If you ever spend much time reading music press and comparing Billboard charts, you probably notice the disproportionate amount of attention sent towards “indie rock” vs. “mainstream” pop, country, rock or R&B. “Indie rock” (I’ll stop with the quotes here – that’s a distinction we can tackle at another time) has a lot more clout than you would think based on album sales and singles chart placement.

No doubt there are a lot of people who were sincerely inspired by their love of indie rock to start blogs or become music writers (I may have been one ages ago, before becoming jaded by the hype machine that I still deal with on a daily basis) and certainly it’s an important part of the identity of urban liberals in their twenties and thirties. Conversely, a few bloggers may even think they have an identity as a tastemaker in this equation.

After getting the newest Best Music Writing and finally getting around to reading Vanessa Grigoriadis’s remarkable cover story “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” for Rolling Stone, I pondered this issue quite a bit. Grigoriadis writes of trying to get an interview with Spears for her feature and had to bluff that she had $2 million to pay for the story to people close to Spears, even though Rolling Stone is still an important magazine and Spears had an album to promote.

My own e-mails to publicists asking to interview established pop stars are almost universally ignored. I know I’m a writer at a regional website with a good-sized (but not huge) readership and well-known artists don’t need to talk to me to get word of their album or show out there. For indie rock, the converse is true.

I don’t have access, of course, to the e-mail boxes of my peers, but I assume they are similar to my own. Each PR mailing list that you’re on will send an e-mail every day or so about one of their clients. If you write or post something about a particular artist (or promise to), even if it’s something as seemingly-insignificant as “check out band X’s new video below,” you’ll likely be on that band’s guestlist next time they play in your city. If you’re really complimentary, you might even get to hang out with the band; if you’re really, really lucky, they might even share their drugs. What you saw in Almost Famous was even somewhat accurate.

I know I’m not perfect but I do try to be as honest and transparent as possible with that and only write about things I like and don’t ask to get into shows that I wouldn’t enjoy.

Being an indie rock writer means getting access to rock stars, a lot of free CDs and access to shows. Again, there is no doubt that people do love the music and not the attention (lots of people are much nicer to me than they wouldn’t ordinarily be), but being treated like a rock star in the indie rock world also means you won’t be asked for $2 million to be in the same room as an actual pop star.