Ending something you genuinely cared about is a weird feeling. Not bad, necessarily. Just weird.
under100k started because I was frustrated. Frustrated that by the time music I loved got any real coverage, it already felt like old news. Frustrated that “emerging artist” had become a phrase that basically meant “already famous, just not to your parents yet.” I wanted to write about music while it was still in that in-between space, before the narrative got polished and everything became a brand.
I think we did that, at least some of the time. The Bruiser Brigade breakdowns, the Ghais Guevara deep dives, the bedroom pop profiles on artists recording in spaces that were definitely not up to code. The Femcels piece with Sweetastic FM remains one I’m genuinely proud of. These were artists nobody was lining up to cover, and we just… covered them. Seriously, with actual thought behind it.
The 100k listener cap was always kind of arbitrary and I knew that going in. But arbitrary lines in the sand are useful sometimes. It kept the site honest. Once you start sliding the bar to let in someone with a bigger following because you like them more, the whole thing falls apart. So we held it.
I won’t dress this up into some grand lesson about independent media or the music industry. I’m a college kid who built a blog because he cared about underground rap and DIY production and thought someone should be paying more attention to it. That’s really it. School got heavier, priorities shifted, and at some point keeping the site going stopped feeling like something I could do well.
If you found an artist through under100k that you still listen to, that’s all I ever wanted. The streams don’t matter. The follower counts definitely don’t matter. Just… if something clicked, that’s the whole point.
Thanks for reading. Seriously.
Go find something weird to listen to.