It goes without saying that music with the right marketing behind it will succeed most of the time irrespective of the music itself. There have been many examples of this happening, even if the X Factor winner doesn't make Christmas number one it still makes a good payday for a certain Mr Cowell.
On the flipside, there is the music that doesn't succeed because it hasn't had the right promotion. The question is how much is lack of promotion and how much is because simply not enough people like it?
I always had the ambition to be a successful musician. When I was younger I had a band, I wrote plenty of songs, I played some gigs. We never made it as musicians, clearly there weren't many people who heard our music, but even if they had it may still not have guaranteed success. For the record, I personally thought we were good and still listen to our music all these years later.
When we did play, there were people who liked us. There were people who complimented us on our music, I even saw some people sing along which to me was quite something. Some of my friends who knew my songs would tell me I was a talented musician.
However, there were also people who weren't so complimentary. A work colleague of mine at the time told me there was no way my band could be better than Blink 182 because they are playing arenas all over the world and selling lots of records, whereas we would play the occasional gig at small venues where most people had gone for a drink rather than to see me and we had sold precisely zero records. Sadly there are a lot of people who have this attitude. Admittedly I do enjoy a few Blink 182 songs and the drummer is decent, but we are talking about a band who can only play the basics on guitar and bass, often mess up when playing live and are quite dreadful at singing. They also have a song which is a basic chord sequence and the lyrics are simply "It would be nice to have a blow job" repeated over and over, not exactly genius song writing. The point is just because they are popular doesn't make them superior in every respect to those who aren't popular, give me the choice of listening to my old band or Blink 182, I'd choose my old band.
I also had somebody tell me to forget any aspirations of being a musician. He said I'm not the talented musician I think I am and I should stop kidding myself. This person and the person in the example above have one thing in common, both of them never heard any of my music. That's half the battle really, if your an unknown entity then many people will automatically assume you're crap.
I'll leave it at that with my old band, I am a little biased in that respect after all. There was a pub I used to go to most Sunday nights which would always have a live band on. There was one particular band who I saw 2 or 3 times that would mostly play covers. Admittedly a lot of the covers they did were of songs I didn't like, but they also played a couple of their own songs which I found to be so much better than the other songs they would play, but people went to that pub to hear songs they know and love, not to discover new music.
You do however get music that does not succeed which simply isn't good enough.
When UK Hardcore rose from the ashes of Happy Hardcore and gained in popularity, the major events would have line ups consisting of just the big name DJs, some of whom had gone away and come back again now it was more popular. People on the internet forums would complain left, right and centre about the big names keeping out the more talented up and coming DJs, and there were many of them. However, I heard quite a few of the up and coming DJs and to be honest I didn't think any of them were better than the big name DJs.
Another example of a group who many fans said were under promoted was Alisha's Attic. Around the time their final album came out there was a forum on the official website and many people said the reason why the second album didn't succeed was because the record label didn't promote it enough and they seemed to be making the same mistake with this album. However, the reality was that most people I knew were aware of Alisha's Attic, but most of them didn't like them. When they set a date for the first single release of the new album, "Push it All Aside" a TV schedule was given on their website. They went on Top of the Pops, Popworld, GMTV and several other shows promoting it. It was also heavily promoted on The Box music channel and I remember a lot of people telling me they had seen the video because they knew I was a fan. The single flopped though, but it was because people didn't like it enough to buy it rather than lack of promotion.
Ultimately there will be music out there that only a handful of people will ever hear, but would be popular if everybody got to hear it. There will also be music that would never be popular no matter how many people will hear it. How much of it falls into which category is probably something we'll never know.
A final thought on the subject of popularity, the biggest selling album of all time is "Thriller" by Michael Jackson. I remember reading a few years ago that around 1 in 5 American households own it. Sounds impressive, but at the same time it means 4 in 5 American households don't own it. So even if your music is extremely popular, you'll still find at least 80% of people won't like it enough to buy it.
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