5 of the Best Indie Music Sites

Discover new music with our favorite picks

Updated on April 8, 2020

If you're into indie music, you probably know just how difficult it is to find great new indie tracks to listen to just by casually browsing for what's available on popular music platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music.

Those platforms are great if you want to easily discover music from artists who work with major record labels, but you'll likely have better luck looking elsewhere for new music released by less popular signed artists or independent artists known for their super obscure pop, rock, folk, hip-hop or electronic sound (dubbed the modern-day "indie" genre).

To help solve this problem of indie artists needing to share their music and indie music fans needing to discover new music, a number of sites have popped up seeking to bring artists and listeners together.

If you're ready to see what's out there in the world of indie music, check out some of the sites below and give their suggested indie tracks a listen. Best of all, they're all free to use for casual listening.

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Hype Machine: Discover What Music Blogs Are Posting About

What We Like

Each new track listed on Hype Machine specifies the blogs that posted about it so you can find more information about the artist and which music platforms you can find it on (such as SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon). You can also create an account through your existing Google, Facebook or SoundCloud account to get a personalized feed, track your favorites, see your history and connect with other Hype Machine users. There are even apps for iOS and Android.

What We Don't Like

Nothing. This site is an incredible resource for music discovery!

Hype Machine is a music website that tracks hundreds of music blogs from around the web and pulls information from their latest posts to find new music to share with you. The site shares new music from a variety of genres, but you can filter music by genre to see new tracks by indie, indie rock or indie pop genres.

Several new tracks are added daily, with the most recently added ones at the top. Just click the play button beside each track summary to start listening. Once the track has finished, the next one down the list will start playing.

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Indie Shuffle: Get Handpicked Suggestions from Music Enthusiasts

What We Like

Each suggestion comes with a list of other artists it sounds like and a short blurb written by the curator explaining what they like about the song. The Smart Shuffle playback option is great for discovering and playing music in the background and it's great to know that the site offers free mobile apps for iOS and Android too.

What We Don't Like

The site has some ads and we wish there were more frequent music suggestions posted on a daily basis.

Indie Shuffle harnesses the music tastes of a diverse group of people who are excited to share new music. Their belief is that humans are better at discovering new music than algorithms are, which is why they use a team of international curators to bring you the best in indie rock, hip hop, electronic and more.

New music suggestions are added to the list almost daily (from newest to oldest) and can be listened directly within the site by clicking the play button on the song thumbnail. They'll be played in order of their listing, with those found on YouTube played in the right sidebar.

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Indie Sound: Connect Directly With Your Favorite Indie Artists

What We Like

The site looks and feels a lot like SoundCloud on a smaller scale with a closer community. You can create a profile, customize your own stream and revisit tracks you liked.

What We Don't Like

No mobile apps. Bummer!

Indie Sound is a music streaming platform that lets artists directly upload their music directly and freely promote their music to fans. The site claims to feature over 10,000 indie artists from over 2,000 indie music genres—many of which offer free MP3 downloads of their music to their listeners.

Explore and listen to what's featured, popular, recently added or topping the charts and check out artist profile pages to engage with them directly. If you have an Indie Sound account yourself, you can send your favorite artists private messages.

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BIRP: Get a Monthly Playlist of 100+ New Indie Tracks

What We Like

It's super generous of BIRP to include links to access their monthly playlists on other music platforms including Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple Music, YouTube, and Deezer. Likewise, it's nice that ZIP files and torrents are available to download them too.

What We Don't Like

We have to wait a whole month for a new playlist, but we guess it's worth it if we can expect 100+ quality tracks.

Every first of the month, BIRP gives indie fans a curated list of over 100 new tracks from indie artists. In fact, you can go back through every month since the site's inception in 2009 to listen to every playlist created since that time and freely listen to each track directly through the site.

Yo make sure you never miss a new playlist, sign up to receive email notifications every time a new monthly playlist is released. When you navigate to the playlist on the site, you can sort tracks by alphabetical order, rating or the most favorites.

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Indiemono: Find Frequently Updated Indie Playlists on Spotify

What We Like

We love that these playlists are specific to Spotify and that we get a description with each one, along with genres included and update frequency. It's also great to get a list of related playlists to listen to afterward.

What We Don't Like

Tracks from some artists may not be considered "indie" at all to some listeners. Most people probably don't think indie when they hear insanely popular artists like Ed Sheeran or well-known oldies like Pink Floyd.

Indiemono is a great site to check out if you just want to stick with Spotify as your main music streaming platform. The site compiles playlists using Spotify's streaming service so that you can play tracks directly within the site and follow them in your own Spotify account.

Each playlist specifies how often it's updated (such as Weekly, Every Wednesday or Periodically) and includes playlists according to mood or activity similar to what you can find in Spotify's Browse section—such as Saturday Morning, Introspection, Crossfit, Throwback Hits and more.

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