There is a specific kind of frustration that happens when you find a song you love and immediately go to Spotify to look the artist up, only to see 3,400 monthly listeners staring back at you. Not 3.4 million. Not 340k. Three thousand. And you think, how does nobody know about this.
The honest answer is that Spotify kind of decided they shouldn’t.
I want to talk about what’s actually happening to a certain breed of artist right now, because I think it’s more interesting and more intentional than people give credit for. There’s a class of underground musicians operating almost completely outside the algorithm’s reach, not because they’re bad at promotion, not because the music is rough, but because the music itself doesn’t fit the shape of what Spotify wants to push. And some of them seem completely fine with that.
Here’s the short version of how Spotify’s discovery system works in 2025: it rewards early engagement. Saves, replays, low skip rates in the first thirty seconds. If people bail on your intro, Spotify reads that as a signal to stop recommending you. Discover Weekly gets fed by behavioral data, and the platform has reportedly been getting more conservative about surfacing unfamiliar artists at all, leaning toward familiar songs on repeat rather than actually introducing new ones. That’s a real thing, and artists are feeling it.
But what I’m more interested in isn’t artists who want to crack the algorithm and can’t. That’s a different and frankly exhausting conversation. What I want to talk about is artists who structurally cannot be cracked open by the algorithm, and seem to have decided that’s sort of the point.
Take iayze, the experimental rapper and producer who gets made fun of on a biannual basis every time he drops a project with some horn section that sounds like it walked in from a 1940s cartoon. People have been dunking on his instrumental choices for years. He keeps making them. He dropped four albums in 2024. The memes never stop. The fans never leave. His listener count stays modest. His output stays weird. There is almost no version of iayze’s catalog that a Discover Weekly algorithm pushes to a passive listener scrolling through chill rap on their commute, and I think on some level that filters his audience into people who sought it out, which tends to produce a different relationship between an artist and their listeners than a playlist add does.
Or look at 7038634357, which is the alias of a New York producer and ambient musician who makes music that is genuinely difficult to assign a skip rate to because the tracks kind of dissolve into each other. The production is heavy and layered. The vocals are processed into something that barely reads as a voice anymore. His 2025 album Waterfall Horizon has no immediate hook, nothing that rewards a thirty-second scan. It requires you to sit with it. That is almost antithetical to how most people encounter new music now. And yet people found it, talked about it, passed it around through forums and Discord servers and the occasional recommendation from someone who just gets it.
The thing both of these artists share is a listener base that came to them through active discovery. Someone typed in a search, or clicked through a SoundCloud chain, or saw a Reddit post. That friction is actually kind of important, because it selects for people who will stay.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of what music writer Kyle Chayka calls the difference between curation and algorithms. His argument, roughly, is that human curation adds interpretation and discomfort, while algorithms are essentially written in fear of offense. A Spotify radio station will never challenge you in a meaningful way because challenge is a skip risk. But a blog post, a friend’s text, a niche playlist that a human built at 2am because they were obsessed with something, those can hand you something genuinely foreign and make you care about it.
That’s basically the whole logic behind this site, but it’s also what these artists are banking on whether they say it out loud or not.
The funny thing is that none of this is some heroic artistic stance most of the time. iayze isn’t writing manifestos about refusing commercialism. He just keeps making the music that sounds right to him and dropping it constantly. 7038634357 isn’t positioning himself as an algorithm rebel. He’s making ambient music with weird vocal textures because that’s apparently what he does. The anti-algorithm nature of their work is a side effect of actual creative decisions, not a brand strategy. Which is exactly what makes it interesting.
There’s a practical argument here too. Spotify now favors repetition over discovery, and features like Autoplay and Artist Radio tend to recycle tracks a listener already knows rather than surfacing unknown artists. What that means for artists who will never be in the existing rotation is that waiting for the algorithm to find them is basically futile. The artists who seem to survive that reality are the ones who built loyalty before the numbers got interesting, because their audience arrived with intention. Those listeners save albums. They follow. They tell people. That actually does feed the algorithm eventually, just more slowly and more honestly.
I’m not saying small listener counts are inherently virtuous or that obscurity is a flex. Plenty of artists are under 100k because the music hasn’t clicked yet, not because it’s too interesting. But there’s a real and distinct category of artists sitting in those low numbers specifically because the music asks something of you. It starts weird. It ends in an unexpected place. It doesn’t peak in the first thirty seconds. And Spotify, tuned to skip anxiety and familiar patterns, passes right over it.
Those are almost always the ones worth finding.