Well, this is what I mean, question being: What it really means to be big? It is not unreasonable to think that band/artist could do most of these things mentioned above without being "known" or "big". Merely being good may be enough and suddenly 500 units of album may sell, and gig offers coming in, etc. while being largely unknown and small artist firmly standing in corner of niche scene.
My speculative evaluation would be like Merzbow, as obvious example, could go to Helsinki, Riga, Prague, Berlin, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh and his work or name would be known to some extent. Pull crowd, awake media etc. Something that is beyond the bands who are merely known in context of noise, or happened to get good warm-up slot.
As successful as God Of War would be, and even when being right there at top of contemporary noise foodchain, I have my doubts if being at venue of mentioned cities, would there be audience who are aware of any releases? This is certainly valid for my own works. Despite several albums have sold 1000 or so, it seems obvious that beyond fairly narrow genre and geographic frame, nobody else knows any of it. Out of mentioned cities, maybe Helsinki would have more than couple or handful of people aware of existence of project(s).
So what really separates the "big" and "small" noise? If difference is article on non-noise magazine or album selling twice as much as newbie did with debut album, difference seems almost nonexistent. I would assume one way to really be "well known" is being able to pull local crowd without headliner in many different countries and cities? That would be interesting to know what is that type of "big noise" in 2022. Now that I think, actually Puce Mary, Pharmakon, perhaps Prurient too, was something that they could do it. Just curious if I can be totally clueless about clipping. maybe there is other contemporary big noise, that I just didn't think about.
