The biggest music story of 2025 remains, as it has for many years, the very fact of how music is discovered, as streaming monoliths and social-media algorithms continually overtake what we hear and what it sounds like. When TikTok virality and playlist automation saturate listeners’ attention, artistic sameness threatens to rule the day—but independent artists on their own unique paths are still with us. Let this list, which mostly eschews household names, be an antidote to that crisis,