[Ethee]

This goes beyond music honestly. All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche. Remember when you played that one video game you found on a video retailers shelf and couldn't wait to tell your friends all about it the next day knowing for a fact that none of them had ever heard of the game before? How about when you found that basement horror film randomly made by the guy from the next town over? There are so many small niche forms of media that used to speak to us and now all of them have to sink or swim against the millions upon millions of pieces being shared on social media every day. The effort the author describes here in finding these pieces really was part of experiencing them and in our new extra-social and commodified world I'm not sure many would go out of their way in that same way any more. Which is a shame.

[jnovek]

“All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche.”

These things and their corresponding communities still exist, they’re just not big presences in the mainstream internet places like TikTok where they are overwhelmed by more popular options. It’s much like how you wouldn’t find an underground record at Sam Goody in the 90s.