This is a much-awaited collection looking at how ideas and practices of independence in music have played out in the last twenty-five years in non-Anglophone contexts across the globe. With cases from Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, Indonesia, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, the volume examines the factors and dynamics ‘enabling or constraining independence’ (p. 17), including the relations between the artists and the intermediaries, technologies, infrastructures, businesses, and ‘social and aesthetic values that shape the creative process’ (ibid.). Local contexts are often put in interaction with the global picture without simplifying the structural relationships between the Global North and South to centre-periphery dynamics (although inequality is considered, too). Overall, the collection spotlights the tensions between artists’ aspirations towards independence and capitalist modes of appropriation, exploitation, and incorporation of independence, framed against the backdrop of global digital transformations.
Many authors astutely avoid focusing on ‘indie’ as a particular sound or genre, given that rap and other styles can also fit the ethos of independence. Instead, the contributions and the afterword by Timothy Taylor highlight how ‘indie’ is a set of attitudes and dispositions which are not homogeneously and universally understood, and which – when turned into practice – do not generate fixed or predetermined outcomes. As the chapters illustrate through solid ethnographic method of participant observation and interviews, often examined with an emic and inductive approach, the positions indie practitioners can take are endless, reliant on urban, regional, national and international contingencies, and dependent on class, history, gender, age, political stance, and a myriad of other variables that produce peculiarities, pluralities, dialogues, and frictions. Independence, like its adjacent concepts of autonomy and DIY, is better understood as both a utopian drive and a utopian space. Like all utopias, it needs to stay in the making to keep its raison d’être.
The first part of the book is titled ‘Labels, genres and mediations’. In Chapter 2, Marcia Tosta Dias analyses how digitisation has intensified fragmentation among artists, groups, and institutions in Brazilian independent music. Tosta Dias examines the emergence of independent labels in the 1980s and the decentralisation boom of the 2000s, while underscoring the crucial role of state cultural policies in shaping this growth.
Chapter 3 follows Pedro Roxo’s exploration of the Lisbon-based jazz label Clean Feed. Roxo shows how the label’s ‘publish-as-much-as-you-can’ strategy generated profits through many small sales of specialised releases. By combining catalogue diversity with a niche market, and by shifting production costs onto musicians, the label achieved financial sustainability with limited risk (an outcome linked to digitisation, despite its focus on CDs). The chapter lays bare the correlation between independence, label curatorship, and different modes of exploitation of musicians, who record their music without any financial or artistic support, often for small to no economic gains.
In Chapter 4, Pedro Belchior Nunes and Otávio Raposo explore the batida genre (a mix of Angolan traditional music, Afro-beats, and electronic dance music), its emergence among Portuguese Afrodiasporic soundscapes, and its popularisation within and beyond Portugal. The authors analyse how locality (another concept resonant with ‘authenticity’ and contiguous with ‘independence’) still matters in independent music, and how race and class intertwine in the collaboration between black Portuguese musicians from impoverished neighbourhoods, and their white middle-class label and booking intermediaries.
In Chapter 5, Cibrán Tenreiro Uzal explores micro-labels in Galicia, Spain, highlighting the fluid boundaries between non-profit ideals and professionalisation, economic pragmatism, and resistance. Drawing on interviews which project independent music as a heterogeneous rather than monolithic practice, Tenreiro Uzal demonstrates how DIY practices can emerge at the intersection of technological accessibility and regional peripherality.
The book’s second part addresses government funding, self-management, and the corporatisation of independence. In Chapter 6, Miaoju Jian examines DIY entrepreneurship and state subsidies for indie music in Taiwan. Jian argues that digitisation has blurred distinctions between mainstream and independent artists: while major acts face declining record sales, indie musicians have seen growth. Extensive state funding has created opportunities but also raised questions about what ‘independence’ means when both government support and capitalist forces shape the field. Jian further explores how many DIY musicians pursue professionalisation, wider reach, and economic expansion, revealing how commercialisation and mainstream recognition are also bottom-up ambitions. ‘Independence’ thus appears situational and temporary. As Jian concludes, DIY and punk cultures once associated with resistance are no longer what some Taiwanese audiences recognise as ‘indie,’ suggesting that ‘independence’ is a floating signifier, continually claimed by new emerging actors.
Chapter 7 by Victoria Irisarri and Ornela Boix examines Argentina’s post-2001 independent scene as a ‘historical configuration’ shaped by self-management practices and networks linking artists with state and private actors (p. 177). The authors stress the scene’s hybrid and evolving character, operating between sectorialisation and multitasking, as well as institutionalisation and informality.
In Chapter 8, Eduardo Vicente and Leonardo De Marchi analyse contemporary funk in São Paulo. They situate its rise within Brazil’s expanding domestic music market, which entered the global top ten in 2022. Framing funk as ‘peripheral music,’ they argue that innovation now emerges from urban outskirts, where local and global influences intersect. Yet growth has intensified competition: musicians face declining fees, scene oversaturation, and exploitative label practices. Four local labels dominate production networks, reproducing corporate logics ‘on a small scale’ (p. 198), disrupting traditional notions of independence.
Chapter 9 by Shannon Garland, the book’s gem, examines Sofar Sounds. Garland uncovers Sofar’s commodification of a previously noncapitalist practice: the intimate show rooted in DIY values where actors do music ‘for the love of it’ (p. 225) is turned into capitalist accumulation by repackaging atmosphere, exclusivity, and alternativeness as curated ‘experience’. This model depends on an oversupply of musicians willing to trade payment for exposure, which enables forms of labour exploitation. As Garland discusses, Sofar also represents an unusual mass product: rather than staging large events for big audiences, it hosts thousands of small concerts worldwide. In this configuration, the brand itself becomes the product. Lastly, the project’s colonial undertones are evident, as organisers and performers in the Global South often work unpaid for the benefit of an Anglo-American corporation. The chapter raises pressing questions about self-exploitation, creative labour and, ultimately, the very possibility of independence within capitalism.
The volume’s final section is titled ‘Political regimes, independent ethos and forms of music organisation’. In Chapter 10, Ana María Díaz Pinto examines Chile’s 2000s Pokemón Reggaetón, a teenage movement centred on student parties, dance, and sexuality. Díaz Pinto argues that independence functioned as an affective, generational practice, an autonomous way of experiencing music that both resisted and negotiated with the conservative adult world. Independence thus emerges as a relational and emotional construction, shaping collective lifestyles against a perceived ‘other’ (p. 234).
In Chapter 11, Rizky Sasono analyses Indonesia’s indie movement during and after reformasi. Sasono presents indie and DIY as a holistic cultural movement linking musicians, activists, and students, initially rooted in universities before expanding into broader urban spaces. Despite neoliberal commodification, horizontal and anarchic practices endured in initiatives such as Jakarta’s Superbad! concerts, underlining the constant renewal of independent forms, whereby new projects replace those absorbed into the mainstream.
In Chapter 12, Mike Levine examines the work of Cuban rapper David D Omni, who circulates his music via USB sticks to evade state surveillance. Levine situates this practice within a complex ecosystem where independence is defined primarily against authoritarian state control rather than major label monopoly. Today’s practice of USB circulation in Cuba, one may add, echoes magnitizdat, the illicit copying and distribution of unofficial music in the USSR and the socialist bloc. Like magnitizdat, USB sharing operates through informal, hand-to-hand networks. Yet unlike analogue tapes, whose repeated copying degraded sound quality, digital files allow impeccable reproduction, expanding the durability and reach of underground circulation. It is intriguing to see how magnitizdat and USB-based infrastructures exist in the interstitial spaces of communist regimes, or in milieux where the (authoritarian) state – not the capitalist market – is the principal Other vis-à-vis which practitioners shape their discourse of independence. More cases on this point (perhaps from other communist or post-communist countries) would have counterbalanced the volume’s emphasis on independence as a response to, or negotiation with, capitalism.
In sum, this volume is an informative and enjoyable collection of timely research on independence and its multiple conceptualisations, applications, and struggles outside the Anglo-American paradigm. The book will no doubt serve as an important reference point for future studies, reminding us of the following: on the one hand, independence is a relational and attributional process, constantly made by practitioners and validated by others; on the other hand, because independence is shared, it shapes communities of belonging and positive affirmation. And in today’s atomising world, independent music’s potential for disalienation and togetherness is more important than ever.
