One important reason the profusion of music now being produced independently has remained unknown to most people is the simple lack of an effective means of presenting it.  

This hasn't been for lack of trying.  Since the beginning of the Internet era, any number of websites have arisen that promised to connect currently-unknown musicians with people who might appreciate their work, hoping that a large enough shared site would be able to attract enough curious visitors to be self-sustaining (an outcome that was effectively unimaginable for musicians presenting songs on the web entirely on their own).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this proposition, but to date, none of these sites have caught on with the public. The primary reason:  they've failed at identifying their best material.  As a result, site visitors have been unwilling to wade through every sub-mediocre effort by every questionably-talented creator to find something they might really like.

This problem seems now to have been solved by improved techniques of social content curation—providing incentives for music bloggers and traditional journalists, people who book bands for clubs, DJs who long for the days when they got to do more than just be on-air “personalities,” and pretty much anyone else who might have the proverbial “golden ear” to invest their time in bringing the best work to light.

With this critical boost, it’s possible that music created wholly outside the mass market-worshipping, blockbuster-obsessed “mainstream” music industry could catch on to a significant degree with the public—for many of the same emotional reasons that a lot of people today have become dedicated aficionados of small, locally-produced craft beers.

In its own way, music can be more intoxicating than beer, because it’s capable of expressing our essence and yearnings in a far richer, more nuanced and powerful way than just hefting a bottle of suds.  If this music is made by previously-unknown people overthrowing a powerful, deeply-entrenched behemoth of mass-marketing power and cultural clout, the thrill could be profoundly liberating--even existential.

In the glow of such a grass-roots revolution in music, we could reasonably anticipate people feeling less voiceless and small, and correspondingly less drawn to snarling neo-tribalism, or attempting to become “somebodies” via the application of lead from the muzzle of an AR-15 to large groups of their fellow citizens.