Which Music Was Underappreciated in Its Time? A Statistical Analysis
What music slipped through the cracks but eventually found its audience?
Intro: The Reclamation of a Long-Lost Band
In the early 1970s, a Memphis-based band called Big Star emerged with a sound that blended British Invasion rock with American power pop. The band was a critical darling, lauded by journalists and peers, and appeared destined for rock stardom—they were "your favorite artist's favorite artist" of the 1970s.
Despite glowing reviews, Big Star's music failed commercially, marred by distribution problems and a lack of attention from their record label. After three little-heard albums, the band broke up in 1974, vanishing into obscurity after three tumultuous years of music-making.
Decades after their dissolution, Big Star's music began to find a wider audience, with influential artists championing their work, including R.E.M., Wilco, Beck, Cheap Trick, Gin Blossoms, Pete Yorn, and The Bangles. Today, Big Star is revered as one of the most influential cult acts in music history, so much so that all three of their records have been featured in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list.
Big Star is perhaps the quintessential example of a band underappreciated in its time—their contemporary success discordant with their long-term legacy. Much like Big Star, numerous musicians endure relative obscurity while in their prime, only to be rediscovered and celebrated decades after their music was first released.
So today, we'll explore the musicians whose cult-ish legacy outshines their initial reach and the artists whose short-term commercial success greatly exceeds their longstanding cultural reputation.
Which Artists and Genres Were Underappreciated in Their Time?
We'll consider an artist to be "underappreciated" if their lasting critical reputation surpasses their initial commercial success.
We'll use Billboard-charting songs as a marker of commercial footprint and citations in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" as an indicator of cultural legacy. Although Rolling Stone is a fading media brand, the magazine continues to approach its "greatest of" lists with a commendable seriousness. The publication's "Greatest Albums" ranking is produced from a survey of critics, musicians, and industry executives and, therefore, serves as a reliable proxy for measuring musical influence.
When we look at the artists who have no Billboard-charting songs but repeatedly appear on Rolling Stone’s "Greatest Albums" list, we find a collection of punk, new wave, indie, and alternative rock acts.
The Velvet Underground tops our list of underappreciated artists—a band so fervently revered as a countercultural icon that, paradoxically, they have become somewhat mainstream decades after their breakup. As a teenager, I remember seeing Velvet Underground iconography scattered throughout Urban Outfitters and Tower Records. These chain stores offered mass-produced t-shirts and laptop stickers that celebrated this decidedly non-commercial band.
Artists like The Velvet Underground, The Smiths, and Pavement rejected mainstream conventions and commercialism, carving out devoted followings through underground zine coverage and indie-head record store recommendations.
When we analyze the genres celebrated in the Rolling Stone survey yet often overlooked by the Billboard Charts, we find punk, new wave, indie, and jazz to be the most frequently neglected formats.
The iconoclastic allure of underappreciated genres and musicians sparks an intriguing thought experiment on the mythology of "overlooked" music: how much of their appeal stems from a lack of mainstream success? The enduring charm of artists like Nick Drake, Miles Davis, and Pavement is deeply interviewed with their position on the fringes of mainstream culture, where their celebrity remains untainted by commercialism.
Wearing a Velvet Underground t-shirt signals that your tastes lie outside Billboard's Top 40—even if you purchased this paraphernalia at a big-box retailer like Hot Topic. Ultimately, it begs the question of whether these bands were truly "underappreciated"—and should have received more airplay in their time—or could only have risen to prominence as totemic countercultural figures. After all, "mainstream" and "counterculture" are relative terminology, where the latter defines itself in opposition to the former.
If punk, new wave, and alternative acts are a reaction to "mainstream" culture, then which mainstream artists serve as their foils? Which commercially successful pop acts failed to achieve lasting critical acclaim?
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Which Artists Achieved Commercial Success But Lack Longstanding Critical Recognition?
What does it mean for an artist to sell millions of albums yet be neglected by critics and future generations of musicians? Does this sin of omission emerge from a lack of musical artistry? Is there a cultural bias toward certain genres, gimmicks, or stylings? Or were these musicians simply part of a fad—championing music that is now considered anachronistic (like ska or pop-punk)?
We'll invert our previous approach to identify artists who achieved significant commercial success but lack enduring critical recognition. To do this, we'll highlight musicians with numerous Billboard-charting songs who are absent from Rolling Stone's "Greatest Albums" list.
We'll limit this group to artists who made the Billboard charts between 1970 and 2010—recent enough to be relevant for readers (who probably aren't familiar with doo-wop music or 1950s pop standards) but released well before the most recent "Greatest Albums" survey.
Our collection of commercially successful but critically overlooked acts is comprised of country artists, pop-ier rock bands, and the cast of the television show "Glee".
Let's start with "Glee" because I had to triple-check my code to ensure this result was legitimate (which it is!). During the show's six-year run, the cast of "Glee" saw 207 songs (all covers of well-known pop classics) chart on the Billboard Hot 100. This accomplishment (which is only partially captured in our data due to our 2010 cut-off) broke Billboard records held by The Beatles and Elvis Presley. This show was an inescapable phenomenon in the late 2000s and remains a testament to how much people like hearing their favorite songs re-recorded with slight stylistic variations.
Less straightforward is the inclusion of Hall & Oates, Chicago, and Heart, perhaps overlooked for their pop-ier sound or because they resonate less with younger audiences. The Rolling Stone survey is biased toward rock music—because, you know, it's Rolling Stone—so these bands are curious outliers.
At the genre level, 1950s pop standards, electronic music, and country have the highest percentage of Billboard-charting songs by artists omitted from Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums." Said differently, hit songs from these genres rarely achieve longstanding critical recognition.
Country remains a consistent outlier in every music analysis I've conducted. Despite ranking as the third most popular format—behind only pop and hip-hop—mainstream critics frequently dismiss this genre because they are not its intended audience (and somehow can't wrap their minds around this factoid).
The appeal and commercial success of country music resembles that of horror movies. Both are embraced by a thriving yet insular fanbase while being dismissed for a perceived lack of highbrow ambition.
These country music haters will never know the joy of drinking a White Claw on the Fourth of July while listening to Zac Brown Band's "Chicken Fried" or Kenny Chesney's "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." Instead, they'll spend their time reading New Yorker think pieces to "Understand Trump's America" and buying anti-Elon Musk stickers for their Teslas.
Admittedly, I'm biased, having grown up bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, but I believe country music is critically undervalued—akin to Big Star's lacking commercial success.
Final Thoughts: Can Things Still Be "Underground" or “Long-Lost”?
I first discovered Big Star in my late teens—perhaps the perfect time to find a "long-lost band." I was browsing iTunes (RIP to that pastime) and found their songs on a playlist of cult music. The mythology surrounding this band was overwhelming—an artist destined for obscurity that was reclaimed by those capable of recognizing their talents. I (unironically) felt special knowing they existed and relished listening to the indie-est of indie music.
My affinity for this band (and its mystique) was so strong that I gladly bought a vinyl of their music at Urban Outfitters a few years later. I didn't think critically about what it meant for this "long-lost music" to be prominently displayed at a big box retailer—for the band's underground appeal to be commodified (and expertly merchandised), and for me, a teenager hungry for countercultural objects, to have taken the bait.
Yet the reclamation and celebration of bands like Big Star, The Velvet Underground, and Pavement may be remnants of the pre-internet age. In an era of Spotify, Pitchfork, SoundCloud, and YouTube, could an artist like Nick Drake still go unnoticed at the height of his career? If I were to re-run this analysis in 2040, would our list of underappreciated acts still stem from the 1970s and 1980s?
Streaming and social media diminish the once-monolithic influence of record labels, radio stations, and physical retailers—obstacles that prevented a band like Big Star from commercial success—while also muddying our understanding of counterculture. The music market no longer suffers from instances of overwhelming information asymmetry—all songs are equally available and all bands have the distribution to find their audience (in theory!).
With Spotify and SoundCloud, it's increasingly rare for truly gifted musicians to go unnoticed, which is a tragedy for seventeen-year-old hipsters everywhere. In a world saturated with information and effortless access, everything will be sufficiently streamed and adequately appreciated—with the exception of country music.
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Ironically for the title of this Substack, this statement is incredibly vague and unsubstantiated: "With Spotify and SoundCloud, it's increasingly rare for truly gifted musicians to go unnoticed, which is a tragedy for seventeen-year-old hipsters everywhere. In a world saturated with information and effortless access, everything will be sufficiently streamed and adequately appreciated—with the exception of country music."
Is it rare? The rise of Spotify has turned music curation into an algorithmic affair, and the decline of music (and other forms of) criticism, paired with the consolidation and then decline of independent radio has given precious few channels for artists to "break through" or be "rediscovered" by an obscure enthusiast.
Yes, you can look up almost anything on Spotify, but you don't, in practice. Just like most the Internet doesn't get seen anymore and increasingly rots away as we don't do search as much anymore, even, being fed content by algorithm or paid-results searches within walled gardens (like Amazon) or else increasingly just asking LLMs about things. The publicly available Spotify data that I've seen verifies that the "long-tail" of music in their library slopes down to zero listens very quickly after the cluster of top artists at the top.
Love this stuff! However, any raver is truly clutching their Molly by seeing Sheena Easton listed as house/trance. Also, The Smiths were huge in their native England with many #1s. And Morrissey had many hits in the USA after they broke up. I think that propelled their resurgence in the USA more than retail promotion.