Indie music and the question of whether scale is the enemy of quality is something I've been arguing about with myself for years.

There's a version of the argument that goes: small scale produces better music because it eliminates commercial pressure, creates direct relationships with audiences, and allows artistic risks that larger audiences won't tolerate. I find this persuasive in specific cases.

But I also think it can become a form of snobbery that romanticizes obscurity for its own sake. Some genuinely great music has found large audiences, and some genuinely mediocre music is deliberately obscure. The correlation between obscurity and quality is not reliable enough to use as a discovery heuristic.

What I've settled on is a more specific version of the argument: commercial pressure of certain kinds — the pressure to fit radio formats, to produce accessible singles, to avoid alienating mainstream audiences — does damage certain kinds of music. But scale alone doesn't require commercial compromise, and some artists scale up without losing what made their music interesting.