I think you're missing an enormous part of being a musical act if you're only looking at Billboard chart placement. My wife and I have made a hobby of going to concerts and festivals for the past few years. Just in the last three years, we've seen KMFDM and NIN multiple times, Tool, Madonna, Judas Priest, Kreator, Queensryche, Slowdive, Echo and the Bunnymen, Metallica, Dead Kennedys, Social Distortion, Bad Religion, Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper, Filter, New Order, Ministry like five times. We've got Slayer, Weezer, and Flaming Lips coming up in the next couple months. I have pretty badly <i>wanted</i> to see Massive Attack, Juno Reactor, and Spiritualized, but their tours never hit the US.<p>Some of these were multi-generational megastars. Some of them charted once or twice 30+ years ago. Some of them never charted at all. All of them have devoted fanbases and they sell out venues. Some of these are 80,000 seat arenas, some are small clubs with standing room only, but they're all enough to sustain the band for decades.<p>You don't need to be on the Billboard top 100 to make a living. A whole lot of fans continue to be fans and will love you their entire lives regardless of whether a single one of your songs hits the mainstream ever again or even if you don't release new material at all. KMFDM thankfully does release new stuff damn near all the time (now 40 years of conceptual continuity), but my wife and I met at one of their shows. We've gone to see them every single time they come within 100 miles of us ever since and we always will. They're a far more important part of our identities than Icona Pop is to the casual radio listeners that sung along to their one popular song for a summer and then forgot about them.