Talk:Indie pop

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If Indie Rock's stylistic origins are in both Post-punk and New Wave...
Why is Indie Pop only in Post-punk? 18:45, 26 September 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Theburning25 (talk • contribs)

Possible sources for a twee pop article
Twee pop is sorely lacking on Wikipedia. I don't think we can simply dismiss it as being synonymous with indie pop, as it's a movement in its own right. There was a conversation about starting a twee pop article here a few years ago, but nothing seems to have come out it. Right now I'm trying to find sources on which we can base a twee pop article. After a quick search, I found these:


 * Allmusic profile
 * About.com profile
 * TweeNet

Surely there are more sources? I'm not very good at finding them. Help would be appreciated. Carbrain (talk) 10:53, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree...Twee was its own separate movement, not just "indie pop" 76.171.240.103 (talk) 15:57, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

No such thing as twee pop. It's just a term coined by American music journalists to describe UK indie pop to their readership. --Ef80 (talk) 14:35, 7 November 2014 (UTC)


 * "No such thing as twee pop. It's just a term" — Huh? Make up your mind, does it exist or doesn't it? Almost every western genre from the last 30 years has been "just a term coined by journalists".--Ilovetopaint (talk) 15:11, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

OR issues
This article has a lot of problems. While I don't disagree with some of the statements, they are not sourced and appear to be only opinions on for example the origins of the genre. The importance of the C86 compilation (and the reissues) is repeatedly overstated, and the term 'C86' was only retrospectively used for bands from the late 80s that had little similarity to most of the bands on the C86 album - the article states that these later bands were influenced by the compilation, but that simply isn't true - they may have been influenced by some of the bands on the compilation (and undoubtedly many others that weren't). This article shouldn't be about the C86 compilation - it really wasn't all that important at the time. The whole 'Roots' section is unsourced - C81 had nothing to do with indie pop (it just had a similar name to C86) and the rise of independent record labels was related but not the same as indie pop (take a look at some of the indie charts from the era - mostly not indie pop). The article states that Talulah Gosh and Razorcuts were yet to emerge in 1986, but Razorcuts had been around since 1984 and were already having indie hits in 1986. --Michig (talk) 06:17, 20 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not an expert on the genre but I had almost all of the same feelings. C86 is overstated. What is indie pop? I still don't really have a clue.--Ilovetopaint (talk) 14:32, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

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Source for TVU distorted music page
See here --Ilovetopaint (talk) 22:34, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

History stops after the '80s?
Hmm... There's only history of the subject before the '90's, nothing afterwards. Indie pop has gone a long way since then, and most people that lick a link here probably want to know more about the recent history of indie pop as well. Anyone have any good ideas of places for sources for more recent history?Awsomaw (talk) 03:30, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Link to list of artists?
I'm surprised that this article doesn't link to List of indie pop artists, but I'm not sure where such a link should be situated in the article, so I haven't made that edit myself. Jcejhay (talk) 21:39, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Alternative pop
Why are "alternative pop" and "alt pop" redirects to this page. Whenever I see either term (and as I've exemplified in pages for albums like Spiders and The Beta Band), it is used to describe a very different style(s) of music than indie pop. - TangoTizerWolfstone (talk) 01:30, 18 April 2017 (UTC)


 * "Alternative pop" is a term that has no currency. The only source I've ever found that attempts to define it is AllMusic, which calls it "essentially a catch-all term for post-punk bands from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s." Other people might think of "alt-pop" as a synonym for art pop, experimental pop, avant-pop, progressive pop, and so on.--Ilovetopaint (talk) 04:37, 18 April 2017 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, here are a couple of other appearances of these terms: Merriam-Webster.com has an entry for "alternative pop," defining it as "pop music that has broad appeal but that is produced by performers who are outside the musical mainstream and that is typically regarded as more original, eclectic, or musically or intellectually challenging than most pop music...called also alt-pop." Last.fm has a category for "alternative pop" whose "top artists" include Björk, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Garbage, and the Cardigans. I suppose those two conceptions are compatible with each other; and if the "indie" in "indie-pop" is to be taken at all literally, I guess a major-label artist who made non-mainstream pop might be "alternative" but not "indie" (as with "alternative rock" vs. "indie rock"?). Jcejhay (talk) 18:30, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I've since changed my opinion and think that Alternative pop should remain a redirect to Alternative rock. Ilovetopaint (talk) 08:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The term 'Alt pop' is being used quite a lot on blogs/websites these days...sometimes with 'Alt Pop' being interchangeable with 'Bedroom pop' (though the latter just redirects to Lo-Fi Music at the moment)...it really needs its own article as Alt pop is moving in a direction that has nowt to do with indiepop (less indie more 'Alternative Teen pop', especially with a lot of people using indie as shorthand for 'with guitars'). Until then I have added the following...

Alt pop
"Where once the term 'Alt pop' was interchangeable with that of 'Indiepop' (with 'Alternative' being the preferred American term for non-mainstream acts, and 'Indie' being favoured more in the United Kingdom), in the 21st Century the the term started to be used less in conjunction with twee, jangly guitar acts who would be found in the indie charts and more with pop artists like Tate McRae and Billie Eilish  . These 21st Century pop stars would be seen as more eclectic and more original than the usual chart pop stars (with the definition of chart pop in this instance being the 'more cheesy  ' or 'purer ' form of pop music usually targeted at teenagers), having more in common with Art pop and Lo-fi music than Stock Aitken Waterman  ". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.172.230 (talk) 13:28, 18 November 2020 (UTC)


 * P.S. even though I am in an area dealing with Alternative music and have referred to 'Cheesy pop', I am not using Cheesy pop as a snide negative. I actually like a lot of S/A/W's tunes and watched them on Sky Arts the other day.


 * These are interesting insights. I'm sure I'm not the first to feel that it's hard to know what to do about these terminology/subgenre issues, when there's so much overlap and ambiguity, and meanings can arise and shift so quickly, and there are so very many artists out there (and yet there's not always necessarily a consensus as to what subgenre best describes even one particular artist). It almost seems like the whole topic should be relegated to disambiguation pages! You know, like "'Alternative pop' or 'alt pop' can mean this or this or this or this or sometimes this, and that's all we're going to say." (:v> Jcejhay (talk) 14:24, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the problem arose from differences between language terminology UK and US. In Britain we have generally put the emphasis on the 'Indie' part, so that 'Indie' is the genre (now regardless of being independently distributed or not) with the sub-genres being Indie Rock, Indie Pop (typeset a lot of the time as indiepop probably because if the word pop is too 'visible' or given 'equal status' it might be seen as 'chart pop' and therefore inferior) and Indie Dance (usually from that time in the 1990s when indie bands went dance after the Second Summer of Love). In American terms it looks like the emphasis is being put on the second word, so that Alternative Rock, Alternative Pop and Alternative Dance are sub-genres of Rock, Pop and Dance, with each featuring artists operating outside the mainstream (or at least deemed less 'MOR'/'chart friendly'/'Radio 2' etc)...with Alternative Dance being used for all those dance music acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers acceptable for a play down at '50p a pint night' (i.e indie/student nights in various University towns back in the day). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.172.230 (talk) 12:07, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I moved the stuff about alt-pop from the indie pop section to teen pop but people were not happy over there either...it has to go somewhere as so many sites are using the term...please see the discussion at Talk:Teen pop

Color for infobox
Look, I know that indie pop is a very closely related of indie rock, but every site I seen treats it as a full-on subgenre of pop. Shouldn't we give it the same colors as the other pop genres? 72.208.178.248 (talk) 04:21, 23 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Looking at the indie pop article which is mostly about the NME's C86, indie pop should be in the same colours as all the other alternative music articles, whilst alt-pop (if an article is ever created) should be in the same colours as all the chart pop stuff as most online articles about alt-pop these seem to relate to teenagers/young adults in the chart and not artists who would have the C86 tape in the collection or have ever seen a printed copy of the NME in the shops.

BEccles81.152.238.125 (talk) 14:05, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

The term has long lost any meaning
For example, Wikipedia categorizes Gracie Abrams as Indie pop. She is the daughter of a film director and a film producer signed to a major label (Interscope/Universal). How more mainstream can you get? Independant used to mean that the people involved had very little money and much enthusiasm. -- 2003:E5:171F:444A:2035:C831:CC1C:174B (talk) 08:44, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Monochrome Set
Needs some mention of the Monochrome Set, they were very influential to indie pop and their first singles in the late 1970s helped birth the Smiths, critics have later assessed them as presaging the sounds of bands like Franz Ferdinand. Aradicus77 (talk) 01:12, 28 April 2023 (UTC)