The Beato trap: when clickbait works

Good clickbait draws in an audience even when they know they’re being baited. Rick Beato recently did this to me with his ‘Is metal dead?’ thumbnail. As an experienced Youtuber with an audience in the millions, he’s an adept practitioner of this dark art. In this case he’s served up a kind of double baiting. Once for the hyperbolic title taken at face value, twice for people that know full well it’s bait, but click regardless just to see how the video will attempt to justify the provocation.  

Beato’s not always like this. His channel is a curious blend of the best and worst parts of music YouTube. As the “music theory guy”, his bread and butter is breakdowns of popular (usually rock) songs, a template he all but pioneered, now adopted by hundreds of channels. He’s also spent the last few years conducting a series of in depth interviews with some of the largest surviving figures of 20^th Century music (Kirk Hammett, Rick Wakeman, and David Gilmour to name a few). But these are interspersed with his other favourite format, lowest common denominator swill where he suddenly mutates into an incurious geriatric shouting about the key change deficit in modern pop music. This is Beato’s alter ego, a ragebaiting Mr Hyde to his normally benevolent internet grandad persona. The ‘Where have all the metalheads gone?’ video is a classic of the genre. He spends most of the runtime rattling off Spotify stats from his phone and noting the declining numbers, especially for acts that formed in the last fifteen years, with only sixteen “metal” songs having over a billion streams.

It’s almost comical to watch him sitting in his vast studio, surrounded by enough gear to pay off the UK deficit, staring down at his phone and bellowing Spotify numbers into a camera worth more than the crown jewels. Funnier still is the fact that Beato knows this back-of-a-napkin level of insight will garner more hits than any meticulously researched video essay from lower budget channels this month, and he knows his comments thread will be awash with metalheads who can’t resist answering his ‘Where have all the metalheads gone?’ provocation, boosting his viewing figures further. He knows that, despite having the time and resources to put together a more nuanced take on the topic, he doesn’t need to do anything more than scroll through Spotify and throw out some hunches to get paid this month.

So how does Beato explain the declining streaming figures for metal? It’s probably cos kids are going to the gym instead or something. To his credit, he does seek out a source to backup this conclusion in the form of a friend who has kids in their teens. He happily confirms that Beato is indeed correct, kids aren’t using aggressive music as an outlet anymore, they’re into fitness instead. Look at Korn performing at Woodstock 99, no smartphones, the crowd looks pretty young, don’t see that anymore at a metal show, hmmm, thanks for watching, cheque please YouTube.

I’m unsure if Beato genuinely listens to the words tumbling from his mouth or is just playing up to the role of internet argue man. But if this video does nothing else, it highlights the fact that he still thinks he’s living in the 20^th Century to some extent. Sure he’ll throw out the odd video on AI and streaming occasionally. But it’s clear that he still sees music as this hierarchical, measurable, transparent branch of the creative economy. He clearly knows the music industry is in trouble and changing rapidly, but the fact that most young musicians don’t even view it as an “industry” in the traditional sense rarely enters the discussion.

One comment from Beato’s buddy stood out in particular, that “if you’re fifteen…there’s not much edgy stuff happening with musicians”. As someone who spends their freetime listening to edgy music made by young people this was news to me. It highlights the degree of blindness on display here. The degradation of music as a viable profession alongside the enormous expansion of the amateur/hobbyist economy, which is where the vast majority of engaged younger music fans now operate, doesn’t seem to factor into their speculations. That Beato still views music as a series of quantifiable hierarchies means his analysis refuses to extend beyond the prism of streaming stats. Which, in the absence of any other substantive sales figures or top forty charts, will only confirm his assumption that certain genres are just not that popular right now.

It also means, in their worldview, that the fact that metal’s numbers are down on Spotify means there’s something wrong with the kids. That the music “industry” is now a diffuse, decentralised, and most importantly complex network of hobbyists and (at best) semi-professional part timers existing beyond streaming stats is ignored because it’s easier to suppose that something’s up with the kids. Also missing is the possibility that genres like metal are moving away from their Western heartlands, its vanguard shifting toward South America and to a lesser but no less important extent Asia. Today’s environment is complicated. Something Beato and the gang have no incentive to navigate if videos like this continue to generate a steady paycheque.

The degree of laziness on display actually makes picking it apart further largely redundant. But there’s a far more serious problem. Beyond the off-the-shelf clickbait title, the liberal conclusions drawn from limited data, the laziness and the tired, speculative “the kids are doing it wrong” talking points. No, the real problem with this video is that Beato is onto something here.

I don’t mean that he’s right in any kind of structured, intentional way. It’s a stopped clock kind of rightness, a monkeys with typewriters doing a Shakespeare brand of correct. But the sheer belligerence behind what we’ll charitably call the video’s “point”, that kids are in the gym instead of the rehearsal room, is an observation that lands in the same postcode as insightful. It just needs a little finessing to bring it home.

Looking at the raw data Beato rattles off from his phone after five minutes of research, it’s clear that heavy music has been declining in popularity for some years. At least, there are fewer bands able to break a million monthly streams on Spotify. Running concurrently to this are constant headlines about the crisis of masculinity, or in the words of Beato’s buddy there, the kids are “more into fitness now”. The insecurities of young men accrue in biceps and fad diets instead of mastery of the fretboard.

I remember being young. It was probably the last time heavy music was popular on a level Beato can understand. Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit were on Top of the Pops, Elton John was name dropping Slipknot in interviews, Papa Roach played at the school disco (yes, these bands aren’t “metal”, tell me about your other interesting opinions). And what happened after this popularity waned? The rise of the far right, of the gym bro, of the wellness influencer, the podcaster, of vitamins, red pilling, semen retention and the coming testosterone wars. Just as metal, and the broad array of notionally alternative music that was at least capable of invading the charts from time to time, melted away.

But heavy music didn’t die. Like a lot of alternative music, it simply sequestered itself within an informal network of casualised practitioners. A world with very few professionals. No one’s quitting the day job anymore, but more music is being produced than ever before. And the fanbase – and therefore listening stats – is remarkably diffuse, distributed across a vast spectrum of small to mid-sized artists, and, importantly, a host of physical and digital mediums that won’t appear in Spotify’s numbers. For someone like Beato, in his incurious geriatric form at least, this is tantamount to genre death because he can only see the world through these moribund quantitative hierarchies. But what’s actually happening here is more like genre entropy. Today’s decentralised, networked infrastructure is not just a fact of technology but a fact of culture, as the old tribalist loyalties melt away in favour of more egalitarian exchanges. Streaming stats are dispersed across a broader array of smaller artists, as is the money fans set aside for physical media, merch, and gig tickets. Meaning no single artist – outside of rare exceptions – can rise above a certain level.

A side effect of this is that music now lacks figureheads. I recently wrote about this very thing in relation to Ozzy’s death. He’s part of a generation defined by a clear cast of characters whose lives, image, and public persona meant far more to their loyal fanbases than music alone. His passing reminds us that individuals of his stature are becoming a thing of the past.

Another way of framing this is the idea that musicians are no longer capable of playing a leadership role in culture. If a musician is making headlines today, more often than not it’s a faded legacy act embroiled in scandal or tweeting offensive slurs. Kids, or rather, young men and boys, no longer look to musicians as thought leaders and role models. Intuitively, this is a good thing. Anyone old enough to remember the late 90s and early 00s would hardly wish for a return to that climate. A time when male idiocy, aggression, and physical strength was placed front and centre across a host of films, TV shows, and in the personas of heavy rock and metal. Behind the Woodstock 99 footage Beato references were the very dark consequences of male entitlement. But what’s risen to replace this is arguably worse. A ghoulish collective of conservative thought leaders exploiting the insecurities of young men through podcasts, public “debates”, and all manner of medicinal and self help MacGuffins thrown around as catch all solutions to complex, multifaceted problems.  

“Where have all the metalheads gone?” you ask Beato. Well you might be right, most of them are in the gym. They’re also manifesting and goal setting, measuring their testosterone levels and listening to the Modern Wisdom podcast. They look at the climate of contemporary music and see the progressive drive to inclusivity as inherently feminine coded, lacking strong male figureheads to rally around. They might look at headline grabbing artists like Taylor Swift, Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Lady Gaga and wonder where all the manly men are?

Aggressively left wing male artists have occasionally threatened to redress this balance. Embodied this side of the Atlantic in artists like Idles, Stormzy, Kneecap et al. But these artists are so explicitly political in their public personas that they fail to resonate as widely as a Rage Against the Machine or System of a Down once did, who were somehow able to pose as generically anti-establishment in a way that had genuine crossover appeal.

But it’s also woefully simplistic of Beato and his buddy to conclude that there’s not much edgy stuff happening in music. The modern metal scene – as with a lot of alternative music – just behaves in ways that aren’t detectable after five minutes of flicking through Spotify. But Beato is, against all conceivable odds, at least half right. There is something to the idea that, at least in North America and Europe, young men are abandoning aggressive music in favour of the Jordan Peterson lecture. A cursory scan of the vibe matrix indicates as much.