I like live music. I've seen plenty of famous bands play before.

But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware).

I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.

We had once an awesome unknown band from Belgium coming to play in our local club. I was the only person that came to the concert. For an hour they didn't start to wait for more listeners and they invited me to their table. No one showed up so they played for me and my brother whom I have summoned in the meantime. The best concert I have ever attended.

The band was L.T.D.M.S. (https://thomasturine.com/bands/ltdms/)

Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month

As someone who has played a fair amount of music with different people in different places, and who has attended quite a few odd little gigs and band practices and playing-in-your-friend's-house type things, as well as other types of mad musical moments, this is to be expected.

The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.

The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.

The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.

I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.

It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.

Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.

Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.

The world is filled with brilliant people.

My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.

Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.

I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.

So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.

If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.

And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.

We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.