I think this is an issue for any curation. It's especially an issue for music - bandcamp shows you music - top sellers, recently sold, liked by creators, etc that all require someone else to do curation. They do have a random listing, but the signal to noise ratio is so low that I doubt anyone listens to it.

So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.

The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.

Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.

I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?