From the Niches to the Masses

We often only know about niche and underrepresented music genres as much as their representatives are willing to share with us. In many cases, they don't apply for public funding, they don't ask for help from export organisations, and so they disappear from our radar as a matter of course. Ironically, it is often the representatives of these underrepresented genres, such as metal or hip hop, who fill stadiums and have a significant impact on the music industry. Meanwhile, niche genres such as jazz or world music often serve as a basis for the export of music for entire countries, sometimes as a deliberate national strategy, but more often as a natural course of events. It seems that in most cases it started as an underground activity, based on instincts rather than knowledge, although nowadays metal, jazz, hip hop or world music scenes are professional markets successfully operating outside the mainstream and making excellent use of such tools as branding, crisis management, mixed media, narrative based marketing etc. How is this possible? What do they do better than artists operating in the mainstream genres? Is it about the quality of the music itself or specific organizational and marketing skills?