E-Mail This Article to a Friend INDY ROCKS! A new way to discover new music BY MIKE MILIARD

On a road trip to Montreal last weekend, my buddy and I listened to hours and hours of music. He played me new stuff I hadn’t heard (or even heard of), and I did the same for him. But long road trips only happen so often. And with today’s gas prices, they cost a lot. What if there were a free, easy, automated way to learn about bands you never knew existed, songs you never knew you’d like?

Indy, a piece of software released last week by Ian and Andrew Clarke — via a Web site designed by Worcester anti-major-label activists Downhill Battle — is a free program that helps hip you to new sounds based on your own musical preferences. It’s as much a boon to indie artists looking to get their music heard as it is to omnivorous music fans questing for new tunes.

Just download and install the software. Then press play, and check out the song that pops up. It might be plaintive singer-songwriter fare or spicy Latin jazz, angular post-punk or challenging avant-classical. Every once in a while there will even be an artist (Ella Fitzgerald, scatting manically) or song (a countrified cover of Green Day’s "Good Riddance") that you’ll recognize.

Whaddya think? If it’s lousy, or maybe just not for you, drag your cursor over the five stars at the bottom of the interface and assign it a one- or two-star rating. A new song will play. Repeat. If you dig it, give it four or five stars. It’ll play through to the end, or you can skip ahead to another selection. The Indy software knows nothing about you at first, but after a while, through continuous use, it quickly hones its sense of your sensibilities, finding new music it thinks you’ll like by identifying genres, artists, and songs other users had rated similarly. (Each tune it plays is downloaded to your hard drive and can be listened to again and again.)

"What I wanted to create was, in effect, a taste-based search engine," says Ian Clarke over the phone from Edinburgh, Scotland. "One of the problems for the creators of independent music is how to get their music out there. You can put it on a Web site, but how are people going to find your site if they’ve never heard of you? What Indy brings is a new and quite efficient way for artists to discover a fan base that perhaps previously they might not have known how to access. And, similarly, for people interested in discovering independent music, it provides a means through which they can discover artists."

The technology behind Indy is not new. It’s called a collaborative filter, and it’s the same thing that allows a site like Amazon or Netflix to recommend books, music, or movies to you based on purchases made by other people who bought what you bought. It’s been live only a couple weeks but already hosts about 9000 pieces of media in its database. ("Hopefully within a few months we’ll have 10 times that," Clarke says.) Some of those songs come from independent-music Web sites like CDBaby and Vitaminic, but most of the music was submitted by artists directly to the Indy site. It makes sense for them, after all.

"We see it as an alternative to the various copyright-infringing peer-to-peer systems out there, but more than that, we just see it as an alternative to the mainstream music industry," says Clarke. "It’s perfectly legal, [fans] can hear music without paying for it — although if they find something they like, we’d certainly encourage them to go buy the artist’s CD from their Web site. This basically says to artists, ‘It doesn’t matter how much money you have for promotion, or if you’ve got a major label behind you, this thing is a pure meritocracy. If your music is good, and people like it, a lot of people are gonna get to hear it.’"

Learn more and download Indy at indy.tv.