More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.
As an example, I play accordion and I like to hear other accordion play songs on YouTube. There may be lots of covers of a popular song I want to learn, but there are rarely many accordion covers, let alone good ones.
So the question is whether you are looking for generic entertainment, or do you take an interest in something specific? Add another search term to a query and the results can thin out pretty quick.
From a professional creator’s point of view (not me), the question is whether these niches have enough money in them to get started and grow from there? And that depends on market conditions. Can people find what they like when it’s not mainstream?
So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Unless accordion covers go viral on its own, it’s probably not going to break out. But if it did then YouTube would add fuel to the fire as long as people are responding
It doesn't have to be mainstream to get the flywheel started, just well-liked by some niche.
If you have Spotify, here's a playlist of accordion recordings I like: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Ydvyr0ZjfiG4085izipNC
E.g. I'm subscribed to a bunch of obscure, specialized subreddits that would be deadly boring to most people. But my reddit is far more interesting to me than the reddit I see when I'm not logged in, where posts have thousands of upvotes instead of dozens.
I once read about an experiment where users would listen to music and and the platform counted the number of listens and showed users. When the experiment was rerun, a different set of songs from the first experiment were popular. I believe I read this in Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger.
The point is that most content platforms select for content that is sufficiently good (or clickable) but not necessarily the best.
Best is in the eye of the beholder anyway. But, truth be told, as long as an algorithm is reasonably dialed into my genre preferences... (There are some genres I just don't like even if you show me the very cream of the crop. And there are less popular ones that I'll probably enjoy even Tier 2 performers well enough.) I'll be pretty well satisfied with the overall most popular songs in those genres. Will it hit all my favorites. No. But it wouldn't be a bad cut.
I actually think this has gotten quite a bit worse thanks to algorithmic content recommendations. For instance, when Pandora launched with hand-curated content, the recommendations were a lot better than I currently get with spotify.