Dream Theater is more famous than you think. In the last two months I've been in L.A., San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, D.C., North Carolina, Georgia, West Palm Beach, and Miami Beach, The Florida Keys, The Everglades, Naples, and Orlando and everywhere I have gone, I have been promoting the video I did for Jordan, and almost every day of the last two months I have found Dream Theater fans. With the second Grammy Nod they got a lot of attention, internationally. Also, Live at Luna Park was number one on Billboard's "hard rock album" charts. They're huge.
(That's about 6k in travel, and I am not receiving any sort of residual or getting paid for any amount of views.)
Well, at first I wrote "isn't
very famous" if that helps, but then I thought about the word "fame" and I'm not sure if that applies to DT. Sure, they are widely
known, but they are not famous, if that makes sense. Of course, all of this words about size are relative. For their genre, they are massive, for heavy metal, they relatively medium-to-big(nowhere near the big ones, but they are known in the scene), but in general, including all music and pop artists, I'd size them as mid-to-small. Just look at the YouTube numbers, their latest hit has a million viewers, which is big, but comparing to the large bands who have 25+million on their views and they seem smaller. So, all in all, they are internationally known? Sure, and they are growing, five to ten years ago you said Dream Theater and only a few people knew what you were talking about, even among music fans, now they are known among music fans, but not that much among the casual listeners.
As Portnoy once put it very well on an interview, within their bubble they are huge, outside their bubble they aren't.
I quote YouTube numbers because I think it's more accurate than albums sales right now, albums sales I think they measure how big a band's hardcore fanbase is, and DT may have one of the largest maybe, but they barely have a casual fanbase I think, even if they heard of the band, if you ask someone for a song name, they would go
. I may be wrong of course, I'm not part of the business, just baseing it on old-fashion completely subjective powers of observation
.
And I'm don't think because of the people who are viewing this they will suddenly become popular
. In fact we're not even discusing the tribute band anymore
. As for me, they would have to come to a city than even some argentinians have problems locating it in a map
. I would definetely travel 1000km to Buenos Aires to see Dream Theater, but definetely not for a cover band
.