It definitely depends on location, I noticed outside the US (especially in non English-speaking countries), they will play things like Mac Demarco before going on a Audi commercial or as the intro for a politics show lol, I'm not kidding. In the US, I have never heard people like him or Grimes in any of the contemporary music stations, it's only common and suddenly everywhere if you place yourself on the way, not the other way around (as with most pop artists you can't escape no matter how much you try to hide from them lol). Last time I checked, MTV doesn't even play videos, and in "rock stations", it's more like Cake combined with some new-ish things like, I don't know, The Lumineers. There's so much music and so much competition and offer that putting it out there is a much slower process than everywhere else apparently, especially when in a label that's independent. And people like Grimes still mostly just attract people into a certain kind of scene...
That said, I find her pretty annoying. I hear her new album at work all the time... witnessing musicians exploring and evolving is always great but man, don't I wish she had gotten forever stuck in her Sagrad/Skin/Devon days now... precisely because she started to cater a little too hard to larger audiences (didn't she restart her new album from scratch due to criticism?) and her sound reflects that, it's so polluted with "catchy elements", a bit desperate. And so is her image and relationship with fashion... which as an aspiring model, she always had, but seems to be conflicted on playing outsider and then completely diving in without any sense of discernment. I do admit that last part is completely biased, I never got over her acting like "oh wow what is fashion? this is so weird, I'm weird", when, to have joined online communities devoted to it (tfs) and livejournals, she was more than just interested so.. yeah, sure fashion's stupid, but so is pretense.
Also her recent interviews ("everyone stop talking so much about my work!").. hello, Kristen Stewart of music..
Why do people care if she's "mainstream" or not? What a meaningless debate.
