I also like these weird bluegrass bands like The Steeldrivers. I have two Steeldrivers albums in my iTunes library. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm listening to their eponymous album as I type this. Anyway, I think danzig6767 has hit the nail on the head when he says that "hipster" is "thrown around to loosely." It's like "rock." You hear one of those terms, and you still have no idea what the music is about. I recall the days when we could call radio stations with requests. We always figured that if a station would play Snopek, it was cool. Smaller stations in Milwaukee and Madison would do that, along with a reservation station in northwestern Wisconsin. I stopped listening to commercial radio a long, long time ago. The big fat flaw is that artists have to fit their music to a formula to get played. It was a major bummer when Madison's WIBA suddenly changed from a free-flowing format to a commercially dictated format circa 1980. (Before that, they'd fulfill requests for Snopek. ) If there's good commercial music that I end up liking, I've likely found out about it through one of the ways that danzig6767 mentioned… just like I would have found out about music that hasn't been acknowledged commercially. Satellite and the Internet have helped considerably. iTunes has been huge. There are streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. And of course, word of mouth has always been around. But the fact that listeners are looking for something other than what's considered "popular" doesn't make them "hipsters." People are simply looking for good blues, jazz, punk, classical, folk, country, rock and roll, bluegrass, or whatever.