Indie-Rock as World Music

Me going off on a tangent in an email to a friend:

Music has an artistic context and it also has a role as providing a soundtrack for social experiences. This artistic context is a very strange one when it involves the popular music of the community of the say, 2 million people who have ever bought an indie-rock record, many of whom are themselves marginalized (and with a population that small and eccentric, there could very well be a Putamayo Compilation, The Music of the Plastic-Framed Lands).