More musicians are recording, distributing, marketing, and selling their own music now than ever before in history. The Indie Band Survival Guide is the critically-acclaimed, do-it-yourself modern classic that has been telling them how for years. In this up-to-the-moment edition, musicians and web gurus, Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan, cover everything musicians need to know. Drawing on their in-the-trenches experiences, they tell musicians how...

For twenty years, Merge Records has remained true to their belief that you can sign bands because you love their music and respect what they're trying to do. As giant corporate labels struggle for survival, Merge has garnered a secure and growing fan base while releasing some of the best music of our time. Our Noise is the history of the much loved label as seen by those who were there. It features interviews with and profiles of some of indie rock's...

It's the 1980s and the rock landscape is littered with massive hair, synthesizers, and monster riffs, but there is an alternative being born in the sleepy East of America-we just don't know it yet. Before the Internet, MTV, and iPods provided far-off music fans with information and communities-and before Nirvana-kids across the world grew up in relative isolation, dependent on mix tapes and self-created art to slowly spread scenes and trends. It...

"Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands 'ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame.' Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour ... diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, despite creeping...

"In Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale examines the town's flourishing as a Southern alternative culture mecca, emerging out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s to become home for a set of artistic, social, and political alternatives to northern liberalism or urban punk on the left and Sunbelt Republicanism on the right. In this moment of cultural flourishing, Hale argues, a generation of young white southerners could not or did...

"What do AC/DC and Aphex Twin have in common? David Bowie and Butthole Surfers? The Clash and the Chemical Brothers? On the surface, very little. Yet they are all representative of the most important movement in modern music - Alternative." "What makes these acts alternative? And why do we care? The A to X of Alternative Music answers these questions. Based on a show on pioneering London-based radio station Xfm, this is both the story of the greatest...

"North Carolina has always produced extraordinary music. From Charlie Poole standardizing the bluegrass form in the 1920s, to the creation of an entire diaspora of Black musicians which included Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone, to the gentle early-70s sounds of James Taylor, the state has many distinguished sons and daughters. But it was the indie rock boom of the late 1980s and '90s that brought North Carolina most fully into the...