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.
My mother in law used to refuse to eat in an empty or nearly empty restaurant. On the logic that if it’s empty it must be bad. Never mind that the reason a restaurant is empty often has more to do with location than quality, or that it’s packed for dinner and empty at lunch or vice versa.

Wild, I refuse to go to packed restaurants because my experience will be markedly worse… my favorite time is between 2-4, because everywhere is dead then.

To each their own, I guess.