The Indie WAV: tools and receipts for independent artists

The problem

When an artist gets a record deal offer, the information they need is scattered across court filings, news archives, and forum lore. The labels have lawyers; artists have vibes. I wanted the facts in one place, structured so both Google and AI answer engines can actually cite them.

What I built

The Indie WAV (it also answers to a spicier domain) is two things in one site: an evidence archive documenting how record labels have harmed artists, fans, and venues, where every claim links to a primary source, plus practical tools: a royalty audit, a deal navigator, and guides for staying independent.

The thesis on the homepage: you don’t need a label, you need a formula.

How it works

• SEO-first by construction. Server-rendered HTML, structured data, and generated sitemaps so both search engines and AI answer engines can find and cite the work.
• Content as files: every case, topic, and label profile is one version-controlled file that automatically appears everywhere it should: listings, search, metadata, structured data.
• Editorial discipline encoded in the system: every claim is labeled by how well it is substantiated, and a case cannot ship without its sources. The structure forces the receipts.

What I’m learning

This is where my day job and my projects overlap most directly. At Snap I work on making profile pages crawlable and findable; here I get to test the same instincts with full control of the stack. It is also a lesson in credibility engineering: an angry site gets dismissed, a sourced one gets cited.