Been a metal head for almost 40 years and metal doesn’t die, it has a life of its own.

Countless subgenres and personalized algorithms means an endless variety of Metal. Everyone has their own favorite item from a specific local Food Truck now. We're not all staring at the same Taco Bell menu.

A thing I think Rick missed is that being popular for a metal band versus being popular by conventional popular artist standards are two wildly different metrics.

Most heavy metal listeners like underground and independent metal bands and they like a lot of them

Most die hard metal heads are in the lesser known band area. Metal is underground.

Trends come and go, popularity ebbs and flows. Good music is timeless. If metalheads were interested in being popular, they wouldn't be metalheads. They'd be Top40 music critics, or Grammy voters.

One thing not mentioned is metal and hard rock is one of those genres keeping physical media alive. I know i still have 1000s of cds on my shelf and even more in storage and i have them all rip to my computer.

The immediate problem with his thesis was its inherent presumptions that he never questioned or challenged. The world of music has changed, and all genres have hugely expanded because of it. I listen to WAY MORE metal bands today than I did back in the 90s and 2000s. His argument is similar to saying that television is dying because It is rare for any streaming show to reach the level of viewership that TV shows used to reach pre-streaming.

Yet the television, episodic drama format has had a renaissance in regards to prestige, quality and cinematic quality. And the playing field has expanded hugely. It's possible that MORE people are watching episodic television drama now, and watching it more widely, but they AREN'T all forced to select from the same small pool of pre-selected programming.

And with metal, it's the same. Even if bands like Korn or Metallica were still relevant today, why the heck would you choose to listen to THEM when you have this incredible, seemingly endless buffet of interesting, innovative and fascinating music (some of it seems relatively undiscovered) out before you? It's that kind of deep desire for discovery that got me into metal in the first place, back in the day.

I think that's true for a lot of metalheads. Most metalheads don't look at the top 20 charts to find the music they're interested in. Most metalheads couldn't care less about the sales dominance of the bands they like listening to. In fact, the more niche and obscure and dare I say it, "trve kvlt" it is, the better, in most metalheads' minds. It's built in. Just look at the record label name, "Transcending Obscurity".

It's what metal has always been about fundamentally. The big acts and icons of "the Zeitgeist", and the popularity that surged in the 90s and early 2000s were all ... happy accidents. But you could argue that inevitably, it all led to stagnation for various reasons. The terrain of metal TODAY is so much more interesting and exciting, precisely because there AREN'T still just a handful of Top 20 friendly bands that the genre is defined by. Metal didn't die. It was reborn.

I think that Beato (with all due respect), being a producer, doesn't really UNDERSTAND metal. He sees it as an aesthetic and as a business proposition. But he clearly doesn't understand the CORE ETHOS of metal. The way he talks about it, I'm reminded of the "black metal" shirts in Hot Topic shops. And that's probably why he mentioned so many Hot Topic equivalent "metal" bands. But anyway, that's another discussion. I couldn't disagree with him more. He's out of touch. He's shouting at clouds. But the clouds: they do not care.

As a lifelong metalhead, I firmly believe that metal is not dying, but rather evolving and growing stronger. The underground scene serves as a barometer for the genre's future, and I wonder how many fans, like myself, are not stuck in
nostalgia, repeatedly listening to the same old songs and bands.
With the constant emergence of new music and sub-genres,
I think  metal enthusiasts often have short attention spans, making it challenging to stick with the same artists or songs for an extended period. Once the concerts come into town you tend to move away from band until their next drops of course it’s different if you’re a hardcore fan.

I have been hearing people tell me heavy metal is dead since the '90s. Metal heads have not gone anywhere. And I can tell you from my grandchildren's music taste heavy metal will never die

It can't die as Metal is not a fad, neither can Punk...

Metal was never a genre that was meant to be measured by online metrics 🤟

It’s almost like Rick’s argument is cuz Metal isn’t in the mainstream then it must be dying. Metal was never about the mainstream.

To Rick's point being 63, I'm 53 and I watch your show all the time Jon and eat up the new metal that you and a couple other channels talk about on a weekly or monthly basis. Yes us underground metal heads are eating very well lately 😂😂

I hope the guys at Ulcerate also got that little rise I felt out of being mentioned here.

This was kind of what some people were saying in the late 80/90's, a new type of music would come along and extreme music was no longer popular with the mainstream. One of the best examples is when grunge and groove metal came along and that was supposed to be the end for death metal scene. While some bands tried to change, with varying degrees of success, most of it just went back underground, where it belongs and my opinion, and the people who were into the music and didn't care about winning a popularity contest, knew where to find it. That's never going to change.

“You can’t kill the metal, the metal will live on” - Tenacious D

GREAT point about metal making musicians as opposed to the other way around

I'm a die-hard metalhead in my late 50s (a silverhead?). I still listen to a lot of heavy music; I just don't listen to much streaming music at all. Maybe that's a product of my age group but I still enjoy heavy music even if someone isn't monitoring it online. Best wishes from Atlanta.

The Japanese metal scene is wild right now, Hanabie. Lovebites, Nemophila are just 3 of many that are super good