Indy is a music discovery tool. Its goal is to give independent (indy) musicians (those not signed to a record label) a great new way to promote their music and to create a whole new way for people to discover music that they'll love.


Photo credit: Robin Good

As a listener, all you have to do is download the Indy 'player' (a small 1.5 MB application) and double-click the 'play' button. Indy will then start to play a random selection of songs. As you hear them, you rate them by clicking on any button from one to five.

Indy quickly learns the type of music you like to listen to and begins to select more appropriate tracks - by matching up your tastes with those of other, like-minded listeners.

The creators of Indy believe that "You aren't just a target market - Indy can help you find your own path to the

music you like. There are tons of great bands out there that don't have big labels promoting them;

Indy helps you find them."

Once Indy downloads a track, you can add it to your music collection, listen to it whenever and wherever you want. For musicians, Indy gives them a chance to reach a whole new audience that's excited about what they're playing.

Best of all, it's free for everyone. It is, however, currently only available for Windows 98/2000/XP, although Mac and Linux versions are promised for summer 2005.

Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you'll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don't like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same

song, Indy guesses that you'd probably like other music that they enjoyed. As you rate more songs, Indy will gets better and better at picking songs that you'll really enjoy.

All music on Indy has been made freely available on the web by independent artists. When Indy downloads music, it comes directly from the artist's website, and you can visit that website by clicking on the title of the track in Indy's user interface.

Indy contains no adware or spyware.

Indy artists get a totally free way to find new fans. Anyone who discovers your music on Indy can go to your website to find out more about your band, buy downloads, concert tickets, or other stuff. "Indy gives you an entirely new way to reach a fan base that you may never even have known existed in the first place."

In order for artists to submit their tracks, they only need to upload the music file via a very simple submission form.

The Indy concept originated from Ian Clarke, but was inspired by a number of other projects including iRate (neither Ian Clarke nor Indy is affiliated with the iRate project).
Music is just the beginning for Indy. Their goal is for Indy to promote and help people discover all kinds of media, including music, video and more.

An inspired, yet simple concept, with plenty of potential. The only negative so far is that if you really can't stand the track being played to you, you can't skip to the next one - you have to wait until the end, rate it and then receive the next song.