In their own words

“Contrastream is a new way to find indie music by having the indie community take over the role usually held by journalists/reviewers; who have had control over filtering music (and deciding what's worth listening to). Usually the best way to find music is from word of mouth and this is a way to hear those recommendations from a community of indie fans instead of just a few friends (or pretentious reviews)… Everyone now has a voice in filtering the good from the bad and by leveraging the power of crowds we can improve the standard of music we listen too. We believe the success of albums should be measured by the quality of the music not marketing budgets.”

	Why it might be a killer

Independent artists are always looking for ways to promote their music, so they may like this site for making it easy to share albums and bring together a community of indie-minded music consumers. Likewise, indie music fans will enjoy the mainstream-free atmosphere (you can even flag an album as “mainstream!”), the range of small-time artists featured, and the potential is there for good indie music discussion in the forums.

	Some questions

A banner across the top of Contrastream.com announces “Big Update! We've added audio, new profiles and more,” however I could not find anywhere on the site to actually listen to music. If this feature currently exists, it is fairly hidden and the site should make it easier to figure out. If such a feature is not already in place or in the works, it seems users might get frustrated with constantly having to link to outside pages to actually hear the indie albums being hyped.