Everyone has that one friend who loves to say, “I liked them before they were famous.” Maybe that friend is you. Finding an artist, a song or a series before it becomes popular has turned into a small achievement, especially online.
Comments like “I was here before it blew up” are common under viral videos of new artists, and they all carry the same message: I saw it first.
But why does being first matter so much? And what makes a fan so proud of having discovered something before everyone else?
Is it cooler when nobody knows it yet?
Being one of the few people who know a new artist can make anyone feel special. It shows good taste and a bit of personality, and when everyone is listening to the same songs, liking something different is a way to stand out.
Wanting to belong and to stand out at the same time may sound contradictory, but for the social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, it makes perfect sense. Her optimal distinctiveness theory, proposed in 1991, says that we are always trying to balance these two needs, and finding something early does exactly that, since it puts you in a small group that “gets it” while keeping that group apart from the crowd.
When the mathematician Jonathan Touboul, from Brandeis University, built a model to study people who go against the mainstream, he found that, ironically, they often end up making the same choices at the same time. His study, “The Hipster Effect: When Anti-Conformists All Look The Same”, was covered by MIT Technology Review in 2019 and shows how being different can also become a trend.
That might explain why some early fans feel a little uneasy once an artist gets too popular, since the thing that made them feel unique is now shared by everyone.
When the stage gets bigger, the distance grows
At the start of a career, artists are usually closer to their fans, since shows take place in small venues, comments get replies, and fans can sometimes meet them in person. As the fandom grows, that access becomes increasingly rare.
Sabrina Carpenter is a good example. She first performed in Brazil in 2017, as the opening act for Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman Tour. In 2019, she returned for an acoustic pocket show in São Paulo, for a small, select group of fans to promote the album Singular: Act I.
In 2023, she performed at the MITA festival and opened Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows in Brazil, playing in front of tens of thousands of people per night. Then, on March 20, 2026, she closed the first day of Lollapalooza Brasil as one of the festival’s headliners.
For the fans who were at that pocket show, the memory feels different today, since they saw up close an artist who now headlines huge music festivals. That kind of closeness is hard to get back, and it is part of why early fans value their stories and those moments so much.
Being there from the start feels like a badge of honor
For many fans, having supported an artist from the beginning of their career becomes part of who they are. Saying “I’ve been here since the first EP” works almost like a medal, proving loyalty, time and love.
As the artist grows, early fans often feel that the success is a little bit theirs too, since they streamed the songs when few people did, shared the videos, bought tickets for the small shows and followed every step of the way. Seeing that artist on a big stage feels like a shared victory.
Even streaming platforms have noticed how much this matters, and in February 2020, Spotify tested alerts that told users they were in the top percentage of an artist’s listeners, such as the top 3% of Taylor Swift fans. Many fans shared screenshots on social media, according to Refinery29, and one fan who got the alert summed up the feeling by saying, “I felt immediately flattered and then I felt dumb for feeling flattered.”
Inside a fandom, early fans are still part of the group, but their history gives them a special place in it, which is exactly the balance between belonging and standing out that Brewer described. The risk appears when this pride turns into gatekeeping, with older fans treating new ones as “posers”, even though every fan was new one day.
So, why do we want to be first?
Finding something before everyone else mixes a little bit of everything, from the social side of looking cool and different to the closeness we can only have while an artist is still small and the feeling of belonging to a story from its first chapter. This is especially true nowadays, when you can be a huge fan of someone across the world who has only one song officially released, or even just an online acoustic version of their art, because they can’t produce it yet.
It is becoming easier to lose your spot as the number one fan, the closest one, or the one with the most “merch”, since within 24 hours your small artist can go viral on TikTok and be doing all the mainstream events the next month.
In the end, saying “I was here before it was famous” is a way of guarding the feeling of being closer to our idol, favorite song, album and all that this art represents deep in our souls. It comes from a defensive perspective that shares space with the wish to see the artist reach spaces we deeply know they deserve. When they win an award, headline a festival or break a record, feeling proud is inevitable, and seeing them succeed is all we want, even if itmeans losing that sense of intimacy.
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The article above was edited by Júlia Batista.
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