There was a time when being “mainstream” actually meant something
If a song was a hit, you probably knew it. If a television show was popular, chances were your friends were watching it too. If a movie became a cultural phenomenon, it was difficult to avoid hearing about it. Popular culture created something that feels increasingly rare today: a shared experience.
The internet changed that. At first glance, the idea of it was simple: it would give everyone access to everything. And it did. You could listen to music from another country, discover a filmmaker with only a few thousand followers, find a community dedicated to an obscure hobby, or spend hours watching videos about something you had never heard of before.
But there is an unexpected consequence to having access to everything: we no longer have to consume the same things. Instead of bringing everyone into one giant cultural space, the internet has created millions of smaller ones.
Welcome to your own mainstream
Before streaming and social media, culture was largely shaped by “gatekeepers”. Radio stations decided what songs would get played. Television networks determined what shows were profitable enough to be picked up again. Record labels, magazines and movie studios had enormous influence over what became visible.
That did not mean everyone had the same interest. It meant that everyone was exposed to roughly the same things and finding people who liked similar things was harder and rarer.
Music platforms do not need to tell you what the most popular song in the country is. TikTok does not need to show you what everyone else is watching. YouTube does not need to recommend the biggest creator on the platform. If you want to see what’s trending, you can, but their job is increasingly to figure out what you are interested in.
And the better these platforms become at doing that, the less reason we have to leave our own little corners of the internet. You can spend an entire day consuming content that feels completely tailored to you, without ever encountering the things that millions of other people are consuming.
What makes something a “hit”
Ten or fifteen years ago, seeing a song at the top of the charts meant something different. If a song was dominating radio stations, television, music stores and the charts, there was a good chance you had heard it, even if you hated it.
Today, a song can accumulate hundreds of millions of streams while remaining surprisingly unfamiliar to someone who does not belong to its particular audience. That is partly because “popular” no longer necessarily means “universally popular.”
What changed for underground culture?
There is another side to this fragmentation. The internet has made it possible for niche culture to travel further and faster than ever before.
A fashion style that once existed within a tiny subculture can suddenly appear on millions of screens. An obscure artist can develop a dedicated international audience without ever receiving traditional radio play. A small online community can influence the way people dress, speak, listen to music or decorate their homes.
Something can begin as a niche interest, explode on TikTok, become a trend on Instagram, appear in major fashion campaigns and then be replaced by something else a few weeks later.
Sabukaru has explored this phenomenon through the idea that underground culture can become mainstream precisely because of the internet, creating a constant cycle in which niche communities generate the trends that eventually reach mass audiences.
In other words, the mainstream is no longer necessarily where culture begins, sometimes, it is simply where a niche ends up.
So, is there still a mainstream?
Of course, mass culture has not disappeared. There are still songs that dominate global charts, movies that attract enormous audiences, celebrities recognized around the world and events that bring millions of people together.
But the way we experience them has changed. The difference may be between mass popularity and shared popularity.
Something can have extraordinary numbers without becoming a universal cultural reference. A creator can have millions of followers without your friends knowing who they are. A song can be streamed hundreds of millions of times without becoming the kind of song that “everyone” knows.
We are increasingly living in a culture where everyone can have their own version of what is popular. There are too many songs. Too many shows. Too many creators. Too many communities. Too many trends. And when there is something for everyone, there may no longer be one thing for everyone. The mainstream hasn’t disappeared, it has simply become the biggest niche of them all.
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The article above was edited by Fernanda Rhomberg.
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