Underground Music

Underground music comprises a range of different musical genres that operate outside of mainstream culture. Such music may tend to express common ideals, such as high regard for sincerity and intimacy, freedom of creative expression as opposed to the highly formulaic composition of commercial music, and appreciation of artistic individuality as opposed to conformity to current mainstream trends. Apart from perhaps the underground rock scenes in the pre-Mikhail Gorbachev Soviet Union, very few types of underground music are completely hidden, however, performances and recordings may nevertheless be difficult for outsiders to find.

Some underground musical genres never left their non-mainstream roots, such as jagged, aggressive UK 82-style hardcore punk bands like Discharge. Some underground styles eventually became mainstream, commercialized pop styles, as did for example the underground hip hop style of the early 1980s. In the 2000s, the increasing availability of the Internet and digital music technologies has made underground music easier to distribute using streaming audio and podcasts. Some experts in cultural studies now argue that "there is no underground" because the internet has made what was underground music accessible to everyone at the click of a mouse. One expert, Martin Raymond, of London based company The Future Laboratory commented in an article in The Independent, saying trends in music, art and politics are:

... now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.

In effect, this means a boy band (for instance) could be influenced by a (formerly) obscure 1960s garage rock, early 1980s post punk, noise rock acts like Pussy Galore or even composers of avant-garde classical music such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, while maintaining recognisability as a boy band.