Follow these 4 steps after realizing your musical exclusivity badge has been ripped away from your superior lifestyle.

We’ve all liked an artist before it was cool, and we’ve all closely guarded the secrets of its existence, revealing them only to flaunt our knowledge of underground music in our friends’ stupid faces.

It’s a pretty special feeling, knowing about the next big thing before it becomes the next big thing. It is, however, a fleeting sensation. As the object of our discovery becomes increasingly visible to the general public, we lose interest in reverse proportion. Since popularity and success can be a fickle bitch in the music world, here are our suggestions for what to do when your favorite musicians get too big to like anymore.

Find a new band, style, genre, etc.

The first response to your favorite band becoming too mainstream is the most obvious: find another little-known band that you can be proud of. When that band gets too big, find another even more obscure band to follow. When all the artists in that particular genre are all too popular, move on to another genre. The problem with this coping method is that it must be repeated ad infinitum, but the repetition is worth it to be a step ahead of all those other mainstream fools. 

Go back and listen to the music you liked before.

Who doesn’t love a good throwback? The next method for coping with the loss of a hidden musical gem is to retrace your past and listen to the shit that was popular before your latest discovery. Re-discovery is almost as fulfilling as knowing about a band before it blows up. Admittedly, when Skrillex started popping off, we went back and revisited boy bands. Everyone totally wanted to borrow our Discman and listen to our Backstreet Boys CDs. In hindsight, frosting our tips was probably a little drastic, though.

Start your own band.

This next step is guaranteed to make you one the first fans a band has, but it requires a little effort. Considering it takes all of a month for an artist to complete the cycle of popularity from “underground nobody” to “filthy rich megastar,” it can sometimes be easier to just give up on fandom and start your own band. This way when you put on your band’s shitty album and people ask whose shitty album it is, you can bask in the delight of being the only one who knows.

Give up on music altogether. Books are super hip anyway.

If you’ve exhausted all of other options and still aren’t (self)satisfied, it may be time to just accept that you are an unappeasable hipster and are better off giving up on music to read books and alternative magazines instead. Chances are good that when you ask your friends if they’ve read Noam Chomsky’s latest opus you will have the opportunity to be in the know once again because no one has a clue who the fuck Noam Chomsky is. To guard against any potential thunder-stealers, just tell everyone he’s a dubstep DJ and that they’ve probably never heard of him.