I can give you something analogous though: I’m a big fan of old school east coast hip-hop. You have the established mainline artists from back then (“Nas”, “Jay-Z”, “Big L”, etc), then you have a the established underground artists (say, “Lord Finesse” or “Kool G Rap”), and then you have the really really underground guys like “Mr. Low Kash ‘n Da Shady Bunch”, “Superscientifiku”, “Punk Barbarians”, “Harlekinz”, etc.
A lot of those in that third “tier” are every bit as good as the second tier. And both tiers contain a lot of artists that could hit the quality point of the mainline artists, they just never had access to the producer and studio time that the mainline did.
I know these artists because I love going digging for the next hidden gem. Spotify recommended me perhaps one or two of all the super-underground guys.
Ironically more West-coast style, but here is a great example (explicit!): https://youtu.be/BUwJMVKSMtY?t=129
Dude could’ve measured up to the best of the west coast. Spotify monthly listener count? 891.
Algorithms are sadly win-more.
Now I’m just silently hoping a math nerd will feel inclined to share their hidden math channel gems :+)
https://www.3blue1brown.com/blog/some2
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnQX-jgAF5pTZXPiD8ciE...
For both tier 2 and tier 3 its basically the same process. This is for Spotify btw, I have no idea how different the workflow would be for something like Apple Music.
Say the genre you want to dig around in is Hip-Hop. You are aware of Eminem and Mac Miller, and vaguely aware of a guy named Nas. By intuition you'd probably already be able to tell that Nas is more at the edge among the mainline artists.
You click on "Nas", and scroll down to Fans also like. Right now, for "Nas", it is showing "Mobb Deep", "Mos Def", "Rakim", "Big L", "Wu-Tang Clan", "Gang Starr", "Ghostface Killah", "Method Man" and "Common".
This is a mix T1 and T2. "Wu-Tang"s in there along with assorted members, but some of the other artists are much lesser known quantities.
Its a bit hard for me to decide what a Hip-Hop layman would consider the most unknown name here, but I'd venture it'd be "Big L". We click on him, do the same thing. Now we're really getting somewhere, with guys like "Inspectah Deck" and "Smif-n-Wessun". Click, dig, we get a bunch of names amongst which "Lord Finesse" stands out. The Show more at the end of Fans Like is also invaluable.
In total the dig order for me to get to the very bottom of the undeground is "Nas" > "Big L" > "Smif-n-Wessun" > "Lord Finesse" > "Channel Live" > "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs" > "Trends of Culture" > "Brokin English Klik" (358 monthly listeners).
I wouldn't consider each of those going a tier (layer) deeper. As a guy who knows waaay too much about Hip-Hop, I'd separate them into:
- T1: "Nas", "Big L"
- T2 "Smif-n-Wessun", "Lord Finesse"
- T3 "Channel Live", "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs", "Trends of Culture", "Brokin English Klik"
Perhaps "Brokin English Klik" should be in its own T4 and 3 tiers lacks the fidelity to be necessarily accurate. Not sure.
A little shortcut would be using "The Edge of $Genre" playlists. They're the pair playlists to "The Sound of $Genre" (broad slice) and "The Pulse of $Genre" (most popular) generated via everynoise.com, although as that guy got fired from Spotify its up in the air how long those will keep working.
Edit: oh, and if you run into a playlist that caters to that deep underground (in my case, that was "90's Tapes"*), that's worth its bytes in gold.
*https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2H0rNGEBShvHSGebM2m37c?si=...
TikTok's recommendation algorithm is probably one of the best. It puts content first, giving what seems only a passing weight to follower count.
That doesn't mean that having a big follower count doesn't increase you chance to go viral and gain a lot of views, but it is much more likely for great content from a small creator to go viral, than mediocre content from someone with 500.000 followers.
You can also see this in that successful TikTok profiles often have a much higher view-to-follower ratio than something like YouTube.