I don't know if it's on an indie label or not. But I'm guessing there'd be a whole demographic difference between who's listening to it depending on whether it was perceived as mainstream or not, whatever term they use for it.
"Indie" used to just mean "independent label" in the U.S., too, though even back in the Fifties the word was loaded: during the Depression the markets for country and blues recordings collapsed, and the major labels abandoned those genres. After WWII it was independent labels who served these "specialty" markets, and these labels were best able to capitalize on the new music that arose, i.e., rock 'n' roll. The majors didn't make the same mistake in the Sixties of ignoring the market when rock came along and soul went big, and some formerly independent labels like Atlantic were bought up by the big labels in the early Seventies. After several major-label proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls fizzled commercially in the early Seventies, punk and new wave became the province of small labels in the mid to late Seventies, and these labels adopted the word "indie" for themselves, self-consciously looking back to the rock 'n' roll age of heroism. It was in the Eighties that "indie" began to denote a set of loosely related "alternative" styles of music that were vaguely descended from or in the milieu of the new wave.
no subject
"Indie" used to just mean "independent label" in the U.S., too, though even back in the Fifties the word was loaded: during the Depression the markets for country and blues recordings collapsed, and the major labels abandoned those genres. After WWII it was independent labels who served these "specialty" markets, and these labels were best able to capitalize on the new music that arose, i.e., rock 'n' roll. The majors didn't make the same mistake in the Sixties of ignoring the market when rock came along and soul went big, and some formerly independent labels like Atlantic were bought up by the big labels in the early Seventies. After several major-label proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls fizzled commercially in the early Seventies, punk and new wave became the province of small labels in the mid to late Seventies, and these labels adopted the word "indie" for themselves, self-consciously looking back to the rock 'n' roll age of heroism. It was in the Eighties that "indie" began to denote a set of loosely related "alternative" styles of music that were vaguely descended from or in the milieu of the new wave.