit untested bands, and in turn, they promise that every band they sign has proven its mettle through self-reliance.

Of course, by forgoing interdependence, we lose the possibility that the whole can ever be greater than the sum of its parts. In my last post, I explained that the Beatles were exceptional precisely because they could count on others to handle every little thing unrelated to making music. But our desire to see bands get out there and hustle essentially guarantees that none today will be as musically noteworthy as the Beatles. Self-reliance, then, isn't just a virtue we highly respect; by default, it's the only virtue that has any chance to distinguish indie rock.

And this will go on for as long as the generation that started indie rock, Generation X, can go on. But the next generation, the Millennials, might choose to play a different ballgame altogether.

Let's face it, indie rock was perfectly made to suit Generation X. The notion that pluck and courage should count for more than cultivated talent, or that those of like-minded spirit can be adored by the world for banding together⁠— these resonate well with a generation that famously resented having to work jobs they hated, to pay for houses they couldn't afford, to fill with stuff they didn't need.

The big story about Millennials, on the other hand, isn't that they resent their jobs, but that they can't even find jobs. Their worst fear is to be forever shunted aside, despite all their qualifications, to make way for those possessing elusive qualities that can't be earned. In this light, the notion that pluck and courage should count for more than cultivated talent might suddenly seem a bit more vulgar, while an indie label that prides itself on being run more like a family than a business might look no different than any other institution that favours connections over credentials.

This is all conjecture on my part, of course, but I've noticed that I don't hear the rallying cry "Support the indie labels!" nearly as often as I did a decade ago. Which makes sense, given the rise of crowdfunding as the self-reliant artist's new source of empowerment. If your business strategy as an indie label is to not be needed⁠— to be a mere facilitator, contributing nothing of substance to the process⁠— then your unwillingness to step aside once a more streamlined option becomes available… makes you no less an exploitative middleman than the major labels have long been accused of being.

Indie rock currently reflects Generation X's admiration for the effort it takes to get to the top. But should the Millennials ever definitively declare that they'd rather celebrate what it takes to be at the top, the indie labels will need to drastically change or else wither away. Rather than signing bands that don't need a label, then, they must prove themselves indispensable by signing exactly those that do⁠— in other words, the ones desperately reliant on others to handle every little thing unrelated to making music.

Don't get me wrong, indie rock's model of independence has given us a long run of truly amazing bands. But the most influential and relevant bands in music history thrived during times of inter-dependence. And when you think about what interdependence is⁠— well, that just sort of makes perfect sense.