Are we too “online” for subcultures in music?
Warehouse rave in France, C. Arts Council Collection
Cosmos Zero Aggodino
The year is 1995. You’re in Camden on a damp Friday night, queuing outside the Dublin Castle with a folded copy of Melody Maker under your arm. Everyone looks more or less the same: shaggy hair, charity-shop shirts, suede jackets, Adidas Gazelles or battered Doc Martens. Jheez. The indie scene has its own quiet uniform: second-hand cool, studied nonchalance, a look that says “I don’t care” but took an hour to assemble. Across the street, the ravers are gearing up for an entirely different night with bucket hats, fluorescent windbreakers, glow sticks, and baggy baggy jeans wide enough to hide half a subwoofer. Fairs. Two tribes disparate in appearance, but united by the same hunger to belong to something. Each scene speaks through style, a shared visual code that shows who’s on your wavelength.
Nowadays, all it takes is a hashtag.
In the age of constant connectivity, subcultures – those vibrant, rebellious pockets of identity that once thrived on locality and difference- seem to have dissolved into the endless scroll of online content.
Every aesthetic is instantly available and endlessly remixable. Don’t get me wrong - this is fantastic for many reasons. It’s easy to condense this conversation into a simple “Internet bad, touch grass”, but it’s important to recognise that young people in particular are being introduced to styles, sounds, and ideas that once would have taken years - or at the very least, heaps of crate-digging - to discover. A teenager in rural Scotland can stumble across Japanese city pop, or a kid in Brazil can fall in love with 1980s post-punk from Manchester. The age of information has broken down the old cultural barriers, letting anyone find their tribe without having to live in the right city or know the right people.
But whilst access has exploded, commitment has thinned.
What once took time, effort, and belonging can now be “tried on” like an outfit – a quick experiment before moving on to the next trend. Scenes that once required immersion, community, and lived experience are now available as - though better words abound - “expressions”: scrollable, replicable and disposable.
The barriers that once defined identity have dissolved, replaced by endless possibility - and with it, a quiet loss of depth, continuity, and conviction.
Platforms like TikTok, Pinterest and Instagram distribute aesthetics globally in seconds. The distance between underground and mainstream has collapsed. The word “niche” used to mean protection, but now one could argue it means “early trend”. What once took several years to evolve now circulates at the speed of virality. You could even go as far as saying subculture has become style without substance – a series of visual cues detached from the communities that birthed them. Punk, goth, and grunge are no longer underground identities, but instead algorithmic moods: cores to be curated, posted, and forgotten by next week.
The question is: has that accessibility enriched cultural life, or stripped it of the depth that once made subcultures matter?
Subcultures used to live and die – literally expire – in specific places. Punk had London and New York; hip-hop had the Bronx; rave culture pulsed through warehouses across Europe. In addition to being styles, they were deep social movements built on shared experience and a sense of belonging that required effort to find. You didn’t stumble into a scene by accident; you earned your way in by caring enough to look for it. The cliques rewarded consistency. Subcultures were local, tactile, and alive. The clothing, the slang, the music – everything was coded in a form of friendly dogwhistling: a signal to others in the know. They offered an escape from the mainstream, a kind of rebellion rooted in a physical community.
You know, it’s not the same as it was.
The result is what writer Kyle Chayka calls a “flattened culture” – a world where trends move so fast that they lose their meaning before they even land. When everything is visible, nothing feels exclusive. Online, every symbol of resistance can be copied, monetised, and turned into content within days. Subcultures once thrived on scarcity and mystery; now, they’re instantly accessible, endlessly imitable, and stripped of risk. The underground has largely gone digital, but in doing so, it’s lost the (un)proper grit that made it feel alive.
This shift reflects a deeper social change. Sociologist Dr. Elyakim Kislev calls it 'networked individualism' – the idea that in digital life, we're no longer locked into stable groups but instead float between networks of personal connections. You belong to everything and nothing simultaneously. Online identity is fluid and performative. Instead of joining a subculture and staying there, you sample from many: a bit of goth aesthetic today, cloud rap tomorrow, cottagecore next week. The internet allows anyone to experiment with looks, sounds, and attitudes. But here's the trade-off: these experiments happen without the community that once gave them weight. You can look like you belong to something without ever actually belonging to it.
In some ways, this flexibility is liberating. The online world has opened space for people who might have been excluded from traditional scenes: queer, neurodivergent, or diasporic communities can now connect and create across borders. Digital subcultures can be deeply supportive, intimate, and politically aware. Yet even these spaces risk becoming performative content streams rather than lived experiences. Participation often becomes consumption: following, liking, and reposting instead of living the culture in real time.
For culture as a whole, this hyperconnectivity is both a gift and a curse. On one hand, it’s democratised creativity: anyone can start a micro-scene or invent a new sound from their bedroom. Look at what the COVID-19 Lockdown era, as tragic as it was, contributed to the new “indie” culture in Summer 2020.
The Bitter End in Romford, closed 2019
This shift reflects a deeper social change. Sociologist Dr. Elyakim Kislev calls it 'networked individualism' – the idea that in digital life, we're no longer locked into stable groups but instead float between networks of personal connections. You belong to everything and nothing simultaneously. Online identity is fluid and performative. Instead of joining a subculture and staying there, you sample from many: a bit of goth aesthetic today, cloud rap tomorrow, cottagecore next week. The internet allows anyone to experiment with looks, sounds, and attitudes. But here's the trade-off: these experiments happen without the community that once gave them weight. You can look like you belong to something without ever actually belonging to it.
In some ways, this flexibility is liberating. The online world has opened space for people who might have been excluded from traditional scenes: queer, neurodivergent, or diasporic communities can now connect and create across borders. Digital subcultures can be deeply supportive, intimate, and politically aware. Yet even these spaces risk becoming performative content streams rather than lived experiences. Participation often becomes consumption: following, liking, and reposting instead of living the culture in real time.
For culture as a whole, this hyperconnectivity is both a gift and a curse. On one hand, it’s democratised creativity: anyone can start a micro-scene or invent a new sound from their bedroom. Look at what the COVID-19 Lockdown era, as tragic as it was, contributed to the new “indie” culture in Summer 2020.
Bedroom artists, online communities, and virtual collaborations flourished in ways that would have been impossible even a decade earlier. Songs and trends could circulate instantly, giving rise to new stars seemingly overnight. On the other, it’s made cultural innovation feel weightless. Every underground idea is instantly absorbed by the mainstream and, rather tragically, the corporate world. Every rebellious look monetised by brands and algorithms. The system now feeds on difference, converting individuality into engagement metrics. What once resisted capitalism now fuels it.
As scenes continue to gradually digitalise, the physical spaces that once nurtured subcultures are disappearing: the Music Venue Trust (MVT) reports that over one-sixth of UK grassroots music venues have closed in the past year, and they further estimate that 35% have closed over the last 20 years. Fewer stages, fewer basements, fewer venues — the tactile backbone of subcultural life is quietly eroding.
The pandemic hastened the shift toward finding our communities in digital spaces. Digital micro-tribes like Discord servers, niche newsletters and anonymous SoundCloud communities now carry the spirit of those lost venues.
They may lack the same tactile immediacy, but they offer space for experimentation, collaboration, and a sense of belonging. Even as physical hubs vanish, subcultures adapt, thriving in virtual corners where creativity, authenticity, and community endure, albeit in a less tangible form.
Take the UK underground rap scene in 2025. Artists like Fakemink deliberately blur their identities – minimal social media, anonymous features, no clear origin story. You find them through Reddit threads, Discord servers, and private Soundcloud links. The community is tight, almost gatekeepy. Ceebo represents the inverse: hyper-visible, constantly posting studio sessions. His 2024 project LAMBETHNOTLA was community-sourced – fans submitted beats, voted on features, watched it unfold across Discord.
What enriches the scene isn't choosing one strategy over the other, but that both exist simultaneously. Fakemink's mystery creates scarcity and hunger; Ceebo's transparency creates ownership and collaboration. The tension between the two methods forces the scene to ask real questions: Who owns culture? Can you build a community without exclusion? Can you stay underground while being completely visible? Neither needs record label validation.
Both are proving that subculture survives online, not despite the constraints, but because artists are forced to choose how they want to be known. In a landscape where everything is supposedly accessible, the real subcultural move is deciding what to keep hidden and what to share.
In this evolving landscape, the essence of subculture remains very much alive – not in the physical spaces of the past, but in the digital realms where creativity, authenticity, and community thrive.
Still, I can’t help but feel something on a wider scale has been lost. Walking past another closed venue, I wonder if we've actually gained anything. When every aesthetic is instantly visible and globally shared, culture loses the friction that once made it evolve. Subcultures used to thrive on tension – between inside and outside, rebellion and conformity, discovery and secrecy. The internet has erased those lines, leaving us with a culture that is broader, faster, and shallower all at once.
The basement club has become the comment section. The punk fanzine is now a meme account. We aren’t particularly lacking creativity, but we’re drowning in it, scattered across endless feeds. Perhaps the next real subculture won’t come from being more online, but from turning away from it. In a world where everything is shared, the ultimate act of rebellion might be to go offline and start again. (Please)