CNN is running a special section on indie culture.
Ryan Schreiber, the editor and founder of Pitchfork Media, a popular online magazine that chronicles the indie music scene, said the indie spirit has been commodified and re-envisioned as a marketable lifestyle just like punk, alternative and grunge before it. “But those are all permutations of the same very resilient subculture,” he said.
“If the last 30 years are any indication, after every last cent has been wrung from it, it’ll just burrow back underground and continue on its own terms,” he said. “You can’t kill the ideal.”
On daily basis I see examples of this. Essentially there is an oxymoronic concept of “mainstream counter-culture.” Obviously it’s always been cool to rebel and be different, but today internet and other forms of communication have made it hard for anything cool to be left a secret, and therefore what is Indie at first, if cool enough, will become mainstream, and no longer Indie.