The 2025 Inhailer Indie 500: What independent music/broadcast looks like in the streaming era

The Inhailer 2025 Indie 500 took place this past Memorial Day Weekend, and as usual I have some thoughts on how the composition of this year’s countdown reflects the contemporary status of modern rock/alt/indie/etc.

The 2025 chart made a very strong claim for an “alternative” history of modern rock. In contrast to the orthodox “punk to Nirvana” narrative, Inhailer gave us one that’s rooted in Prince (who appeared on the chart 3 times) and routes through NIN and LCD Soundsystem, whose “Dance Yrself Clean” topped this year’s chart.

The figures you would expect in the orthodox “punk to Nirvana” narrative are, if not absent, de-prioritized. The Clash appear twice (2.5 times if you count “Paper Planes”), The Ramones appear once, and The Sex Pistols do not appear at all (but The Slits do). Instead, the post-punk acts that have more than one entry in the chart include New Order, Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club, The Cure, and Devo. Grunge is nearly absent. “Teen Spirit” came in at #12, and someone on the Inhailer Discord said “thank you for smells like teen spirit not being #1.” Queens of the Stone Age’s “No One Knows” is 291 and The Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” comes in at 303, but that’s it in terms of anything remotely grungy. Can and Diggable Planets each appear more than Green Day, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, or any other grunge act, just as Tina Weymouth appears more times on the chart than any former member of Nirvana, Billy Corgan, or even Trent Reznor. The stereotypical “punk to Nirvana” story is not what we get in the 2025 Indie 500.

Nils reports that these are the bands with the most tracks in the 2025 countdown:

Radiohead (5 times)

Vampire Weekend (5 times)

Talking Heads (4 times)

The National (4 times)

Modest Mouse (4 times)

Daft Punk (4 times)

St. Vincent (4 times)

Spoon (4 times)

Father John Misty (4 times)

That’s a couple of bands known for long electronic tracks (Radiohead and DP), post-punk’s ür weirdo eclectics (TH) and their aughts/10s counterparts (VW & SV), the most prominent Ohio band of recent memory (National), a couple of bands with crossover hits (Spoon, MM), and a kind of latter-day freak-folky Mojo Nixon (FJM). This list is almost entirely bands whose main period of productivity is the 21st century. It is neither punk nor Nirvana, and it most certainly is not a lineage of guitar-rock purity.

In this respect, Inhailer is right on the zeitgeist: the contemporary music industry is desperate to cleanse 90s alt rock from its “bro-ified” image and reframe the genre for pop’s core audience of women and queer people. The February 2023 cover of Rolling Stone styled the queer femme supergroup boygenius to echo the magazine’s January 1994 cover featuring Nirvana, effectively passing the alt-rock crown from the kings of the 90s to the queens of the 2020s. In 2024 The Guardian’s Hannah Ewens interviewed a number of Gen Z musicians who appreciated Kurt Cobain for his “more inclusive style of rock stardom” that foregrounded feminism and anti-racism in an otherwise “hypermasculine” genre. That same year, Live Nation hung the premise of the highest-grossing tour of any musician born in the 21st century around the narrative that The Breeders are the most important 90s alt band of all. Billboard’s Andrew Unterberger writes that “Rodrigo inviting the ’90s alt greats to be part of her story helps stitch together a rock timeline that never should have been interrupted” by the “male aggression took [that]  over the sound of modern rock [when] alt radio essentially decided it didn’t need women” in the late 1990s. For listeners young and old interested in such a reframing of modern rock history, the 2025 Indie 500 offers a deep and systematic account.

But that’s not the most interesting or important thing about this year’s 500. Filled with long (5+ minute) songs that slap, the 2025 Indie 500 gives us a model for what “independent” broadcasting can look like as both a style and a business model in the streaming era.

With Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist publishing in 2024, it’s now widely known that this industry-dominant platform privileges songs that (a) are short (shorter songs mean more overall streams for artists) and that (b) exhibit what Pelly calls the “Spotifycore” sound. Optimized for “lean-back listening,” the Spotifycore aesthetic is “muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy” (82) – it can fade into the background and doesn’t ask too much from the listener, who is primarily focused on being productive in other ways. With long, musically active songs that encourage dancing and discussion with others (there was a Discord thread and a meetup to listen to the last 100 or so songs), the 2025 Indie 500 positions Inhailer as the anti-Spotify.

With the first “Indie” (rather than “modern rock”) 500 in 2024, Inhailer started to make the countdown its own distinct chart apart from WOXY’s. This chart started a trajectory that the 2025 countdown articulates even more clearly. As I said last year,

With its emphasis on sometimes quirky songs that, as Chappell Roan would put it “have a fucking beat” the Indie 500 helps clarify that the stakes of the 2020s may not be the same as the ones that defined modern rock in the 80s, but they still involve disidentifying with a homogeneous mainstream, this time figured as Antoniffied girlboss pop. The story the Indie 500 tells about its modern rock past sounds like the opposite of “enforced modesty.”

If the 2024 chart leaned on modern rock classics to set itself apart from the folklore/evermore/”Drivers License”-y pop mainstream, the 2025 chart swerved hard to the 21st century. As music director Nils reported in the Discord chat, the 2025 countdown included this distribution of songs by decade:

2020s: 13.8%

2010s: 36%

2000s: 22.4%

1990s: 15.8%

1980s: 8%

1970s: 4%

In 2025, 72.2% of the entries were from the 21st century, putting 27.8% in the 20th. 49.8% were from the last two decades, and nearly a quarter were from the 2000s. WOXY went off the air in 2010, so roughly half of the songs on the 2025 countdown were released after they stopped broadcasting. This makes the chart a squarely Inhailer-oriented chart that has some of WOXY’s DNA but is expressing it in a fully new generation.

The fact that half the songs on the 2025 chart were released in or after 2010 is significant for another important reason. Spotify debuted in the US in 2011. Half the music in the 2025 Indie 500 is from the Spotify era. If you look at what KINDS of music the 2025 Indie 500 contains, the chart looks like the anti-Spotify. As indicated by the #1 song and the way the chart positions it vis-a-vis antecedents like Prince and NIN, the 2025 Indie 500 prioritizes songs that (a) slap, and (b) are tailored more to the affordances of the 12” single (long songs, typically dance music) than the streaming era.

For example, the number 2 song, Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” is six and a half minutes long. Number 3, Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know The Better” is driven by a funky bass groove. The top of the chart retains some long-running Modern Rock 500 high-performers, such as The Smiths “How Soon Is Now?”, The Cure’s “Lovesong,” The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, and another long, 6+ minute track with Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence.” Newer songs near the top include MGMT’s electro-bop “Kids” (clocking in at 5ish minutes), Phoenix’s dance-punk “1901”, Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”, and Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith “Not In Love.” Prince appears three times, and his “When Doves Cry” is the highest-ranking of his three songs in the chart, and it’s very synth-driven and electro. Further down the chart, there’s a prepackaged mini dance party with Rumblebucket’s “Come Out of a Lady,” Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods” and Parquet Courts’ “Wide Awake” all in a row. Other songs charting songs include Daft Punk’s “Around the World” (over 7 minutes) Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”, NIN’s “Closer”, Arthur Russell’s “That’s Us/Wild Combination” (nearly 7 minutes), a couple more LCD Soundsystem songs, the iconic “House of Jealous Lovers,” a track from Funkadelic, the old 97X fave “Groove Is In The Heart”, and !!!’s “Me and Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard” (9 minutes long). These are all funky, danceable songs that tend toward the five or even seven minute mark.

In my book about WOXY I discussed how indie started in the 70s as a DIY business model that offered a grassroots alternative to the mass media-era record industry. Then, in the 21st century, as hipster capitalism encouraged college-educated people with cultural capital to flip that asset into small business like craft breweries and Etsy stores, “indie” became a style that the corporate music industry co-opted to do things like brand cities as tourist destinations. With its lean-back listening strategy, Spotify has collapsed style into business model, with the toned-down “Spotifycore” sound designed to keep users streaming if mentally disengaged from “listening” as such. : Programming long, aesthetically engaging songs and offering multiple opportunities for listener interaction such as the Discord and the meetup (the station even asked for listener input in identifying songs that should go on the countdown), the 2025 Indie 500 pushes back against both Spotify’s style and business model. The 2025 Indie 500 thus illustrates what “independent” music and broadcasting can be in the streaming era. Instead of profiling individual users by “taste communities” to better individuate algorithmic recommendations, Inhailer broadcasts from and to actual groups of people who interact with one another. Programming by and for an actual grassroots community, Inhailer continues WOXY’s independent ethos, which frames independence as something possible only when practiced with and for other people.