Miami Music: Leading the Heroes is one of the many local underground artists who use Miami’s venues to gain a following outside of the mainstream market. courtesy photo Underground music, once akin to a rite of passage for musicians looking to debut into the mainstream, has since become something of its own genre. Such music, which typically has a cult following instead of mass appeal, is not usually seen on MTV nor heard on radio stations, but instead on college radio programs and MySpace.

Bands and groups are actually prideful of this obscurity, but this type of music isn’t as obscure as one might think, especially in South Florida. Miami has a large number of independent groups. MySpace Music has 491 bands registered in Miami-Dade that are labeled as “Indie,” or independent from the mainstream. Included among them is Leading the Heroes (www.myspace.com/leadingtheheroes). “They’ve been together 18 months,” said senior Andrew Julian, a close friend of drummer Nick Day.

“They have a really different sound. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it sounds like how alternative rock sounded in 1992.” Commercials are beginning to reach out more to artists unheard of by American audiences. One of the recent GEICO Cavemen commercials sampled the last 20 seconds of “Remind Me,” a song by the Norwegian electronic music duo RГ¶yksopp.

Vonage commercials feature the song “Woo Hoo” by Japanese rock and roll trio The 5.6.7.8’s, who were also featured on the soundtracks for Kill Bill and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift; the DVD for Kill Bill contains an extra where you can watch two of the three sets played by The 5.6.7.8’s during filming. The rising awareness of underground music has even become apparent on television programming.