![]() ![]() To most music listeners, a lot of artists that music enthusiasts would consider mainstream can go completely unknown. But even they aren't mainstream in the sense of someone like Taylor Swift, whose most viewed YouTube video has nearly 2.5 billion views. And there are a lot of "mainstream" hard rock and metal bands that have playcounts that put even the biggest indie acts to shame. Even with Spotify streams, Bring Me the Horizon has a pretty staggering lead. Meanwhile, Bring Me the Horizon's most viewed video has 78 million views, posted 2 years ago. Father John Misty's most viewed video on YouTube has around 4 million views, posted 5 years ago. Sure, we may say that Father John Misty is mainstream, but I came across Bring Me the Horizon (a group that I had never even heard of before). As someone who is fairly versed with alternative rock and indie rock, jumping into the world of hard rock and metal this past year was a complete shock to me. Likewise, what is mainstream to one group can be completely unknown to another. But there was that whole #whoisbeck thing that circled around with all of these mainstream music fans completely baffled that this no-name dude took away Beyonce's Grammy. To anyone in Alternative Rock and Indie Rock, he is totally mainstream. Something similar happened with Beck in 2014 when he won Album of the Year. But after they won, Twitter was overrun with people wondering who in the heck this no-name group called The Surburbs were and why they took away Lady Gaga's Grammy. They couldn't possibly be more mainstream. They were the biggest rock group out there. I remember back in 2011 when Arcade Fire won Album of the Year at the Grammys for their album "The Suburbs." To anyone familiar with Arcade Fire, they were on top of the world. They may be mainstream to that particular music circle, but to the culture at large, they are more or less unknown. But the thing is, the average music listener familiar with Top 40 has probably never heard of either of them before. I have heard that both of them have finally broken through into pop music. In music enthusiast circles and indiehead circles, someone like Father John Misty or St. Within particular circles of musical interest, however, mainstream does tend to be defined differently. Top 40 pop music or anything of similar strata). So yeah thoughts? Agree? Disagree? What is obscure and what is popular music in your opinion? And yeah I realize it doesn’t really matter whether music is mainstream or not but I thought it was an interesting question.Īlthough I do feel that there is certainly a level of relativism regarding what is mainstream and what isn't, I've found the most useful definition of mainstream is music that the average music listener is on some level familiar with (a.k.a. So yeah I think some people spend so much time online on places like /mu/ or rateyourmusic that they forget what the average teenager, or average adult, actually listens to in the real world and end up calling stuff like Death Grips mainstream. Less than 5% of teens would know that album. It’s true that pretty much every jazz critic knows who Charles Mingus is buuut, while it doesn’t make that teen better than anyone, it actually is pretty rare for a high schooler to listen to that album on the whole. ![]() And while yeah, thinking that listening to obscure music makes you better than others is pretty stupid, I felt the post lacked perspective. ![]() Anyway so this question was prompted after seeing a post on reddit with like a hundred upvotes which mocked teens who thought they had an obscure taste in music simply because they listened to albums like The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. And if we stick with this “grand scheme of things” perspective, then some artists which music fans would normally not consider to be obscure could be considered relatively obscure like idk King Crimson. AC can barely get a dozen million views on YouTube while truly mainstream artists get hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of views. In that sense, they’re not truly popular in the same way that artists like Rihanna or Bruno Mars are. In the grand scheme of things, the average person on the street wouldn’t know who AC are. But on the other hand, we could talk about the big picture. AC is pretty well known by music fans, especially online. And I’d sort of agree with that if we were only talking about popularity among music fans. For example, some might say that something like Animal Collective, for example, is mainstream and something like La Monte Young is obscure. What is “pleb shit” to one person is “obscure” to another. So I was wondering what you guys would consider to be mainstream music and what you would consider to be obscure. ![]()
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