For years, we’ve been adding the artists we love to our New Indie Music playlist on Spotify. On September 1st, we’re going to delete it. Yes. On purpose.

IMC is about to change quite a lot. With the new Indie Music Center, we’ll be launching IMC Records and producing physical CD releases, with proper royalties going directly to the artists whose music we sell.

And once you decide to do that, celebrating another 0.000-something Spotify stream starts to feel a little weird. Spotify isn’t the only thing we’re leaving behind. We’re also leaving submission platforms.

Somehow, we’ve reached a point where algorithms can judge the value of our work largely through the performance of our Spotify playlist. Which is... interesting.

IMC has been supporting independent music for 25 years. Radio shows, reviews, interviews, podcasts, thousands of artists and countless hours spent discovering and sharing their music. Reducing all that to a playlist metric simply doesn’t make sense to us anymore. So we’re building our own system instead.

The new Artist Space will give artists their own accounts and profiles, bringing together their reviews, releases, interviews, podcast appearances, achievements and history with IMC. They’ll also see, in complete transparency, how many people read their articles, their total readership across IMC and how many times the podcasts they appear in have been played. We don’t know many music blogs giving artists access to that kind of information. But then again, we’re not a music blog.

IMC is a community. We’ve supported each other for years, and the new Indie Music Center is being built around that idea, with new tools designed to genuinely help independent artists grow their careers. And with IMC Records, we’ll be able to turn some of that support into something wonderfully old-fashioned: selling music and actually paying the people who made it. There’s plenty more coming, but I’ll spare you the washing machine instruction manual.

So yes, the Spotify playlist is going away on September 1st. The music isn’t. The artists certainly aren’t. After 25 years, we simply think it’s time to do things our own way again.

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It's Friday again! So we’ve added new songs to our New Indie Music playlist on Spotify , Deezer, Youtube and SoundCloud! This playlist is for artists we respect, and for songs we genuinely enjoyed this morning. If one of them speaks to you, support the artist. Follow them, share the song, or buy their music... it matters!

And if you want to keep discovering new indie songs every week, don’t forget to follow the playlist! It is updated every Friday (and sometimes on other days too!). Here’s what’s new today: