I do think that gems get their due over time. I'm not suggesting that "their due" means any kind of commercial success. Nor am I suggesting that "their due" means any kind of broad critical acclaim from music gurus like Rolling Stone magazine or similar trashy spokesmen of pop culture.

What I'm suggesting is that "their due" means that me, Joe Schmoe, from the Midwest of the USA can hear about some obscure band that put out one album nearly 25 years ago and can almost easily find this album in some format with relative little difficulty.

Your examples are good regarding Touch and New England. Five years ago, I had never heard of either band. Now I have everything (I think maybe) by one of these artists and can readily get everything by the other. In the 3 or 4 years that I've been hanging around this board, I've heard plenty about both of them. One of them was even lucky enough to ignite a flame war. I can download full-length clips from various sources to sample them.

The music industry is blatantly unfair to many artists. Our mass-production consumer culture devalues that which hasn't been carefully homogenized, packaged, and mass distributed to the empty minded flock of sheep who only buy stuff they've heard on the radio a hundred times. Still, despite all of this, great music is made, discovered, and heard by plenty of people. It may not achieve the popularity, success, or acclaim as anything else, but it's still there. It's not forgotten. It does eventually get its due. Even it is only by some semi-wacky music fan who starts his own record label on a whim and eventually reissues and sells less than a hundred copies of it.

Joe