I was sharing music with a friend and their reaction upon being shown an artist (not even listening) was "ew less than 100k monthly listens”

bro? is this your metric for good music ? how many people listen to it on Spotify ?

if this is how avg ppl see music it explains a lot about top 40 charts

It’s sadly a very common thing and applies to just about everything. “It’s not popular so it’s automatically bad”, I’m just glad I’m not forced to be around people like that too often.
this is also why vote manipulation is a thing. people are prejudiced by the appearance of a consensus.