Sleeper Hit / Music

Songs

• A number of Breakaway Pop Hits from films fall into this category. To list all the most prominent examples from that page would send the category on overflow, but here are some of the more notable examples.
  • Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)". Its source film, The Breakfast Club, was a moderate box successful at the box office in the U.S., making almost $45 million U.S. though it made another $51 million internationally on a $1 million budget, but frequent airplay on radio stations led to the tune becoming one of the most popular songs of 1985.
  • "End of the Road" by Boyz II Men. It was recorded for the Eddie Murphy film Boomerang, which made back its budget but has since fallen into obscurity. "Road", meanwhile, is the best-selling single in Motown's history.
  • Roberta Flack's cover of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was tucked away in her 1969 debut album First Take. It would stay that way until Clint Eastwood included it on his directorial debut Play Misty for Me, itself a sleeper hit. Atlantic Records released the song as a single in 1972 and it shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 where it stayed for six consecutive weeks, eventually becoming the number one song of the year, and winning two Grammys.
  • Pharrell Williams' "Happy" initially made little impact when it was released alongside Despicable Me 2. When it got a 24-hour music video, was nominated for an Oscar and he performed it at the ceremony, then people noticed; it eventually went to #1 for 10 weeks, and became one of the biggest hits of the decade.
  • Everyone knew that Furious 7 was going to be a huge hit, but nobody could have predicted the runaway success of its lead single "See You Again" by Wiz Khalifa. It sold nearly 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone the week after the movie came out, had a 12-week reign on the top of the charts, and the biggest graduation song since Vitamin C's "Graduation".
  • "Somewhere Out There", as recorded by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram for An American Tail, could be considered the 1980's equivalent to "See You Again". It reached #2 on Billboard in 1987, as Tail's popularity began to slide off, and was also a top 40 radio hit that became a wedding staple and helped popularize the Award-Bait Song for films, especially animated ones.
• Eurovision Song Contest:
  • The 2017 Portuguese entry "Amar pelos dois" was not viewed as a strong favorite when it was chosen to represent the country in Kiev. But it wasn't until the actual contest when it won people over, and Portugal - who had never even placed in the top five before then^note their best placing at that point was sixth back in 1996 - would go on to claim their first victory.
  • Austria was never as successful as most other countries and had only won once before they decided to send bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst in 2014. Her song "Rise Like a Phoenix" was initially met with a mixed response, but it went on to take the top honors in Copenhagen.
  • In the 2022 contest (which included hitherto out-of-form pair of Spain and The U.K. making pushes for the title after years of struggle, and with entries that were initially divisive when chosen), Armenia sent Nu-folk ballad "Snap" by female singer songwriter Rosa Linn. The song had decent reviews but initially took time to win the fandom over owing to the country’s popular 2020 entry not being given her promised participation that was given to most other acts from that year for 2021 - from which Armenia abruptly withdrew. Indeed, it achieved the bare minimum in the contest, getting Armenia back into it for the first time in 5 years but placing only 20th. However, its appeal allowed it to be played in sped-up form on TikTok which helped the song become a major viral hit over the summer, and therefore become a Billboard hot 100 chart hit.
• In 2014, a then-20-year old aspiring pop singer from Nantucket, Massachusetts named Meghan Trainor recorded the song "All About That Bass", which had a rather unusual message about body acceptance and mixed pop rap (with Trainor both rapping and singing) with Doo-wop ^note she had also tried, unsuccessfully, to have the song recorded by other artists (notably Beyoncé) before deciding to record it herself. Early in July, the song started to make a small impact as a viral hit. Then, at the end of the month, it started to surge up the charts. By the end of August, it was one step away from the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. It stayed atop the chart for a whopping eight weeks, becoming the second longest running #1 of the year and the longest in Epic Records' history. Yes, the same Epic Records behind the catalog of one Michael Jackson (!). It ultimately finished 2014 as one of the top five best-selling songs of the year. She went on to have several other hits since then.
• Neal McCoy's 2005 hit "Billy's Got His Beer Goggles On" was this. He had left Warner (Bros.) Records after an unreleased album, and had signed to an independent label which closed before he could release anything. Issued on his own label 903 Music, "Billy's Got His Beer Goggles On" charted for one week on Hot Country Songs, fell off for a long time... then re-entered and slowly nudged its way into the Top 10 by year's end, thus becoming his biggest radio hit since "The Shake" in 1997 and one of his most popular songs overall.
• The Chainsmokers' "Closer". The NYC-based production duo, previously only known for the reviled One-Hit Wonder novelty hit "#SELFIE", had two comeback hits with "Roses" and "Don't Let Me Down" before releasing this collaboration with alt-pop singer Halsey. It shot up to number-one in only its third week, becoming the longest reigning #1 of 2016 and as of this writing is tied with LeAnn Rimes' "How Do I Live" for the longest-running top 10 single in the history of Billboard's Hot 100, with both spending a total of 32 weeks in the tier. Not to mention breaking the record for the most weeks in the top 5, at 26.
• "Creep" by Radiohead initially received very little airplay upon parent album Pablo Honey's release in 1992. It wasn't until months later in 1993 that it became an international success that it was re-released in the UK and became a top 40 hit.
• Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why" got off to a slow start — it was initially only released to AAA radio and was generally ignored upon its January 28, 2002 release. Later that year, after Top 40 and Hot AC stations began spinning the track and it was serviced to those formats, parent album Come Away with Me went platinum, topped the Billboard 200 a year after it's release and swept the 2003 Grammys.
• Tracy Lawrence had largely been absent from country music radio since 1997 when a domestic dispute with his ex-wife largely proved to be a Creator Killer. While he had stray hits in 2000 and 2004 with "Lessons Learned" and "Paint Me a Birmingham", both were stunted by label closures. Recording independently in 2006, he released "Find Out Who Your Friends Are", which lingered at the very bottom of the country singles charts for nearly half a year. Then radio stations caught wind of a remix featuring Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw on guest vocals, causing an unexpected surge in airplay due to their star power. The result? A 42-week run to the top (then the slowest in the chart's history), Lawrence's first #1 hit since 1996, and one of his most popular songs overall.
• Swedish singer Tove Lo's song "Habits (Stay High)" was originally released in 2013, then simply called "Habits". It was later rereleased under the new title in late 2013 and started to slowly climb the charts. Eventually, it sold over 2,000,000 copies and received a 5x platinum certification in the US alone. It peaked at top 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Ironically, the original song never made the Swedish singles chart, but the Hippie Sabotage remix did. Said remix didn't enter the US Hot 100. However, together they managed to sell over 4,000,000 worldwide.
• Leonard Cohen's much-covered song "Hallelujah". The original version released in 1984 began life as a forgotten album track on Cohen's album Various Positions. Former Velvet Underground musician John Cale did a rearranged version of the song in 1991 for a Cohen tribute album entitled I'm Your Fan but that also went unnoticed. Jeff Buckley then did a cover based on Cale's version three years later on his album Grace, which was in itself a sleeper hit, bringing the song to prominence. The inclusion of Cale's version in Shrek helped a lot, as did another version by Rufus Wainwright (replacing the Cale recording version on the soundtrack album). Since then, literally hundreds of artists have covered it and various versions have frequently been used in films and TV shows (though, ironically, the original Cohen recording didn't appear in any other media until it was used in Watchmen, but that was only because another recording of the tune was rejected from that film).
• Alessia Cara released her debut single "Here" in April 2015. After circulating on the Internet for several months as well as Cara's performance of the song on the The Tonight Show, it started to chart in the fall of 2015. By the start of the following year, the song reached top 40 positions in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States, where it took six months to reach its number five peak.
• Many were taken aback when Panic! at the Disco's 2018 song "High Hopes" reached the number 5 position on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming their first major hit single in ten years, long after the band had all but disappeared from the mainstream eye.
• MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" is one of the few Contemporary Christian songs to cross over to the mainstream pop charts. But it wouldn't have done so if some shock jocks at Dallas's then-Top 40 station 100.3 Wild-FM didn't play the song as a one-off joke, giving the song a Colbert Bump to top 40 and adult contemporary radio stations across the country.
• Blanco Brown looked destined to be a One-Hit Wonder with the viral 2019 hit "The Git Up", an obvious Follow the Leader of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" which looked to fuse contemporary hip-hop with country music. That same year, he collaborated with Parmalee, an obscure country band who had not had a hit in years, to release the ballad "Just the Way". A slow-burn fueled largely by streaming ensued, and the song enjoyed a 43-week ascent to the top of the country charts — no small feat when the COVID-19 pandemic rendered bands unable to tour, and especially after Blanco himself spent a large portion of the song's chart run hospitalized after a motorcycle accident.
• Major Lazer had been around for years as the side project of Electronic Music DJ Diplo. They were popular for years and filled up dance clubs across the world, but never truly had a hit of their own. Then in 2015, they released "Lean On" in collaboration with DJ Snake featuring vocals from little known Danish singer MØ. The result was not an immediate success, as it debuted at the bottom and slowly rose up the charts and fell back a few times, but the longer it stuck around, the more people discovered the song. It eventually went Top 5 over five months after release, hit #1 in almost every other county it charted, and became the biggest EDM crossover since Avicii's "Wake Me Up" until The Chainsmokers' "Closer" (see above).
• A virtually unknown English singer-songwriter named Passenger released the single "Let Her Go" in mid-2012 for his third studio album. The song initially made waves on Dutch radio in late 2012, and in the following year went on to top the charts in multiple countries, as well as peak at number 2 in the UK and number 5 on the Hot 100 in the US. The song is now one of the most streamed songs ever on Spotify, and its music video is in the top 30 most watched YouTube videos of all time.
• Roxette were a Swedish soft rock Supergroup-esque duo formed by Gyllene Tider frontman Per Gessle and successful solo performer Marie Fredriksson. The duo had a fairly big hit in Europe with their debut album Pearls of Passion in 1986, but it was practically ignored outside of Europe. In 1988, they put out the album Look Sharp!, which included the catchy anthemic song "The Look". While studying in Sweden, an American exchange student from Minneapolis, Dean Cushman, heard "The Look" and liked it enough that he purchased a copy of the album and brought it home, giving a copy of it to his local Top 40 radio station, KDWB 101.3 FM, who put "The Look" into rotation. "The Look" quickly became popular, and the station began distributing the track to their sister radio operations. "The Look" rapidly climbed up the Top 50 as it spread across American radio, then peaked at number one eight weeks later, all before Roxette even began official promotion in the US (as EMI America had previously rejected the duo as unsuitable for the American market, and Roxette did not have a recording contract there). As a result of the surprise success of "The Look", Roxette got an American recording contract and had several more hits in the US, including the Pretty Woman soundtrack single "It Must Have Been Love", another no. 1 hit for the duo.
• Lee Brice's "Love Like Crazy", with a 56-week chart run spanning 2009 and 2010, broke a record set in 1948 by Eddy Arnold's "Bouquet of Roses" for the longest continuous run on the Billboard country music charts at the time. Thanks to its longevity, it also became the first song to top the Billboard Year-End chart for the country format despite only peaking at #3 on the weekly charts.
  • Brice's longevity record has been broken countless times since. As of 2022, the longest run on Country Airplay is a tie between "After a Few" by Travis Denning and "Whiskey and Rain" by Michael Ray, both of which took sixty-five weeks before finally peaking at #1 in mid-2020 and early 2022 respectively.
• The Michael Andrews and Gary Jules version of "Mad World", a cover of a 1982 Tears for Fears song, was an unusual case of a song taking several years to became a hit. The song was originally included in 2001's Donnie Darko, itself a sleeper hit that didn't have a major following until it came out on DVD, and then on Jules' 2001 album Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets. The song slowly developed a following of its own from Donnie Darko's growing popularity and from frequent radio play, and it wasn't until late 2003 that the song was released as a single and a music video was filmed.
• The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed reached a moderate #27 on the UK Albums Chart upon its release in 1967. Reviews were quite lukewarm, with Rolling Stone even calling it "an English rock group strangling itself in conceptual goo". However, the album and especially the single "Nights in White Satin" received steady radio airplay in the US over the years, and eventually, the latter reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 five years later in 1972. The album has since been recognized as one of the first examples of Progressive Rock and one of the finest records of The '60s.
• When the COVID-19 pandemic started, 15-year-old Savanna Shaw recorded created an Instagram account to keep in touch with her choir friends. Her first post was a video of her and her father Mat singing "The Prayer", which went viral. The father-daughter duo's rise to fame is exceptional since this was Savanna's first social media post ever, and such posts rarely ever go viral, according to Forbes. They have since released several successful albums, performed at a number of concerts, and have announced a Christmas tour for 2021.
• "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People gained momentum slowly, hitting its chart peak at #3 in the US about a year after its initial single release. To say nothing of it being unusual for pop radio at the time, even more lyrically than sonically. Radio has become more friendly to alternative crossovers since, but it was literally the only major crossover hit of 2011.
• Vance Joy came straight from Triple J's Unearthed indie podcast with no record deal even. When he won the Hottest 100 countdown, his song "Riptide" was a hit on rock radio and made #32 in the US and the Top 10 in several other countries. Not bad for an out-of-nowhere jam.
• Saint Jhn's "Roses" was completely ignored back in its 2016 release, but three years later, a then-unknown producer by the name of Imanbek gave it an EDM remix and once it was featured on a Snapchat filter and countless TikTok videos, it began to spread all across the world. By 2020 the song was a global smash, topping the charts in several countries and peaking at the Top 10 almost everywhere else.
• Capital Cities' "Safe and Sound" was released on January 6, 2011 but was completely unnoticed for over two years, until it was rereleased for their debut album. It topped the Alternative charts and reached a #8 peak on the Hot 100 in October of 2013, over two-and-a-half years after it was released.
• Awolnation's "Sail" was released in January of 2011, but didn't chart until September of that year. After spending twenty weeks at the bottom of the chart, it fell off. Then it reappeared over a year later, it reached a new peak of #17 and stayed there for 79 weeks, making it the second-longest run in Billboard history.
• "Somebody I Used to Know" by Gotye is also unusual for a pop song and became a smash hit without any prior mainstream following - no doubt due to it topping Triple J's Hottest 100 poll for the year 2011. The Walk Off the Earth cover (you know, the one where they're all playing on one guitar) may have also done the trick.
• Simon & Garfunkel's first album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. flopped, but its album track "The Sounds of Silence" got some late-night airplay in Boston and it quickly gained a following among college students. Capitalizing on the growth of folk rock, producer Tom Wilson added some rock instrumentation and re-released the song in November 1965. By January, it was No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and the duo (which had split up after Wednesday bombed), reunited to quickly record an album, Sounds of Silence.
• Nobody would expect a heavy metal band to come close to the Top 40 in 2016, but Disturbed somehow pulled it off with their cover of "The Sound of Silence", peaking at an amazing #42.
• Sabaton's song "Swedish Pagans" was only published as a bonus track on the Updated Re-release of The Art of War. It proved so popular it got its own T-shirt.
• Hozier's "Take Me to Church" was released in 2013, but didn't become a hit in the U.S. after the song (and its accompanying video) went viral over a year later, where it shot up to #2 behind Taylor Swift's "Blank Space", and spent a whopping 23 weeks atop the Rock charts (a feat matched only by Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive", until it was broken by Walk the Moon's "Shut Up and Dance").
• When The Zombies' "Time of the Season" was first released in the UK in March 1968, it followed a series of flop singles that didn't even chart, and the band had decided to call it quits at this point. Then Singer-Songwriter/producer/session musician Al Kooper, who was also working as a Columbia Records A&R rep at the time, listened to its parent album Odessey and Oracle, and loved the song so much he urged Columbia to re-release "Time of the Season" in the US in early 1969, despite the band having dissolved a year prior. This time, it became a smash hit, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the RPM Canada Top Singles chart.
• "Truth Hurts" by Lizzo was released in September 2017 to little attention. After gaining viral popularity on TikTok and being featured in the film Someone Great, it climbed to #1 on Billboard Hot 100, stayed there for 7 weeks and netted 3 Grammy nominations, a whole 2 years after the song's original release.
• Mark Ronson collaborated with Bruno Mars on "Uptown Funk!" with worldwide success on the horizon. Everyone expected Ronson to get his all-time biggest success, but not too many people thought that Mars would get his biggest hit with the song as well — let alone the biggest song of the decade so far.
• "We Are Young" by fun. came out of nowhere and is more unusual than most pop songs. YouTube music critic Todd in the Shadows (during his review of that song and the below-mentioned "Somebody That I Used To Know") attributed the song's hit status to the Glee cast covering the song, though it never truly took off until it was featured in a Chevy commercial that played during the Super Bowl a few months after the Glee episode aired.
• White Town was a very obscure artist when he released his song "Your Woman", but it happened to catch the attention of BBC Radio 1 DJ Mark Radcliffe who played it on the station. It caused the song to spread like wildfire and "Your Woman" was soon #1 in the UK.

Albums

• Hard though it may be to believe, XL Recordings (an indie label) only had moderate expectations for the album 21 by Adele, whose first album had done well enough, but was perceived as being just another Amy Winehouse copycat. The album ended up doing much better in Britain than they had hoped (helped along by Adele's show-stealing performance at the BRIT Awards) and it certainly exceeded expectations for the US, eventually selling 30 million copies worldwide.
• Bat Out of Hell was hated by almost everybody at the record label, Meat Loaf was effectively a total nobody, and initial reviews were fairly mixed. However, thanks to an aggressive push by the Cleveland International Records head, Steve Popovich, it slowly started selling in the US, with the singles doing particularly well, and in the UK it also benefited from its songs being performed on the concert TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test. In the end, despite the slow start, the album kept selling - In the US, it was rated as 15x Platinum despite the fact that it peaked at #14 on the Billboard 200^note Though it did get a bump up to #13 after Meat Loaf's death. and it's the fourth longest charting album in UK history. All in all, it currently stands as the twelfth best selling album of all time.
• The Black Keys had released five albums and were on the verge of breaking up before releasing Brothers. Their first album to chart, it was certified platinum and nominated for five Grammys, winning two.
• As hard as it may be to believe, Iron Maiden's 2010 album The Final Frontier was announced to moderate-to-low expectations from people who weren't hardcore fans. The band had been successful and one of the biggest metal bands in the world, yet much of this was coming from their concert ticket sales. Ironically enough, when the album was released, it debuted at #1 in 30 countries, including the band's native UK where they'd had their first #1 in 18 years, and while it didn't debut at #1 in the US, it still reached their highest chart position ever (#4 with 63,000 units sold in its first week of release).
• Toby Keith's How Do You Like Me Now?! album got off to a slow start. At the time, he had just signed to DreamWorks Records after disputes with his previous label, Mercury Records. DreamWorks released the album, which consisted largely of material rejected by Mercury, in late 1999. The album and lead single "When Love Fades" were both tanking, so Keith asked if they could pull "When Love Fades" in favor of "How Do You Like Me Now?!" After a slow start on the charts, that song slowly ascended to #1 on the Billboard country singles charts and hold that position for five weeks between March and April 2000. The album eventually built up steam and sold platinum, while also giving him another #1 hit in "You Shouldn't Kiss Me Like This". With his newfound momentum, Keith went on to experience a Career Resurrection that lasted for most of the 21st century's first decade.
• Scooter had massive success in the UK in 2002-2003, but after the flop of the "Jigga Jigga" single, they didn't release anything there for a few years (despite having continued success in Europe, and a lot of UK fans who imported their next few releases). The reason is said to be Scooter's obsession with uncredited samples preventing their albums from being released in the UK. In 2008, Scooter joined the Clubland tour and that tour's label, All Around the World, put out the band's most recent album Jumping All Over The World as a UK release to cash in, with the addition of a Scooter version of Status Quo's "Whatever You Want", and a bonus disc of their greatest hits. Nobody in the UK was expecting the album to get very far, but lo and behold, it reached Number 1 in the album charts, ousting Madonna, and without a hit single. Critics (of which there were many) were eating their words. Unfortunately, their next album, Under the Radar Over the Top, was a flop, so they didn't release anything in the UK after.
• Korn's 1994 debut is a particularly extreme example. Upon release in 1994, it got little media attention and its songs received no airplay. However, critics, as well as everyone who listened to it, noted that the band had a very "unique" sound. It featured heavily downtuned guitars, angsty lyrics, funk-influenced bass, and the absence of solos. Additionally, the album would mix genres as random such as funk metal, grunge, groove metal, prog metal, hip-hop (without actually rapping), hardcore, alt metal, and even traces of death metal. With non-stop touring, more and more people were exposed to the album, and the sound garnered an enthusiastic following. As time went on, it eventually charted on the Billboard 200 nearly two years after release, and sold over 10 million copies worldwide, which shocked even the band; as per Brian "Head" Welch, they expected, at most, to become big for an alternative act, but to otherwise stay niche. The biggest success however, was that it spawned Nu Metal. Those who heard the album emulated, and later modified the sound by forming their own bands, which started in Southern California, but eventually spread across the world as a genre all on its own. This genre, while polarizing and controversial to metal purists, would take the rock music world by storm in the late '90s, and helped revitalize Heavy Metal after spending several years in the underground following Hair Metal's demise. In 2014, Rolling Stone even declared it "the most important metal album in the last 20 years".
• Geffen Records' alternative rock imprint DGC expected that Nirvana's Nevermind would sell about 250,000 units (roughly the same as Sonic Youth's Goo did for the label) and that after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" built the band some buzz on alternative radio, they could attempt a pop crossover with "Come As You Are". Then the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" premiered on 120 Minutes and the rest is history.
• Imagine Dragons released their album Night Visions in September 2012, narrowly being beaten by the latest Matchbox Twenty release. "It's Time" became a big hit on Alternative radio and giving them a big crossover. However, it was the next single, "Radioactive," that would shoot them into the stratosphere. Aside from having a near-record reign on the Alternative charts, it soared into the top 10 with almost no pop airplay that April. About a month later, pop airplay took off dramatically, as the song reached #3 and sold over seven million copies in the U.S. alone, one of less than ten songs to ever accomplish this feat, and the only one that failed to reach #1. It was also the longest-lasting song in Hot 100 history. "Demons" only added onto the success, and Night Visions sold more than 2 million copies, well ahead of Matchbox Twenty's 300,000 total, and outselling similar albums by fun. and The Lumineers.
• Nicki Minaj's album Pink Friday. It got fanfare when it was released, but it was completely overshadowed by the hype for Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released on the same day no less. Its competitors (including West's album) fell, but Pink Friday kept selling, and it reached #1 on the Billboard 200 in its 11th week of release.
• Though Nine Inch Nails debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, didn't sell at all well at first, it gradually managed to crawl its way up to 75 on the Billboard chart. This in spite of being a debut album in a genre (Industrial Music) that had previously had only a handful of relatively minor club hits to its name. The LONG tour and well-received Lollapalooza appearance in 1991 definitely helped- in 1992, it was certified Gold. Almost three years after its release. The next material NIN released (the Broken EP in 1992 and The Downward Spiral in 1994) was much more immediately successful, topping the charts very shortly after release.
• In 1994, Weezer was an obscure band even in their hometown of Los Angeles, and their self-titled debut album only sold a handful of copies in the wake of its May release, and the video for "Undone—The Sweater Song" was a minimalist Spike Jonze affair with a budget of just $60,000. But the song caught fire in late summer, followed with an even bigger hit in "Buddy Holly", and by January '95 the album had gone Platinum.

Artists

• Can you believe that Daft Punk, after seemingly being written off as has-beens, would have their biggest success in 2013? Not only did the duo have their biggest selling album in history (Random Access Memories), but it brought them to the top of the Billboard 200 for the first time ever. And, after years of trying and failing, Daft Punk finally got a top 40 hit in the U.S., "Get Lucky", peaking at #2. Add a huge night at the Grammys, and Daft Punk orchestrated arguably the finest breakthrough/comeback in music history.
• The entire band Delain was one of these. Martijn Westerholt (ex-Within Temptation) started it with vocalist Charlotte Wessels as a studio project, but the debut album Lucidity was such a hit they started touring.
• Inferi was, for a while, an unknown regional act from the Nashville metro area whose reach outside of the area was mostly limited to MySpace and their association with the then-upcoming Enfold Darkness. After a deal with Sumerian Records fell through due to the label being upfront about the gratuitous Executive Meddling that was going to occur, they disappeared completely for several years. Over the next few years, mainman Malcolm Pugh built up something of a Memetic Badass reputation in the underground, and when the band finally released their comeback album The Path of Apotheosis in early 2014, the album slowly gained more of a following than anyone had thought it would, and by 2017, Inferi and Malcolm's label The Artisan Era (which started out as a vehicle for his solo project and eventually put out releases from several of his local friends) had picked up so much steam that Inferi started playing live shows again for the first time since 2009, while The Artisan Era had turned into a fast-rising label that was able to snag numerous established acts and newcomers from all over the world.
• Lorde:
  • It's hard to believe that her Breakthrough Hit "Royals" was an obscure song at one point. Initially a non-single off a little-known EP titled The Love Club, it didn't become the mega hit that it is today until she was lucky enough that an agent heard her sing it at a school talent show. The next thing you know, "Royals" topped charts worldwide, including both the US Pop and Alternative charts, staying atop the former for a whopping nine weeks and becoming the first female artist to top the latter since before she was born. It went 7x multi-platinum in the U.S. alone, easily making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. In a year where Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, and Beyoncé all released new albums, no one ever thought that the female artist who would spend the most weeks at #1 would be a 16-year-old from New Zealand.
  • Her debut album Pure Heroine, despite not topping the Billboard 200 (peaking at #3), stayed in the top 10 for a long time, managing to go platinum - and later, double platinum - (an extremely rare feat for any artist nowadays, and this was her debut album), and sold over three million albums worldwide, easily outselling the Justin Timberlake album that was #1 the week it debuted. All of this was achieved through the quality of the music and positive word-of-mouth, rather than purely mainstream promotion.
• British boy band One Direction is one of the biggest sleeper success story of the 2010s. They were five boys who finished third on the 2010 The X Factor. By then, however, boy bands had been out of fashion for almost a decade - and, as groups like Take That (Band) have shown in the past, they had next to no chance of making it big outside the UK. Add the fact that Justin Bieber's massive popularity was derailing similar heartthrobs' careers like Cody Simpson, and it would appear that they would have a very short shelf life. But then, a campaign to promote their debut album Up All Night went viral and caught on all over the world. As their fanbase continued to multiply dramatically, they started to be as powerful a social media force as Bieber was. Sure, they had a significant American fanbase at the time of their album's U.S. release, but the industry was absolutely shocked when it became clear that it was the top contender for the coveted number-one spot on the Billboard 200 for its release week, a feat never before accomplished by a British band's debut album. It accomplished exactly that, and continued to be a strong selling album well after its release, staying in the top 10 for half a year and becoming the third best-selling album of the year.
• Sanguisugabogg started out as Cameron Boggs' bedroom project that graduated to their grabbing a few friends to jam with and flesh out their songs, and eventually became a local act that rapidly turned into a regional thanks to their heavy self-promotion. By the time Pornographic Seizures was released in mid-2019, they had a substantial amount of buzz across the northeastern United States that rapidly spread across the country, and was enough to turn them into one of the fastest-rising new stars of death metal with nothing more than a demo.
• Shadow of Intent started out as one of many bedroom deathcore projects on Bandcamp, with no real intention of ever playing live. Primordial wound up gaining a surprising amount of buzz, however (likely due in no small part to vocalist Ben Duerr's strong social media presence), and after they gained a full band and released Reclaimer in 2017, their buzz had reached absolutely astronomical heights, enough to give them a compelling reason to start playing shows instead of just being a studio project. Their first set of live dates all sold out the venues that they were playing, and multiple attendees flew over from across the country, or, in at least one case, all the way over from Germany to see them.
• Slipknot's entire rise to fame was this. While they emerged during the peak of nu metal's dominance, they were quite far removed from the rest of the genre stylistically. As an overtly death metal-influenced act from flyover country (at a time when death metal was largely viewed as a fad whose time had passed) with no real radio friendliness, no one was expecting them to explode the way they did. Yes, they had some label hype behind them, but so did plenty of other acts that went absolutely nowhere. They should have been yet another act that played Ozzfest and two or three other major package tours, then vanished into obscurity. Instead, they exploded out of the gate as they went platinum and went from supporting tours to drawing significantly more as a headliner than the acts that they used to be placed below on bills over the course of a year, then debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 (up from #51 with the self-titled) with Iowa just two years later.
• The band Temple of the Dog was formed to record an album mourning the death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood. The album got little notice when it was released in 1991, but a year later it got some media attention when some of the members had success in a couple other bands you may have heard of.
• Tally Hall did see some minor attention in the mid-2000s, as their song "Good Day" was performed by them on the Late, Late Show with Craig Furgeson, and was featured on an episode of The O.C., as well as a simlish version being made for The Sims 2. The video for their song "Banana Man" was also decently popular on NewGrounds at the time. In general, they received minor airplay on some alternative stations (mostly focused in their home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan) and some notability for their internet show. Then, by the end of the 2010s (years after they had broken up), some of their songs (such as "Turn the Lights On" and "Ruler of Everything") began being used in videos on YouTube and TikTok. During the pandemic, "Ruler of Everything" become a meme, and the listenership of them increased. In 2023, their songs "Hidden in the Sand" and "The Bidding" were both certified Gold by the RIAA, and as of 2024, they have over 4.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Others

• Many people know nowadays how disastrous The Rite of Spring was when first performed in 1913, mainly because nobody was ready back then. It took many years to realise just how significant it was to ballet as a whole, thanks in large part to Fantasia, and it became one of the most popular works of Igor Stravinsky.

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