One of the things you discover when running a roundtable on unpopular music is that the music tends to be unpopular. While we certainly had some readers and some discussion as we talked about obscure old blues, obscure punk, obscure world music, and obscure Jpop, in general this has not been a high water mark for traffic on the site. We probably would have done better to do a roundtable on Beyoncé or even the Rolling Stones. It’s the artists with lots of fans, it turns out, who have a lot of fans. There are some people, maybe, who want to discover new things, or are intrigued by a random band name (Virgin Black! Wilmer Broadnax!) But for the most part people want to hear about something they’ve already heard about. I’m not usually one to see the critic as parasite, but it’s pretty clearly true that attention to criticism is dependent on the extent and success of the subject of the criticism’s marketing campaign.

So it’s clear why no read the roundtable. But why aren’t these bands popular to begin with? In some cases, the answer seems like it’s probably just bad luck. If you live in New Zealand, the likelihood of massive success in the States (or worldwide) is going to be substantially reduced. If you never managed to put out an album because of mismanagement or happenstance, the chances of longterm notoriety are much reduced.

At the same time, though, it’s often the case that “bad luck” can be read as “wrong genre.” In his piece on The Music Machine, Sean Michael Robinson points out that 60s psychedlia was a time of album worship. In some times and some eras (early rock, for example), putting out singles might not have marked you as marginal, but not when the Music Machine was playing. Along the same lines, Paige McGinley explained that the blues nostalgist enthusiasm for the male guitar performers is a big part of the reason why Esther Mae Scott, who blues woman in the Ma Rainey tent show tradition, has no recorded music online. Rahawa Haile argues that Eritrean music is marginalized because of an intra-African history of colonialism, where Eritrea is seen by as a kind of embarrassing footnote to the much better known tradition of Ethiopian music. Ben Saunders explains that the Cardiacs were too prog for punk and (presumably) too punk for prog; the incompatible mix of genres left them without a logical fanbase or audience.

Other performers here are simply from genres that don’t garner tons of mainstream attention: Wilmer Broadnax in quartet gospel; Jane Jensen in goth; Windahm Hell in extreme metal. And some, like Natural Snow Buildings or Sleepy John Estes seem to have deliberately oriented themselves towards a smaller audience, either by eschewing traditional marketing or by situating themselves deliberately as local rather than national or international performers. Sometimes genre consigns you to obscurity and sometimes, some artists choose (relative) obscurity as a genre.

Either way, though, I think the roundtable shows pretty conclusively that what lasts, or what is famous, or what’s in the canon, has only a tangential relationship to what is “best” — in part because issues of genre comes before what’s considered best, rather than after. When Rolling Stone makes a list of the greatest bands of all time, performers in Eritrea and New Zealand and Thailand aren’t on the radar. When people talk about the greatest blues performers, it’s men they’re thinking of often, not women. When they talk about greatest singers, gospel isn’t considered. When they talk about greatest albums, you don’t list acts that don’t have an album. Music that’s unheard is generally unheard not because it’s somehow worse than music that is heard, but because somewhere along the way, it was in that set of things that got filtered out.

The genre of things that got filtered out is never going to break blog traffic records. But, like any genre, its fans will testify to its virtues. Thanks to Ben Saunders for coming up with the idea for this and helping to organize it, and to all the contributors, readers, and commenters for joining us. It’s been a great roundtable, even if (or partially because) not many have listened to it.