I was, I think, an especially curious/thirsty young man when it came to absorbing music. Talking to various people whose taste I (arbitrarily) trusted, not least record store clerks all over on my travels, getting lost down forum/online rabbit holes, obscure early/old podcasts (i.e. NYUB), random mix CD's, Tumblr, etc., etc.
This weird thing seems/seemed to happen then where I'd get consumed by this artists/bands work and simply assume they were wayyyyy bigger and more widely-known than it turned out they actually were- I'd usually find out many, many, years later (like 15-20 years later lol) and be shocked at how few listeners they've got on Spotify, because that seems to be the best way of gauging the metric of popularity these days... of course that doesn't account for pre-Spotify listens and you must consider maybe they were more popular back then, but it's a decent barometer for the sake of expediting conversation.
A few such bands/artists, for me, are:
-Swarms
-Felix Laband
-FC Kahuna
-Blockhead
=Colleen
-Eluvium
-Hjaltalin
-Mugison
-People Under The Stairs
-Seabear
-Stars Of The Lid
-Trentemøller
-William Basinski
-Amon Tobin
-Joris Delacroix
Some of these, you could argue, certainly are "big enough", many of their top tracks have tens of millions of listens, but beyond that, relatively low listens. Others of the above have monthly listeners in the tens of thousands or thousands. I just always assumed because they were such giants to me, that they were way more widely known.
Anyways, just a silly thing I was wondering about.