Understanding the Indie Scene

Independent music, also known as Indie music encompasses any genre of music that is not being produced by a major label. I studied the industry this year for my Honours work, supervised by Dr. Rosemary Polegato. There is a belief that without a strong and viable Canadian independent music distribution industry, independent Canadian music would not get promoted and made accessible to Canadians in meaningful ways. I wanted to determine how university students' social identity influences their personal choice to consume Indie music; to understand the role of opinion leadership within the context of exposing others to Indie music; to identify the values associated with Indie music, and lastly; to examine the consumption behaviour of university students for Indie music.

I developed a questionnaire and distributed it at four venues during the 5th annual Stereophonic festival. The data were divided according to the students' degree of identification with Indie music

(strong or weak). The research identified four values that strong identifiers associate with Indie music: Creativity, loyalty, enjoying life, and curiosity. People who identify strongly with Indie music will be more likely to try and sway others' opinions of Indie music; however, people are just as likely to seek out information about Indie music, regardless of the strength of their identification. With regards to consumption behaviour, strong identifiers are more likely to spend more on recordings and merchandise than weak identifiers. Surprisingly, involvement in Indie music, the number and location of concerts attended, did not reveal any big differences between strong and weak identifiers. While traveling across the country and abroad, both groups are attending Indie concerts, although strong identifiers were more likely to listen to and buy Indie music. This reinforces the idea of in-group attachment that can arise out of the most trivial of things, such as preferring one musician to another.

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