I got a friend that goes to live shows in Los Angeles and then interviews the bands after the shows for a decent amount of time and with decent quality. mostly punk rock bands. I've personally met Les Claypool and Trent Reznor and a bunch of smaller artists after shows. However i've never tried to email or otherwise contact any musicians or whatever, except one time in the late 90s there was hosted AOL chatrooms or something similar on yahoo or something where many fans would be in a room and get selected to ask a question that the person of the hour could see, and they'd reply. I also got to ask Reznor a question like that, 26 years ago or something.

I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.

gets a bit sadder when you paid $1000 to send that letter out. But I don't think bands commonly promise that they hand-respond to every letter.

75% music, all business