Indie Rock Cafe.com, will be 20 years old in 2027. There are hundreds of archived posts, songs, playlists, album reviews, festival coverage, DIY band profiles, and capturing of the highlights and trends of the indie rock movement that exploded in the first decade of the new century.
IRC has received many tens of millions of visitors and page views since launching in 2007. For years (from 2009 through 2012), we were in the #1 to #3 positions in Google for search terms like ‘indie rock’, ‘indie music blog’, ‘best indie bands’, ‘best indie songs’, etc. And for most of the time we were ad-free or ad-lite. Some would say ‘you missed out on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars’ because, at one point, IRC was putting out 700K+ pages a month (and the server and hosting issues that came with it) for years. In retrospect, maybe not the best decision. But we feel that part of what made the site independent was the lack of, or lite use of, ads.
The visitors to the site were the ones that made it happen and while we don’t actively cover the scene anymore (especially as “indie” became more corporatized, like everything else unfortuntely), and life changes dictate other priorities, the memories and music that stick with us are testaments to one of the most exciting and experimental rock music movements there has ever been.