Tales of Indy music scenes past - Indianapolismusic.net 2001-2011
Indianapolismusic.net will be having a 20 year reunion show at the Melody Inn on Friday, September 3rd, 2021 @ 7p featuring performances by bands with IMN Alumni, including an Extra Blue Kind reunion, Niswander, Nowhere Good Fast, Phantom Beach, and The Common.
Watch for an episode of the MFT Radio Show on September 2nd, 2021 featuring Matt Fecher, Founder/Creator of Indianapolismusic.net.
The living history of any area or topic has kind of a rolling beginning and end that are made up of the memories of the people who were and are a part of it. As those people move on in one way or another, the history ends if it's not documented some other way. At MFT, preserving Indiana's local music history is one of our big missions, and as such, I felt it important to write a little bit about a local music website that became it's own "scene" and had a really big positive effect on music and culture in Indianapolis (and the rest of the state) from 2001 to 2011.
It's the year 2000. We all survived the Y2K bug unscathed. Internet access was still a relatively new thing, having only become widely available around 1996. Musicians were out there making Geocities or Angelfire sites for their bands. Social media as we know it didn't exist. (the first social media site I remember, and precursor to MySpace, Friendster, wouldn't launch until 2003) Smart phones didn't exist, and the Motorola Razr wouldn't even come out for 4 more years. Technology hobbyists were making all kinds of websites for fun, and seeing what stuck.
One such site was Indianapolismusic.net, started by Purdue Grad turned Indy resident and Software Developer, Matt Fecher. From the earliest version of IMN that can be found on Archive.org, it's mission statement was to be a: "comprehensive resource site for Indianapolis area musicians and bands (regardless of genre, age, race, religion, or financial status) to come together and create a thriving scene. We're working together to help spark more interest in local music."
A screenshot from an archive.org capture of the site circa 2001, retrieved from archive.org on 5/20/2020
This definitely wasn't the first local site of this type. There were other websites for Indianapolis musicians and other online presences around the state that provided links to local bands' websites, concert calendars, local music resources, and sometimes even message boards. What made IMN different was participation and content. Yes, it had message boards, but Matt was out at shows almost every night of the week taking pictures of bands, meeting musicians, and encouraging them to go to the website to see the pictures. This was still the stone-age technologically speaking. There were no smart phones and no imgur; photos had to be downloaded from your point-and-shoot camera, (if you were one of the few that had a digital one) then uploaded via FTP to your personal webserver before you could share them. I think that the combination of personal networking and solid value proposition for checking out the site were what drove IMN to eventually be a thriving community. For a local band, having someone interested enough in your show to take pictures and publish them was a big deal, and I think even today when you see a photographer at your gig with a non-phone camera, it's kind of meaningful. As the site grew those two things, show coverage and networking, they matured into the site's "Be the media" policy. IMN would post just about anything that anyone sent in. We even made up our own press credentials to get into shows.. and they worked!
Over time a solid core of volunteer participants kept things going. Bassists Steve Hayes from The Common, and Ryan "Sweaty B" Williams from Bad Fat and Jumbo Shrimp, and NoStar were strong contributors in writing and editing. Chad Wells from The 100's was there for website management and videography. Danica "Moxy" Johnson, and the mysterious St Mykal, splitting their writing time with Nuvo, were other contributing writer/photographers. Many others helped out at one point or another.
The Indy MP3 Project CD. You might be able to find a copy on ebay or in the cutout bin at a local record shop.
Beyond just a web presence, IMN was engaging the community early on. One such engagement was the IndyMP3 project. It was a CD-Rom featuring 170 tracks from local artists. 18,000 copies were distributed at release parties and other events across the city. Free for the participating bands, and free to the listeners who got copies, it's goal was to show that Indianapolis was really a music town, and I think it had an impact. You can listen to the Indy MP3 Project on the MFT Archive. There’s also an earlier edition in the form of the Indianapolismusic.net and Cty of music MP3 CD from 2001, also on the MFT Archive.
Another great community engagement was the IMN showcase series. I can't track down the full details, but there were at least 9 of these events. Each show featured around 10 artists who were active on the IMN message boards. This fact would become a point of contention with some artists and bands who felt they were left on the outside, claiming this was nepotism, and calling IMN a clique.. In reality, it was the most equal opportunity nepotism you could imagine; all you had to do to join the clique was come to a show and introduce yourself and you were in, and quickly introduced to all the regulars. In fact, for a time, there was a joke in referring to the site as "nice-guy kiss-ass land." Everyone was welcome, and artistic criticism was toned down in favor of camraderie. Most of these showcases were held at the now defunct Birdy's Live, and several had a CD pressed featuring all the bands on the bill which was given out to all attendees. They were typically well attended and a lot of fun.
While not the sole sponsor/organizer, IMN had a hand in a lot of other events around town. One memorable one was called the “2 Ring Circus”, taking place across two stages in Fountain Square long before it was the hip cultural zone it is now. It was hosted by IMN’s Ryan Williams in his “Sweaty B” persona, and had a side show, people in body paint, and snakes along with a bunch of bands.
Another was the Midwest Music Summit. Did you know that we had an annual music industry summit / music festival that took over ALL the venues in Broad Ripple and Downtown for a weekend every year? This event ran for at least 5 years. It was a wild time of panel discussions, trade shows, networking, after parties and tons and tons of performances. The local government took note of the traffic and dollars that the MMS brought to Indianapolis, and if I’m not imagining it, at one point the Mayor presented Josh Baker a “key to the city” and declared the weekend “Midwest Music Summit Days” or something to that effect.
The Common at The Patio Battle of the bands. I think they only did shows on leg day.
IMN sponsored a really popular and long-running Battle of the Bands series at The Patio in Broadripple, an area that, at the time, was the live music hotspot of Indy. There was a battle of 5 or so bands every week, a review of each week’s event on the website, and then bands advancing through a bracket to the finals which were held at the Vogue. The winners getting prizes like a tour van, cash , or a record deal. This usually created some level of drama on the message boards of course, but not as much as the later Battle of Bands at Birdy’s which was highly contested and won by a cover band.
The message boards grew in popularity, at one point having over 10,000 active members. That seems like a small number in today's follower-count obsessed world, but these folks were not just followers, they were active and participating. What started out as mostly a place for local musicians to talk shop, grew to be used by local music fans and industry folk as well. It's tough to explain what this community was like for people who have grown up with social sites like Facebook, but there was a lot more of getting to know people personally, inside jokes, and great conversations. Spammy postings like the ones we now see day to day on facebook were relegated to a "Shameless self promotion" forum so real conversations could flow in the "General music discussion", "Musicians wanted", and other forums. The traffic of the "Off topic" forum, an early-days addition to the site, eventually dwarfed that of the other forums with all kinds of chit-chat and local gossip. There were jokey troll accounts that were more entertaining than inflammatory, with a whole cast of characters. There was even a band formed by trolls called “Dearnt” who ended up performing several shows in rubber masks. It’s rumored that they, and the rest of the IMN message boards may have inspired The Pieces’ song The Battle of Hater Bay, which you can hear on the MFT archive.
There was the occasional grass-roots initiative launched from IMN as well. At one point, an IMN poster figured out that a local Clear Channel radio station was playing a DJ who claimed to be local but was really somewhere in Texas. This was before the time of remote work, and it seemed like an affront to the local music-loving community, so a thread was started in IMN’s Off-topic forum, and everyone emailed the station complaining about the situation. ..and the DJ got pulled! The website was enough of a known quantity locally that things like that could happen. It was known in other geographical areas too, because we often had bands from other states hopping on the site to ask about show trades or what venues they should try to play at in Indy.
A screenshot of the IMN of 2005
Over time, the site grew in readership and the focus changed from a site for artists and gossip more towards taste-making and advertising aimed at concert goers. Articles, interviews, reviews and previews started including national touring acts who were coming through town. A "Top 10 Best Bets" local concert preview section became a feature along with an IMN podcast hosted by Steve and Ryan. I have to admit that I fell out of the loop in these times, so my account may not be great, but I suspect that site traffic started dropping off amidst the rise of all the other social media sites jockeying for more and more of web users' attention. At the same time, Matt had moved on (and just plain moved) to work with the organizers of the Monolith Festival in Denver, so some of the initial drive of the site was gone. Sometime in 2011 the site was closed and a "Memorial" site was put up to showcase some of IMN's highlights over the years. This year, the memorial site itself drifted off into the digital ether as well. [Hey, it’s back! www.indianapolismusic.net] IMN also lives on through “Indianapolismusic.net” and “IMN Off Topic v4.0” groups on facebook. Matt Fecher continues his involvement in music, developing music creation apps with Audio Kit Pro.
I hope this doesn't come off as just a puff piece or a rose colored glasses look at some pedestrian happening. IMN made a lot of measurable headway in getting folks to take a serious look at local music. Music in Indianapolis has made a lot of progress in a lot of ways since then, but there were some good things happening at that time that aren't happening in the same way now, and I think the IMN story can be a reminder that these things are achievable. I think this is also a story of community. It wasn't just IMN making all these things happen. It was a web of all the local groups, organizations, musicians, and music fans doing things and doing them together. Punkrocknight, Nuvo, The Indy Star, Benchmark records and manufacturing... there were so many that there's no way I could do the list justice from memory.
Indianapolismusic.net will be having a 20 year reunion show at the Melody Inn on Friday, September 3rd, 2021 @ 7p featuring performances by bands with IMN Alumni, including an Extra Blue Kind reunion, Niswander, Nowhere Good Fast, Phantom Beach, and The Common.
Watch for an episode of the MFT Radio Show on September 2nd, 2021 featuring Matt Fecher, Founder/Creator of Indianapolismusic.net.
*Screenshots courtesy IMN via The Internet Archive. All photos courtesy IMN. Some photos by Kristen Leep. If you were the original photographer of any of these photos, get in touch and I’d be glad to include your credit.