In a recent episode of 2 Promoters, 1 Pod, co-host and Damnation Festival organiser Gavin McInally launched what some took to be an all out assault on the music press. His contentions were three fold. That the music press no longer does “real” journalism”, i.e. following up on leads and breaking stories. Secondly, that its coverage of releases and live events is universally positive. And, largely as a result of the first two, it resorts to flooding the airwaves with fluff content such as listicles and clickbait fodder.
McInally isn’t the first to note this drop in quality across the traditional metal press. I’ve made similar points myself. But being a high profile figure, his comments at least served the purpose of provoking the press into responding, and in the process revealing something of their current survival plan. In a follow up episode, they invited Sam Coare on, as former editor-in-chief at Kerrang! magazine he acted as the spokesperson for the official/print/legacy media.
The reasons for the metal press’s decline should be obvious to any casual observer. Print media’s wings were significantly clipped by a shift away from the mass pop culture of the 20th Century to the loose, informal networked communities nurtured by Web 2.0. The slippery tectonics of the current environment are more conducive to small footprint, limited, light weight operations moulded by the dictates of social media. Successive attempts to model a traditional media outlet on these shifting sands often resulted in failure (Vice, Buzzfeed), or sustained precarity (Pitchfork, The Quietus), and, in the case of surviving legacy publications (NME, Kerrang!, Louder/Metal Hammer), the dramatic drop in quality noted by McInally and others.
Coare was keen to stress that no one should be yearning for the 80s or 90s. Aside from the ambient toxicity, arrogance, and vindictiveness of the print media in its heyday, poor writing was hardly in short supply back then. But in exercising its discriminatory demons, the debate sparked by 2P1P clearly demonstrates that something is seriously wrong. We have, at the very least, thrown the baby out with the bath water by forgetting how to cover a subject matter like metal in any meaningful, thought provoking, or accountable way. Whilst some would argue that a lack of coherent standards, unlimited access to new music, and a social media ecosystem that rewards unconditional positivity are just the cost of broadening the franchise of underground music, the hornets’ nest 2P1P prodded clearly shows that opinion is divided on the matter.
McInally does not meaningfully address these root causes on the podcast, framing the current state of affairs as if the result of some unknown exogenous shock. Sam Coare’s verdict, delivered with the guarded reserve one would expect of someone whose career is premised on message discipline, is that the music press is ultimately a victim of circumstance.
Like any business, they live and die by the principle of supply and demand. Publications of a certain calibre (Kerrang!, Rolling Stone, Metal Hammer) will have access to ample data on what their audiences want, the media is simply tailoring its content accordingly. The press, forced to work within extremely tight budgets that are getting tighter, pinching every penny, are now hyper sensitive to audience responses, timid and unwilling to repel potential readers who enjoy a media ecosystem of near infinite options. A far cry from the arrogant, tastemaker swagger they enjoyed in the late 20th Century. Assigning someone to chase down leads is a costly gamble, not all leads turn into stories, and breaking stories don’t generate all that much revenue given that the moment a story goes live it spreads to all corners of the internet, with little recognition given to the original source.
All understandable responses from an industry perspective. Journalistic principles don’t keep the lights on. But for anyone persuaded by McInally’s argument that the music press has lost its way, this dances around the central question. Coare, in his capacity as press spokesperson, does not afford himself the luxury of idealism. Journalistic principles are acknowledged only insofar as they don’t conflict with sound financial sense. The more interesting question from an audience perspective is establishing what a functioning, desirable music press might actually look like now, why such a thing is even necessary in a hyperconnected, DIY, online context, and how we might actually get there.
When bands and influencer fans with significant platforms can broadcast directly to their audiences, where people can listen to new albums for free, where controversies play out in real time online in full view of the public, is there a role for a music press in anything like the traditional model?
I’m inclined to answer in the affirmative for a number of reasons. But chiefly because a functioning music press is the first step any scene must take to understand itself. It’s the first layer of a filtration process, the ideas and materials it throws up are later digested by longform content such as books, documentaries, and academic papers. Accepting that it’s neither possible nor desirable to return to the dominance of print media, what has risen to replace it is utterly rudderless by comparison, an “endless carousel of good vibes” where people are encouraged to mindlessly gorge on content and practice open hostility to anyone willing to question or critique it.
By approaching this question from three different angles based on what any media outlet could reasonably be expected to cover, breaking stories, longer features, and reviews, what emerges is an impossible position. One that requires us to refrain from asking anything of the media before we have thoroughly interrogated how or why they have been forced into this position by an audience dancing to social media’s tune.
Breaking news
Unlike current events, if you ignore tour and album announcements, very few headline worthy “breaking news” stories actually happen in a specific music genre like metal. In January of this year the BBC ran a story on the fact that half of UK music venues make no profit. This, to be fair, was at least picked up by Kerrang!, NME, and Rolling Stone. But in between these more hard hitting stories, there’s just not enough stuff going on in the world of metal that one could fashion into headlines and fill column inches, outside of pull quotes from the random musings of aging musicians on the podcast circuit. But that doesn’t mean the press should cede this ground entirely and allow bands, labels, and promoters to set the narrative through statements on their official social media accounts.
In the 2P1P episode, McInally brings up a number of examples where some form of professional media coverage could have benefited the online discussion. The collapse of festivals like Manorfest went largely unreported by the legacy press, leaving the fans with nothing more than official statements from organisers who were obviously keen to control the messaging in their favour. In each case, the social media rumour mill duly got to work to the detriment of any informative discussion. McInally also raised the example of an interview he conducted with Bloodstock organiser Vicky Hungerford, perhaps the most prominent woman working behind the scenes in the UK metal scene. She revealed that she had received death threats after lineup announcements, a line McInally duly fed to his friends in the media (with permission), only to find that no one was interested in picking up the story. Or one could pluck any number of instances where band member X quits without warning, or there is some clear disagreement between members that results in a split or legal dispute, the details only later coming to light if at all. What coverage these stories do receive in the legacy media usually involves little more than paraphrasing press statements and linking to the official social media post, leaving the space wide open for the keyboard warriors to rally. And, most strikingly in McInally’s view, the Glastonbury controversy surrounding Kneecap and Bob Vylan, reported extensively in the national news media, was largely ignored by the metal and rock press.
This last example is important because, much like the music venue story run by the BBC, it only tangentially relates to metal, but is still of vital importance to any music scene. Intelligent journalism would not limit their headline news to events within metal, but link wider economic or social issues into the world of metal, allowing fans to join the dots between the thing they enjoy in their spare time and what’s going on in the world. How will the effects of global events trickle down into underground music and what do fans need to be aware of to process the march of history from different angles? Some outlets do this to be fair, but rarely those of the calibre discussed on 2P1P.
Coare’s defence, whilst justified, was entirely pragmatic. Treating these stories with the rigour they deserve takes time and money. Reporters may need to travel to follow up on leads. They may require legal advice. And after all that, a meticulously researched, traditional journalistic scoop won’t generate anywhere near as much engagement as a ragebait listicle that can be cranked out in an hour from a desk. What’s more, rival media outlets will benefit from all this hard work by lifting and shifting the content to their own platforms, with very little credit given to the original source.
This problem exists across the media landscape. The proliferation of opinion pieces and punditry at the expense of investigative journalism is in part a matter of pure economics. The former are cheap to produce and usually attract more clicks than resource heavy investigative journalism. Hence why news outlets are even more ruthlessly selective in what they cover, and why “official” versions of events are often buried in a tirade of partisan commentary.
Although low by comparison, the stakes in the music press still make this question worth considering. Whether it’s something as trivial as a band split or as serious as musician X being accused of sexual harassment, as Coare notes, there is little incentive for outlets to cover the story thoroughly even if it would allow the rest of us to form the basis of our discussion. Most notably because this is not what the data is telling media outlets about what their audiences actually want.
A brief survey of the bigger publications was revealing in this regard. On the day I checked, of the nine stories featured on the Metal Injection homepage, five took the form of “band X announces something”. Which is little more than low effort PR regurgitation. Of the trending articles (presumably the best indication of what the audience wants on any given day), the top was a listicle (“Nine old-school death bands that need to release a new record”), the second was a scoop on Mike Patton and Faith no More regurgitated from someone else’s podcast, and the third was another generic press announcement.
A similar picture emerges on Kerrang!, Louder Sound, and Blabbermouth. A slew of PR announcements, puff pieces, and minor scoops paraphrased from other sources (usually podcasts), requiring no leg work on the part of the publication. That’s not to say that we should do away with album and tour announcements in media outlets. Collating this information in one place is useful, and saves us scrawling through social media to seek it directly from the band’s official page. And, as mentioned, actual breaking news in metal worthy of the name just doesn’t come around all that often. The challenge for online media is not simply vying for space whilst remaining financially viable, but finding new material to flood the homepage with every day in a media ecosystem more suited to a weekly or monthly subscription model.
The obliteration of hard journalism in music does give us the opportunity to ask if there is some Platonic form of independent, trusted, unbiased press accountability we can use as a model, a bulwark against the anomic tide incurred by social media dominance. To start with, audience preference should not be the ultimate arbiter here. Big tech have become masters of human psychology, manipulating us to repeatedly do things are we know are bad for us and bad for society. So how do you get a kid to eat their greens? Sometimes it helps if nothing else is on the table. And in the case of stories unfolding in real time, some form of trusted, semi-objective summation of the facts provides an important counterweight to both the narrative the band/label/festival wants to put out and endless speculation in comment threads.
Our ideal type of media outlet must fulfil the basic function of any media outlet, literally telling its readers what is happening. And in an ecosystem like metal, what is happening on most days is album releases and tour announcements. I suspect that supplementing this with more sober economic and social analysis, even if linked back to metal in some way, is hardly a money spinner. Hence the homepages flooded with PR copy and pull quotes. Beyond the headlines then, opinion and features play an important role in attracting eyeballs whilst presenting us with the same dilemma between quality and generating engagement.
Opinion, features, and op-ed
This is where the writer really gets a chance to shine, through everything from a straight up opinion piece, an anniversary retrospective, in depth interviews, and yes, even a good old fashioned listicle. Whilst it’s certainly true that what counts as “good” in this category is sometimes subjective, there is space for both light entertainment pieces as well as theory heavy ruminations. Beyond the core function of literally telling us what’s happening, quality media can be a steward, teacher, or simply a good conversationalist. If done right it will refine our understanding of the culture around us. Ultimately, the problem McInally alludes to is an excess of the former at the expense of the latter. A fun listicle has its place, but because audiences are so drawn to them it negates any incentive to inform or provoke the audience into thinking more deeply about the music they love.
The problem is that beyond the lower grade content in this category (puff pieces or ragebait) demand for this form of public conversation is small. I don’t need Coare’s insight to make this case. Looking to my own site where the overwhelming majority of content is album reviews, the posts that do bigger numbers are when I’ve actively set out to bait a group of fans (Messa’s latest album making Metal Archives’s album of the year, Andrew Lee’s dispute with Master). Or pieces that took some time to put together but probably attracted more views because people were expecting to be rabble roused (metal and politics, any random piece on how to deal with “sketch” bands). And lastly of course listicles (album of the year, death metal user guides etc.), which are the surest bet of success and practically write themselves with enough practice.
So this is perhaps where the gap between quality and click count is widest. Regardless of what an audience says about the need for nuanced and insightful coverage, what they click on tells a very different story. Legacy media, with access to the largest data pools, are in a bit of bind then. Openly criticised for flooding the airwaves with listicles and baiting their audience with articles on why Sleep Token are the saviours of metal whilst being rewarded for doing exactly that. The problem isn’t the content itself necessarily, it’s the fact that circumstances – social media conditioning and good old fashioned psychology – have conspired to flood the landscape with a particular form of cheap, scalable, low effort commentary. Speaking from experience, a longform, nuanced essay is slow to attract readers and takes considerably more effort to produce.
Further, there seems to be a growing hostility to this form of journalism as fans become less interested in the opinion of others. They either lack curiosity, or regard even good faith discussion on the ideas and theory behind music with hostility, as thwarting their desire to consume content without the need to critically engage with it (“just enjoy the music”, “keep politics out of it”, “you spend way too much time thinking about this stuff”, and so on). Add to that the growing evidence that our attention spans are indeed shrinking through smartphone usage. If the panic over people’s TikTok fried brains is to be believed traditional, longform prose is a dying medium. It requires the audience to remain fixed in one place for at least ten minutes, possibly more, without scrolling onto the next item, without the sweeteners of moving images or sound, and (if done right) it might ask them to engage in some nuanced, un-clickbait friendly ideas that take time and over 280 characters to articulate an opinion on.
Despite this, the fact that opinion is free to produce and, in the context of a hyper-engaged fanbase like metal, relatively easy to put together, this has allowed it to proliferate exponentially across countless blogs and podcasts. As a result, the higher grade content in this category – cerebral essays and in depth histories – is where traditional media has ceded the most ground to DIY platforms. Limited wordcounts and an addiction to listicles means they have little incentive to challenge the blogosphere and podcast network in any meaningful way. The access they have to higher profile figures will always give them the upper hand on features, interviews, and retrospectives on specific albums, but for straight up opinion pieces and commentary, small time operations and blogs have largely outflanked them.
The reason for this is broadly down to editorial freedom. Blogs exist at the hobbyist level. This means the quality of writing can vary wildly. But the payoff is a degree of independence and creativity. People with the time and inclination to write in their spare time on topics they are knowledgeable about, without having to worry about how much engagement they will generate, who they might be pissing off, or interfering labels and management, have produced some of the most insightful writing on metal I have come across.
And despite the worry over its limited appeal, speaking from experience, there is an audience for this, and if nothing else it is loyal. I think it has something to do with stratifications of popularity. The bands that find their way onto the homepage of Metal Injection or Kerrang! have reached a certain level of fame, attracting all manner of court gossip as a result. The blogosphere and (some) podcasts and YouTube channels tend to be less interested in the cult of personality and more interested in music as an abstraction, as an idea, an artform, a culture, a philosophy.
Whilst some underground bands are accustomed to using social media to court controversy, the type of coverage a Tool or Napalm Death are subjected to would be inappropriate for 90% of the bands I cover on this blog for example. Namely an intense degree of scrutiny usually reserved for the celebrity, who answer to numerous stakeholders (booking agents, larger venues, record labels, PR firms etc.) with real financial interests in how their brand is curated through their public persona. Equally, a homepage featuring essays on why “existential death-obsession prevails over nihilistic death obsession” or an analysis of how the Protestant Work Ethic explains the metal psyche would look incongruous next to headlines like “CKY Feud Gets Weird As CHAD I GINSBURG Claims Bassist Was Fired Because He “Hates Dogs“’”.
But that’s kind of the point. Successful media outlets need to appeal to different audiences simultaneously. A traditional magazine or newspaper would do this with a clear hierarchy of content. Headlines at the front, followed by op-ed, letters, some features, and reviews and longer in-depth pieces toward the back. Once you’ve bought the mag, you’re motivated to justify the cost by at least scanning it cover to cover. Homepage curation is a different matter. It’s competing with an array of rival homepages as well the entire spectrum of online content. A menu ribbon at the top ostensibly designed to lure readers into the meatier content will always be an afterthought compared to headlines that need to be eye catching in order keep said eyeballs within their ecosystem.
One example of a publication that has had some success by going beyond the dictates of the homepage is Decibel Magazine, which offers a hybrid of digital and physical media. Alongside a chunky print magazine, the website hosts a neat batch of free content, from opinion pieces to album features. It has gone so far as to become a one stop shop for metal fans by organising festivals and running a record label, and – through a partnership with the UK’s Cult Never Dies – has even extended its tendrils into the world of publishing with a number of books under its belt.
Subsidising their function as a media outlet with alternative revenue streams (for want of a better word) in books, records, and gigs has shielded them somewhat from the general financial decimation of the music press. This tiering of content also allows them to present a different face to different audiences. I’ve never seen a cover of Decibel’s physical magazine that inspired me to buy it, but books documenting the career of Scott Burns and Immolation saw me readily throw cash their way.
But being both a cultural commentator and producer of culture presents a clear conflict of interest. I was actually given the opportunity to put this very question to Decibel staffer Christopher Dick on a recent episode the Necropolis AD podcast. He candidly responded that whilst Decibel does cover its own festival, it invites other magazines to attend and review it, and is not shy about giving negative coverage to bands that are booked to play. In his words, Decibel does not operate on the “pay for play” model we might be used to in Europe (the idea that magazines and record labels are in cahoots when it comes to giving positive coverage, each benefiting from the mutual PR). But this is an editorial line that could easily be reversed if editor-in-chief Albert Mudrian were replaced.
McInally made a similar point regarding his own festival Damnation. Following his critique of the metal press he describes receiving disgruntled emails from various media outlets who did not appreciate being attacked having given Damnation positive coverage in the past. Clearly, they viewed it as a betrayal of the pay to play principle. His rebuttal was quite simply that he did not view positive coverage of Damnation as a favour, and, echoing Dick’s sentiment that negative coverage is better than no coverage, he wants to be told if there were problems with his festival in the spirit of constructive criticism. From my own limited experience I’ve noted a similar sentiment regarding negative reviews I’ve posted on this site. In most cases (most), if a band reads them they are happy to take it on the chin, accept that it is just one person’s opinion, and comes with the turf when putting out art subject to critical scrutiny.
Ultimately, in the context of music specifically, opinion and commentary are where the media has the chance to shine the brightest, but is also most at risk of gorging itself on lowest common denominator slop. It’s also the starkest example of where the audience must bear some responsibility. Any space for longform content is squeezed out by their FOMO, by their aversion to lingering too long in one place on a lengthy article when something else could be happening on Instagram shorts, or simply favouring a saccharine puff piece on the anniversary of your favourite album’s release over a substantive, theory driven essay. Per Coare’s comments, the media is following the data, and that data is currently telling them they will be rewarded for short termism and disposability in their content over provocative or meandering prose.
Reviews
Here McInally dropped some headline stats into the discussion, running down the recent headliners of Download Festival and listing off the ratings their last albums received in major rock and metal publications, all of which were positive. But the problem is not limited to legacy media. I’ve noted a similar trend in underground and amateur spaces for a while now. Coare’s defence was that maybe these bands are just putting out good material, that the writers who put themselves forward to cover particular albums will usually be fans of the band and thus more likely to give a positive rating, or that reviews just don’t serve a purpose when anyone can stream an album for free and make up their own mind.
I put a similar question to Chris Dick on the Necropolis AD podcast. He responded that whilst he’s not shy about giving negative coverage, the majority of albums are rated above a certain threshold at Decibel, but he was inclined to attribute this to a rise in quality across metal music in the last few decades than any nefarious motive. We could endlessly debate the validity of that claim, suffice to say his point was specifically in reference to the marked improvement in musicianship and production values across metal, which I don’t think anyone could deny.
So do reviews serve a purpose? And if so, why is negativity in such short supply? Call me biased, but I find the idea that reviews are redundant in the age of streaming offensive. Speaking as a reader and not a writer of reviews, a well articulated thesis on an album can make a wonderful listening companion, it can rehabilitate a work previously held in contempt, or make us question what was once held up as gospel.
There’s also a difference between what I call frontline reviewing, passing judgment on new releases, and looking back at older material. The former, for the simple reason that the reviewer will be parsing a high volume of new material and attempting to situate it, is more chaotic, liable to revision, and more “risky” in terms of being out of step with peers. The latter, because it involves going back to albums that have bedded in somewhat, presents the opportunity for a more detailed, granular, and maybe philosophical approach. Half retrospective, half critique, the benefit of familiarity is offset by the fact that it will attract fewer readers, it’s “old news” to an extent, bands want coverage of their latest material to share around, you’re not riding the waves of the current discussion. It’s why I attempt a mix of both on my own platform.
Reviews can be an important vector for how the scene understands itself. Digging through people’s thoughts on an album, how they contextualise it, what they value in particular artists and genres, this can refract your own insights, amplify or challenge others, and generally make us better at understanding why we like the things we like. In short, they are an important supplement for anyone feeding themselves a steady diet of a particular genre as most metalheads tend to do. Despite a wild divergence in quality, I’ve lost count of the number of epiphanies I’ve had whilst scanning through the random, amateur reviews flooding Metal Archives every day.
So why is so much of the metal media landscape reneging on this responsibility? It’s a problem not limited to legacy media. Whilst the better quality blogs might actually write a review (as opposed to regurgitating the PR blurb), they are still generally lukewarm to positive when not hyperbolically enthusiastic.
I find Coare’s response that reviewers will generally be fans of the band and therefore more likely to give a positive rating to be pretty weak. If a reviewer is doing their job right, they are, as far as possible, not speaking in their capacity as a fan. They should be an expert in types. What are the types of death metal. And what type is this particular album trying to be. And how successful is it in this regard. Or is it so successful that it becomes an archetype, or does it even represent a paradigm shift. For an older band with a well established sound, one could assess “type” in the context of their discography. Is the latest Iron Maiden album a good example of the “type” Iron Maiden? Or if the artist is attempting to shift away from their “type” (Ulver, Paradise Lost etc.), is it sincere, authentic and so on. This is what distinguishes criticism from a mere description of subjective impressions. Whilst the latter can be interesting to read, it fails as criticism, the literal art of informing an audience if this is a good, bad, or average instance of a type.
So why are so many reviewers simply falling back on tepid praise when not being genuinely sycophantic? This should not be read as a call to just be meaner, more an argument for standards. The fear being that, through all the moral panics about gatekeeper boogeymen we have lost the ability or even the desire to critically assess the music in front of us. As McInally points out, if everything is good then nothing is good. This leaves us with the “pay to play” theory. The music press has already had its wings severely clipped in the last two decades. Pissing off the wrong band or promoter with a stinkpiece risks burning bridges that could deny them access to important contacts. And for smaller platforms, it’s all about getting your brand out there. And the best way to do this is to have a band share a positive review you wrote. The band gets a decent pull quote to stick on their social media pages, and your little website gets some exposure.
Another element feeding into this is the febrile effects of social media itself. Despite my demeanour, the fact that the vibes are generally more upbeat in metal these days is a net positive. But in the process we risk losing our ability to handle conflict or even interact with opinions different to our own. Platforms regularly posting negative reviews risk haemorrhaging visitors who are unable to enjoy their favourite thing knowing that not everyone out there agrees that it’s good.
This is something I have previously referred to as the casualisation of fandom. People who enjoy the music they enjoy and generally don’t want to be bothered or challenged by this. A benign enough mindset, but I suspect what we are seeing is the casual tier of fans encroaching and policing the space usually reserved for the more critical tier, those happy to endlessly debate the minutiae of specific releases and artists, who have developed a sophisticated rapport with the music they love, and are more resilient to negative coverage of bands they like because they have a greater understanding of their relationship to the music, and are able to digest and even welcome divergent views as an important aspect informing their fandom.
Ultimately this comes down to a combination of trust and engagement. There are plenty of metal commentators out there I disagree with. But they will get my attention if they offer interesting, well thought out takes, and it helps if they are engaging and entertaining in the process, and acting in good faith. The “endless carousel of good vibes” is certainly in part a result of pay to play, but the audience also bears some responsibility here. The constant positive coverage metal subjects itself to is a self-sustaining, propagandising feedback loop. Meaning that any negative coverage of a popular album or band is treated as a form of betrayal. It shatters the illusion that everything is A-OK.
Trust
For all the mistakes the music press has made in the last twenty years, it has had to navigate an impossible position. Whether figures in legacy media have any desire to produce quality journalism is by the by, they are heavily incentivised to do the exact opposite. This has degraded the quality of content at every level, and they are left trapped between an audience demanding one thing whilst actively seeking the exact opposite. An audience that bemoans the quality of the music press when not openly abandoning it as a legitimate source of information is also producing data that tells traditional media outlets that miscellaneous slop content does numbers.
Ultimately they have been forced to respond to a dramatic bifurcation within music fandom. At one extreme are those who grew up when print media was the only source of information outside of TV and radio. At the other are those who may never have even touched a physical magazine, whose media literacy has been nurtured under a host of disparate digital threads. In between is an entire spectrum of variants from older tech optimists all too ready to abandon traditional media outlets and embrace the potential of crowd sourced punditry, to younger digital natives disengaging from any form of media diet out of sheer despair.
As evinced by Coare’s ducking behind the data as the ultimate arbiter of content and frequent allusions to the demands of different age brackets, as far as its audience is concerned, the media is more interested in reach than building loyalty. And from a purely financial perspective, this may be the only metric that makes sense.
But what if we started from a different premise? Thinking of my own media diet the first word that comes to mind is trust. Of those platforms I have been willing to follow and even throw money at, beneath the entertainment value, the insights, the enjoyment I get from engaging with them, it is because I have developed a degree of trust with the individuals or groups that run them. Something that inoculates them against me abandoning them any time soon. And the fact that I don’t agree with every single decision or editorial line they take is in fact a sign that they are performing their function as a media outlet. They are enhancing and challenging my understanding of the subject matter.
The obvious problem from a practical point of view is that trust takes time and hard work to build. Luxuries traditional media outlets were not afforded as digital anarchy pulled the rug out from under them, forcing them to scramble to protect the bottom line. Staff have been laid off, offices shutdown, circulations shrunk, the content withering on the vine as a result, along with any opportunity to rebuild trust with audiences of any demographic.
Whilst Decibel presents a convincing model of how a traditional media outlet can survive through diversifying, it sacrifices a degree of trust in the process. Whilst I have enjoyed some (some) of the material put out by Decibel books and look across the Atlantic with intrigue at their live activities, I don’t trust them as a publication. Ignoring specific disagreements I may have with specific writers, they give the impression of being too close to the subject matter they ostensibly cover to do so with any objective rigour. Nevertheless, they remain probably the most successful example of a traditional metal publication that has managed to survive with a degree of integrity intact.
But to really establish what a trusted, diverse, strong metal media outlet could look like we need to look beyond the borders of music. Setting the politics of it aside for a second, an outlet like Novara Media presents one model here. They rely on donations from supporters to maintain their independence. Their tech platform may be scrappy, some of their content patchy, and, being a politically charged media outlet, they walk a fine line between pissing off different sections of their audience whilst maintain a degree of editorial independence. But if their PR is to be believed, they have managed to financially sustain themselves through this model, grow an audience, and begin to challenge the idea that digital media will never be able to produce substantive, meaningful content that can compete with legacy outlets.
I doubt we can lift and shift this model in its entirety to a metal context. It’s hard enough to get fans to part with cash for an album they like let alone a media platform explicitly designed to challenge them. Beyond these practicalities however, the blunt reality is that the audience just isn’t there in sufficient numbers, and probably aging fast. A project to fix metal media would be required to in some sense “fix” the audience first by making the case that a traditional, combative media is even necessary in the first place. The disparate model we enjoy now works to an extent, a diet across multiple platforms, mediums, and sundry guerrilla content, all have their place, but are no replacement for professional journalism when a real (and potentially serious) story does actually break across the scene.
Some blogs plug the gaps left by a lack of insightful writing, but because these aren’t full time operations their output is patchy and inconsistent. And until we put clear blue water between reviewers and the world of PR, coverage will remain tepidly positive. That’s before we even get to what a viable financial model might look like to fund sending journalists out on the road and to conduct the hard graft of their profession. As Remfry Dedman alluded to in a previous episode of 2P1P, even a relatively successful venture with a dedicated Patreon following will barely scrape together a minimum wage.
One of my motivations for starting this blog was what I perceived as a dearth of quality writing in metal. Since that time I’ve been lucky enough to encounter a number of like minded people all doing what they can to put out thoughtful coverage of the metal landscape. But, whilst writing about metal may be a niche hobby, I’ve also come to realise that reading material about metal with a certain depth of analysis is itself a niche pursuit. One that requires a siege mentality at times. As my awareness of that much larger layer of the metal fanbase grows, of a casualised, aesthetically inclined population, who treat metal as an Instagram aesthetic, meme or TikTok fodder, a package holiday or branding material, and whose engagement with it is premised on unconditional positivity. As long as this mentality continues to dominate online spaces, what remains of metal’s traditional/legacy/professional media will only ever be fashioned in their image.
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