Since the turn of the new millennium, the beau monde of independent music has been growing exponentially. It evolved from the alternative music scene of the early to mid 1990s, a time when “giving the finger” to the hand of capitalism proved popular for the lowlifes of rock (Kurt Cobain, Noel Gallagher, and so on). By the late 1990s, this anti-capitalist attitude grew wearisome and was found disagreeable by the capital labels that had embraced it for its lucrative popularity. As the cost of basic four-track recording equipment went down, so did alternative music — down to the underground, where it became independent. Later, Virgin refused The Smashing Pumpkins’ initial idea for their highly anticipated 2000 album, Machina: The Machines of God, to be a double-CD concept album akin to traditions set by their 1995 album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The band were forced to reduce the album to a single CD. Later that year, the band left Virgin and recorded and released the second part of the concept album independently for free. The transfer by radio station Q101 is still available from Archive.org’s open source audio archive. It stands, subtly titled Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, as an icon of the independent music scene’s “Great Escape” from the restrictive enterprise of the major labels.
