Indie existence aesthetics: articulations around the mainstream conception

Indie emerged as sound and creative experimentations that sought to move away from the mainstream music. This conception, applied to a musical genre, can be understood as an aesthetic conception. Foucault points out that the search for an aesthetic that legitimizes our existence is an ethical subject's constitution practice. In turn, music fans interact to discuss, validating or rejecting content directed to them by the music industry and the artists they enjoy. The interactivity between fans about media products characterizes them as prosumers, i.e., consumers who act productively on what they consume. Thus, present research aims to analyze how prosumerist interactions of indie music fans define the genre through an aesthetic of existence. To this purpose, the research was conducted through netnography in one of the main virtual fan communities of the genre. The results indicate the exercise of two aesthetics: one presents the indie as an alternative to the mainstream, forged in the conceptions of freedom and resistance; another testifies to the indie as adherent to the mainstream, thanks to the capacity to expand access to the genre. Although they sound irreconcilable, both are based on the understanding that the indie is beautiful and that it needs to be preserved from its relationship with the mainstream conception.