Sometimes I wonder what the effects of increasing cultural segmentation are going to be. When I was younger, people I met at parties or shows were way more likely to share multiple cultural touchstones with me. Broadcasts like Subterranean on MTV2 created a shared surface area for indie and alt kids, basically across the United States. Later, on local levels, last.fm concert listings made it easy to find my people. That's how I met my wife.
Now, I have no idea where to find people who share the same "cultural flavor" as me. I feel like everyone's interests have become so idiosyncratic that I can no longer stand any of my best friend's favorite music, movies, memes, etc. and vice versa.
For a long time, I tried to stay on the local pulse so that I could find an audience for my music. It got harder and harder. I then had two realizations... I heard some advice from some musician, "Dont focus on being in a band, focus on making music." That's exactly the error I had been making for the past 15 years. The other week, one of my friends played a solo noise set on a bill of pop punk and emo bands. I missed his set, but apparently out of about 150 kids, only one stayed inside to watch him. He was still buzzing just from playing. I realized, even if I set up a show in the middle of the desert and no one shows up, I could still make some sounds and wiggle around and catch a little ecstasy from the ether.
It is easy to find like minded people if you look in the right places, but yes the democratisation of music has made mainstream sources useless as a cultural touchstone. For many people, none of the mainstream areas have any emotional impact, you have to dig deeper. However, even if you dig a little bit, the ocean breaks and you basically drown in a momentous sludgy breadth of continuously churned "flavour of the month" artists. What you have to do then is REALLY dig deep, again, as you say, to the artists who have no intention of actually getting more than a few hundred listens, and are fuelled only by the love of both the creation process, listening process, and dancing process.
At one point, it was pretty much just the mainstream, and there was not much possibility to really create and release music other than that.
Then, DIY movements happened, and if you scratched under the surface you found "the underground".
Now, we have layers and layers. For example, look at modern techno. Most people do not even know what techno is at all, they may even imagine something completely off-base like deadmau5 or whatever. Already, deadmau5 exists on a layer of obscurity below a lot of mainstream music. However, dig slightly further, and you reach actual modern techno, which is a HUGE industry, literally fuelling a huge part of the Berlin economy, so we have this overblown "underground" scene which is now actually really mainstream. You have to keep digging many more layers before you reach the real underground. It can take years to penetrate this...it is just so specialised, segmented, and granulated. It makes me think of Terence McKenna's weird "novelty theory" stuff: the complexity of the scenes seems to be increasing and fragmenting exponentially in and out of itself.
Thankfully, the underground is always still there, as long as someone still wants to do it.
Now, I have no idea where to find people who share the same "cultural flavor" as me. I feel like everyone's interests have become so idiosyncratic that I can no longer stand any of my best friend's favorite music, movies, memes, etc. and vice versa.
For a long time, I tried to stay on the local pulse so that I could find an audience for my music. It got harder and harder. I then had two realizations... I heard some advice from some musician, "Dont focus on being in a band, focus on making music." That's exactly the error I had been making for the past 15 years. The other week, one of my friends played a solo noise set on a bill of pop punk and emo bands. I missed his set, but apparently out of about 150 kids, only one stayed inside to watch him. He was still buzzing just from playing. I realized, even if I set up a show in the middle of the desert and no one shows up, I could still make some sounds and wiggle around and catch a little ecstasy from the ether.