Why Does Everyone Want Their Favorite Artist to Be Underground?

I noticed a pattern in the way people talk about artists they like. Everyone wants them to succeed, but there seems to be a point where success starts making people slightly uncomfortable. You hear versions of it all the time: their old music was better, they used to feel more authentic, TikTok ruined them. And, of course, the classic: “I knew them before they blew up.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as gatekeeping, but I think there’s something more interesting underneath it. Being early to an artist has become part of how we perform music taste. Discovering someone before everyone else doesn’t just mean you liked the music. It means, in some small way, that you recognized its value before the rest of the culture did. Which raises a question: if we genuinely want the artists we like to succeed, why can their success make us like them less?

The recent conversation around Geese made me think about this. The New York band had been steadily building an audience for years, but their rise became the subject of a much bigger debate after their connection to the digital marketing agency Chaotic Good Projects came under scrutiny. Earlier this year, the agency described a strategy it calls “trend simulation”: putting enough content using an artist’s music across enough accounts that it can create the impression that something is already gaining momentum. That was enough to set off a much larger conversation about whether the excitement around Geese was actually organic.

Even the band started wondering. Cameron Winter recently said that after seeing the controversy online, they contacted their label asking how much of their audience was actually real. According to Winter, the examples they were shown were mostly low-effort TikTok posts designed to boost the algorithm. But whether Geese’s popularity was manufactured is almost less interesting to me than how badly people wanted to know.

Music has never really been a meritocracy where the best song simply rises to the top. Labels paid radio promoters. Publicists pitched magazines. Street teams handed out flyers. Artists got opening slots, festival placements, record-store displays and eventually playlist placements. There has almost always been some machinery sitting between making music and getting millions of people to hear it. The difference is that the machinery used to look like marketing, but now it can look like another fan.

If I see an ad telling me to listen to an artist, I know I’m being marketed to. If I see five unrelated TikToks using the same song, followed by someone posting that they “can’t believe this artist isn’t bigger,” it feels more like I stumbled into something that was already happening. Those are very different experiences, even if there is a marketing budget somewhere behind both. And I think that difference matters because discovery has become part of music taste itself.

There was once at least some friction involved in finding obscure music. You might have needed the right record store, radio station, magazine, older sibling, local scene or friend who knew more than you did. Finding something relatively unknown required being in the right place, knowing the right person or simply spending enough time looking. Streaming flattened a lot of that. Today, an obscure record from the 1970s and an album released yesterday exist inside basically the same search bar. TikTok can put a bedroom artist with 2,000 monthly listeners between Taylor Swift and a cooking video. Spotify can recommend something recorded forty years before you were born immediately after a new release.

That access is incredible, but it also means access itself isn’t particularly impressive anymore. Everyone can hear everything. So maybe what became valuable instead was being early. Knowing an artist before everyone else becomes a small form of cultural currency. You didn’t just like the song. You found it.

Social media has made that strangely measurable too. Comment sections are filled with people announcing when they arrived. Fans argue about who counts as a “newgen.” Someone discovering an artist in 2026 can be told they missed their “real” era in 2024. Two years can apparently qualify as music history now.

TikTok makes the whole thing even stranger because it can make mass discovery feel incredibly personal. You hear a song underneath some random video with a few thousand likes. Maybe you Shazam it, go to Spotify and realize the artist isn’t particularly big yet. It feels like stumbling onto something. Meanwhile, the algorithm may be creating that exact feeling for hundreds of thousands of other people. That is probably one of the strangest things about algorithmic discovery: we can all feel like we found something ourselves while being recommended the same thing at the same time.

TikTok is now one of the main places younger listeners find music. MIDiA found that 51% of 16-to-24-year-olds named it as one of their main sources for music discovery. But discovery doesn’t necessarily mean fandom. The same research found that younger listeners were less likely than the age group above them to take many of the steps that traditionally followed discovering a song: looking up who made it, saving it, exploring the artist’s catalog or eventually considering themselves a fan.

That distinction feels important because we use the word discovery to describe several completely different things. Hearing a song isn’t necessarily discovering an artist. Knowing an artist isn’t necessarily caring about them. And having a song appear on your feed twenty times isn’t really the same thing as going looking for it. In a culture where exposure is becoming almost automatic, choosing to care might actually be the rarer behavior.

Which brings us back to the underground. Part of the appeal of an underground artist has always been musical, obviously. But there is also a social feeling attached to it: being part of a smaller group that understands something before it becomes obvious to everyone else. That creates a contradiction the music industry hasn’t really figured out how to solve. We want artists to succeed, but we also want to feel like their success happened naturally. We want other people to discover them, just apparently not too many people, too quickly.

When that happens, suspicion starts creeping in. Were they always this good? Is their label pushing them? Why are they suddenly everywhere? Are they an industry plant? The phrase “industry plant” gets thrown around so loosely now that it can mean almost anything: an artist with label support, an artist with connections, an artist who became popular suspiciously fast, or sometimes just an artist someone is annoyed about seeing too often. But I think the anxiety underneath the term is more interesting than the term itself.

People don’t necessarily mind that music is marketed. They mind feeling like their discovery was marketed to them. I thought I found you, then I found out you were placed in front of me. And that probably feels especially uncomfortable now because so much of our taste is already being predicted. Spotify knows what song should come next. TikTok learns what keeps us watching. Instagram learns what we find aesthetically interesting. The better those systems get at predicting our taste, the harder it becomes to know where recommendation ends and personal discovery begins.

Maybe that’s partly why being early matters so much. If everyone has access to the same enormous catalog and algorithms are constantly deciding what deserves our attention, finding something before it becomes widely visible can feel like proof that your taste is still actually yours.

But I think there is another side of the same phenomenon, and Taylor Swift might be the clearest example of it. With Swift, nobody is worried that they accidentally discovered an underground artist who turned out to have a marketing team. The machinery is completely visible. At this point, a Taylor Swift release is almost impossible to encounter simply as a piece of music.

Her latest rollout is a good example. Before “Patient Zero” was even announced, a cryptic appearance in an Emmys sketch sent fans looking for clues. Then came changes to her social media bios, a countdown on her website and days of theories about what exactly she was about to announce. When the countdown finally ended, it revealed a new single, followed by The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, with four additional songs. By the time the music arrived, there had already been an entire cultural event around waiting for it.

That system obviously works. Swift has spent years turning anticipation into participation. Fans not only receive announcements, but they also decode them. A number changes in an Instagram bio and thousands of people start comparing screenshots. A phrase appears somewhere and suddenly there are theories connecting it to something she wore six months ago. The marketing doesn’t sit outside the fandom. The fandom helps perform the marketing.

Which is fascinating, but I also wonder whether there is a point where being culturally unavoidable starts producing the opposite reaction. The response to The Encore has included some fan and critical fatigue alongside the excitement, and that doesn’t necessarily mean the music suddenly became worse. It might say something about what happens when the distance between releases, announcements, theories, editions and discourse becomes so small that there is barely any opportunity to miss an artist.

That is almost the inverse of the underground problem. With an underground artist, part of the appeal can be that not enough people know yet. With someone as famous as Taylor Swift, the problem can become that everyone knows everything immediately. A new song isn’t only a song. It is a countdown, an Easter egg, a headline, a TikTok theory, a collectible edition, a reaction, a backlash to the reaction and then another round of discussion about whether everyone is talking about Taylor Swift too much. At a certain level of fame, even disliking an artist becomes a way of participating in their cultural presence.

And I think that helps explain why “overrated” tends to follow artists once they reach a certain size. “Overrated” is an interesting word because it isn’t really a description of music. It describes the gap between how much I value something and how much everyone else seems to value it. An artist can make exactly the same kind of music they were making two years earlier, but once they become culturally dominant, we start judging not only the work but the amount of attention surrounding it.

That might be why artists often seem most culturally desirable right before they become completely unavoidable: big enough that knowing them means something, but small enough that knowing them still feels like a choice. There is probably a sweet spot somewhere between obscurity and saturation where an artist feels culturally important without feeling culturally compulsory. Once they cross it, the language changes. I love them becomes they’re everywhere. They’re underrated becomes they’re overrated. You need to hear this becomes I miss their old stuff.

Artists and their music can change as they grow, but sometimes the biggest change is simply who else is listening. If popularity alone makes the music feel less appealing, maybe what changed wasn’t the song, but the social meaning of liking it.

And I think that’s the part of underground culture we don’t always like admitting. Taste isn’t only about what sounds good to us. It can also be about what our choices say about us. Sociologists have been thinking about this for a long time. Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote about taste as a form of cultural capital: knowing what to appreciate, and being able to distinguish yourself through those preferences, can communicate social position just as other forms of knowledge can.

Social media has made these dynamics much more visible, even as streaming and algorithms have made discovering music easier than ever. Maybe that’s exactly why finding something first has become one of the few things that still feels exclusive.

And maybe that is why the underground remains so attractive even in an era where almost nothing stays underground for very long. We don’t necessarily want the artists we love to remain “unsuccessful.” We just seem to like the feeling that our relationship with them existed before everybody else arrived. In the end, being early seems to carry its own kind of value, separate from the music itself.