10 Musical Artists Who Never Got To Become Superstars

The entire music industry tends to be a bit of a dog eat dog world. No matter how much you may think that your respective part of the scene is a band of brothers, there are always those who are willing to kick you to the curb at the first sign of trouble. So when you actually get the fame and fortune you're looking for, it can be anyone's guess as to who gets the credit for it.

Across every genre of music, many artists have flirted with the idea of becoming mega stars, only to have some form of BS get in the way to keep them from the top. From putting someone more photogenic on top instead or just getting ignored entirely by the media, these artists did not deserve to go out like a punchline once they started to pick up steam. Hell, sometimes it's not even anyone's fault, with a handful of these artists passing away before they even had a chance to see the millions raking in for their albums.

Though there was a larger audience for these bands, it wasn't going to come to fruition as quickly as many would have hoped. For as much as some music comes down to chance, time was definitely not on the side of these legends when they were in their prime.

Throughout rock history, there's always those few artists who aren't really cut out to be rock stars. I mean, as much as Robin Zander and Tom Petersson strutted their stuff across every Cheap Trick record, it wasn't necessarily a mistake that the record company put Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos on the back cover. Though many geeks have found their way to the big time recently, Dan Wilson was one of the few who deserved just a little more time with the public.

Then again, most people just scoff at Wilson as just "the Closing Time guy," with most of his impact on pop being restricted to that one song that people request time and time again at the pub. When you sit back with the songs though, Wilson is actually quite the melodic writer, putting out songs that seemed to fill the void that Weezer left after they went belly up after Pinkerton.

Once Rivers Cuomo got back in the swing of things, we seemed to drop Wilson way too fast, leaving him to hang in the back of the music industry for years now. Though you might not know his face, Wilson's work has covered the last decade of pop rock, writing songs for the Dixie Chicks and even collaborating with Weezer in writing the song Ruling Me. In the old tradition of your Desmond Childs and Glen Ballards, Dan Wilson has become the man that you recognize more for the songs that for the actual visual presence these days.