If you haven’t seen, Wicker Park and Garden State boast a pretty awesome looking soundtrack - except that they are Indie bands. www.amazon.com if you would like to search for them.
Now, is this a bad thing? They aren’t exactly indie, but I do not know what else you would call Broken Social Scene, Postal Service, Iron and Wine, Mogwai, +/-, Death Cab For Cutie, Mates of State, and The Shins. Is this a music snob complex or is it a good thing that they are getting all this exposure? I would not really call such a mainstream movie as Wicker Park or Garden State “independent” per se, having not seen them, but I would definitely call them mainstream. I know the car commercial companies have been using this music for quite some time but still, little people are aware of it.
I think anything that gets bands like the ones you listed more exposure is a great thing. Those soundtracks are obviously targeted at a very specific audience (most likely, those who know most of the bands already), but if they can entice enough random people who saw those movies to buy them, they’re doing their job.
Personally, I find it interesting that soundtrack albums are now used to hype movies almost as much as movies are used to sell soundtracks! How many movie ads have you seen that prominently featured current singles, or even said on screen: “Featuring the new single ________ by __________”?
I’m not altogether sure I’d call “Garden State” all that mainstream. It was kind of a small little movie when it did well at film festivals and was only then purchased (for a paltry $5 mil) by Miramax/Fox Searchlight. You should see it, though, it’s excellent.
I’m not sure that this is really a recent phenomenon. The Kids In the Hall movie Brain Candy (which I have never seen) has a really great soundtrack consisting of Matador artists, with some great rare tracks on there, interspersed with truly awful interludes of sound clips from the movie. Certainly Pavement , Pizzicato Five, Cibo Matto and Liz Phair didn’t crave the exposure that a Kids In The Hall movie would provide. I also have a good cover of The La’s song “There She Goes” by The Boo Radleys off of the So I Married an Axe Murderer soundtrack. There was of course the High Fidelity soundtrack which is chockablock of rare and indie acts, although with Nick Hornby behind it that’s kind of expected (the About A Boy soundtrack is entirely by Badly Drawn Boy). Vanilla Sky had Sigur Ros, the Red House Painters, and Radiohead (and the Monkees…) on its soundtrack. Igby Goes Down had Badly Drawn Boy, the Dandy Warhols, and the Beta Band. The list goes on and on…
In the end, it all depends on the music director and the feel of the movie. I can’t imagine any band that isn’t selling out arenas turning down what is basically free money to be included on a soundtrack. Few of these bands do anything but license a song, and in the rare cases that new material is provided, it is a demo, an acoustic version, a remix, or a non-album B-side throwaway. I think in both movies in the OP this is the case. It is a rare movie with more than one or two original pieces composed for it, and even rarer for these movies to use nonestablished indie bands to do those songs. About a Boy is the only one I can think of. So my answer is “free money” especially for big budget movies like Wicker Park.