The situation is generally the same: a musician, often but not always a rapper, will be performing at a music festival, teasing one of their big tunes. The crowd is getting more and more hyped. Madness is about to ensue. And there, stood at the back of the stage, is this guy, capturing it all on a camcorder. The camera looks old, but not too old, the sort of thing you could probably pick up secondhand for cheap on eBay, or at Cash Converters – maybe a Mini-DV, something that probably lends the footage a cool, gritty, lo-fi quality, like a skate video, but I don’t really know enough about these things to say for certain.

It doesn’t matter if the artist is already well-established, or if they’re relatively early into their career, this guy will always be there. He’s most visible at gigs and music festivals, but he also films things behind the scenes. Once, I was interviewing a musician and he was there in the corner of the room, documenting the whole conversation. He asked me for permission to film, but never explained what the footage was actually meant to be used for. A musician friend of mine told me about a similar experience. They were in the studio with a singer, and this guy was there to film every aborted vocal take, every edit made on ProTools. Again, nothing ever came of it.

Who is this man? Sometimes he’s the artist’s manager, or their creative director. Sometimes he’s a talented video artist, hired to shoot a music video or short film. Sometimes he’s a professional filmmaker, producing some sponcon. But sometimes he’s just, well, some guy, holding a nonspecific role within the artist’s crew. Still, I have questions. When did this start happening? Where did they find him? Does he get paid, and if so, is it enough to sustain a living? Is he allowed to join a union, to collectively bargain for other precarious ‘this guy’ workers around the country? And why, out of all the hours of footage that he captures, do we only ever see the results as a 30-second Instagram teaser, or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snippet in a music video?

Maybe the musician will become a defining voice of a generation, and Netflix will come along and buy up all that footage, turning it into the next Homecoming – or, if the artist flames out, at least the next Fyre. But I can’t really speak for his motivations, because he’s too tricky to pin down. He’s just there. He’s always been there.