SONGS FROM LESSER KNOWN ARTISTS
Songs From Lesser Known Artists/Bands is the perfect opportunity to dig deep into that music library and share just how expansive your musical knowledge is. Or in the case of some of you, share your lack of understanding of the phrase “lesser known.” This playlist is ideal for showing off your cousin’s roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s new single or a weird experimental song from a genre no one ever heard of. Songs will be judged on three criteria. First, is the quality of the song. A homeless guy farting into a microphone over a beat and uploaded to Spotify is definitely a “lesser known” artist, but we’re going for more than just obscurity here. The second metric is the number of monthly listeners. It is easy to call a band with 400 monthly listeners “lesser known.” It is much harder to defend an artist with 8,000,000 monthly listeners the same way. Lastly, the number of listens of the most popular song of the band is considered. Some bands are very well known for a song or two, but that isn’t enough to drive monthly listeners. An extreme example of this is the Baha Men. They have <900K monthly listeners, but a top song with 56,601,521 listens and a name everyone recognizes. All of these criteria were combined into a complex algorithm that is far too complicated for your tiny brains to comprehend, so trust me on this and understand this list is scientific fact with zero room for debate.
Tier 1
Yo Voy Ganao, Carousel, When It Was Wrong, Sugar
These are the songs that stood out for good reasons, the select few that you know you’ll want to listen to again even before you finish the song the first time (and that pass the listener metrics.) They aren’t the most diverse selection of songs, but they are varied enough to not all blend together like many of the others. “Yo Voy Ganao” is an excellent selection. It’s fun, catchy, from a band with only 264K monthly listeners, and a top song with <6 million plays. It could be a song about death and sadness, but you probably can’t understand Spanish so it doesn’t even matter. Even the language is lesser known.
Tier 2
Pick Your Poison, Smoko, Como, Closer to Me, Big Dreams, Summer Sun, You’ll Miss Me Someday, Blue Jeans, Sparklers, The Way We Get By, Rize Up, Marvelous, Heavenly Maybe
Tier 2 songs are a mix of unique and memorable but also have to grow on you a little more than the Tier 1 songs. This tier has a little bit of everything including reggae, hip hop, country, punk, blue grass, and more. The rarest of this bunch is Wicklow Atwater, with just 453 monthly listeners and a top song with roughly 3K plays. Spoon, despite being one of the more popular submissions, jumped to Tier 2 on a strong musical performance. The real “lesser known” standout here is “You’ll Miss Me Someday” by Tyler Adair. Tyler Adair has literally 1 song on Spotify, and it’s from 2015. Google Tyler Adair and you’ll go down a dizzying path of collegiate athletes, random linked in profiles, and trying to figure out when Tyler became a girl’s name. Is this Tyler Adair a boy or a girl? Did the actual Tyler Adair submit this song? The world may never know.
Tier 3
Familiar, More Hearts Than Mine, I’m Good, When It Comes to You, Southern Dreaming, Dizz Knee Land, Twenty-One, Survive, Letters From The Sky, Fair, Capsize, Definition of a Rap Flow, Hold On, Hold On, Tendril, A los Animales, Come For Me, Cloud My Day, Murphy’s Law
There are a handful of reasons for these songs being Tier 3. Some fail the “lesser known” test (looking at you Wafia, Dr. Dog, Agnes Obel, Ingrid Andress.) Some feature artists that will grow on you but will take a lot of time (R.A. the Rugged Man, Lyra Pramuk.) Some have musical segments that hurt your ears (the obnoxious and repetitive riff in “Southern Dreaming” and the overpowering bass in “When It Comes to You”.) Some are just songs so bland that even after listening to this playlist 4x through I still couldn’t tell you the title or artist.
Tier 4
Lonely, Time (You and I), Go Walking Down There, Lonely
The first of the Lonelies, “Lonely” by Joel Corry and “Go Walking Down There” fail the “lesser known” test while passing the decent song test. Joel Corry has almost 8 million monthly subscribers (highest of all submissions), with a top song nearing 90 million listens (4th highest of all submission). Those numbers are good for Joel in real life, bad for Joel in this playlist. The Chris Isaak submission screams, “Mr. Tier 5 king (see below) is my only exposure to millennials so I assume they are all idiots with no taste in music.” While that is a very fair assumption for that particular millennial, it’s patently false for the whole group. While we continue on the stereotype train, Chris Isaak has a song with 173 million listens, and we know there aren’t enough technologically savvy boomers out there to result in those numbers. Millennials are pumping those numbers up. “Time (You and I)” partially fails both the good song and uncommon artist test. It is an uneventful, repetitive, boring song by an artist with 4 million monthly listens (3rd highest of all submissions) and a top song with 34 million listens (9th highest of all submissions). Lastly, we have the second lonely, “Lonely” by Swamp Dogg. I was PUMPED for this song after the first 5 seconds, then it all went downhill after that. The music itself is good, but the excessively distorted autotune monologue is painful. This is a song that would be better off as an instrumental, and it makes sense why this artist passed the “lesser known” test with flying colors.
Tier 5
Break My Baby, higher
The late, unreliable, liar, swap king is back at it again this week, racking up two more Tier 5 submissions. After submitting “Break My Baby” by KALEO, this shameful individual was mocked across various group chats for choosing an artist with well over 5 million monthly listeners and a top song with almost 360 million listens. Having such a poor grasp on the English language and the phrase “lesser known,” it is far from surprising that the phrase “NO SWAPS” would also be hard to process. The saddest part of this tragedy is that this individual also Tier 5ed his swapped song, an actual good song by a young, up and coming Hollidaysburg artist.
Conclusion
Each individual song of this playlist is somewhere between average and good. However, as a collection of songs, this playlist is not good. There is very little variety and 70% of the songs just blend together in some sort of PG indie twilight zone. Halfway through the playlist I had to double check to see if I accidentally put on the background music playlist from H&M. I suppose it’s no surprise given this demographic, but this is the whitest, yuppiest, predictable selection of music I’ve never heard but have also heard 100x in my life. The fact that the two country songs stood out for being so unique made my head want to explode. To the seven or whatever submissions that stepped outside the box, congrats on your above average brains. To everyone else, believe it or not, there are “lesser known” artists in other genres.
Uncomm on.
Best: “Yo Voy Ganao” - Systema Solar
Props: “Sugar” - Sister Sparrow, “You’ll Miss Me Someday” - Tyler Adair
Worst: “Break My Baby” - KALEO
Playlist Rank: 7.2/10
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No Bens were harmed in the writing of these rankings.