Amazon's Trying To Give Us Indie Cred

I was looking around on Amazon this morning, and saw this:

Aw, thanks, Amazon! How thoughtful of you.

If you can't see that well, it says "Fed up with the same old pop pap? There's only one thing to do. Go indie, with 150 groundbreaking CDs to choose from, just $9.99 each." So I did a little research, and here's what I came up with.

Amazon.com today announced that it has teamed up with more than 30 indie labels, such as Sub Pop and Barsuk, to launch Go Indie, a new section in its music store featuring hand-picked selections of nearly 700 independent titles, 150 of which will carry a reduced price of $9.99. This limited-time offering is aimed to help the labels have prominent space on larger retailers, a problem found prevalent when battling against major label releases.

"In this day and age, it's rare that a retailer carries the full range of our releases, so thank God for Amazon.com," said Andy Kotowicz, vice president of sales and marketing at Sub Pop, via press release. "They are the perfect partner to help us showcase the scope and breadth of Sub Pop's current artists and diverse catalogue." Via CMJ.

I can't decide how I feel about this. It's cool, I guess. Except for the fact that Amazon is now marketing itself as the new, hip retailer for music. Personally, I wouldn't trust Amazon to recommend the new hottness to me, because their What's Hot in Music section always sucks on my homepage. But they did choose cool labels to partner with, including Domino, Rykodisc, Matador, Mute and Yep Roc. And this will definitely help indie artists get in to the mainstream a little more.

They also got some artists for their Music You Should Hear feature:

Mates of State
Ben Lee
Stephen Malkmus

What do you guys think of this new Go Indie Amazon feature?