Music, like it or not, is a product. The Inomics website refers to metal as a “cultural good” governed by the laws of supply and demand - just like books and movies. While it might sound sacrilegious to reduce an art form to an economist’s plaything, metal has become a marketable thing in recent years - or, to put it another way, it’s reaching the mainstream.
Bring Me The Horizon
Again, like it or not, music at the highest levels is created to earn a profit. Metallica recently took this concept to a new high (or low) with a t-shirt subscription club that delivers four garments a year for $159.99. Of course, the appearance of the song Master of Puppets in Stranger Things no doubt earned the quartet a pretty penny.
These things don’t happen by accident. Nobody is licensing their most popular song to a TV show if there’s no money in it.
However, the fact that somebody wants to put Metallica in a mainstream show suggests that metal is increasingly delicious to the public’s ear. Rammstein and Olly Sykes’ Bring Me The Horizon are both inexplicably popular outside the community, too.
Is it all the doing of marketers? No - although, both Rammstein and death metal outfit Cannibal Corpse have appeared in movies. In the latter case, it was 1994's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Some things just sound nice to more than one subset of people.
This brings us to another strange period in metal history - the early 2000s and nu-metal, headed up by bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Slipknot.
Dead by Daylight
Nu-metal is more popular today than it has been since 2004. According to Google Trends, the genre died off in 2009 and continued its decline for the next decade. In 2020, that slide reversed, almost coinciding with Still Sucks, Limp Bizkit’s first album in a decade. Analysts have blamed nu-nu metal bands like Spritbox for the fresh interest in early 2000s metal.
Slipknot is another example of how music marketing can get very creative. Cross-promotion, i.e. the art of tying two products together to attract both audiences at once, is a popular tool with salespeople.
It’s especially evident on casino websites. The operator PlayStar offers Slingo for real money (a mix of slots and bingo) affixed with brands like Discovery’s Shark Week and Tetris. Similarly, rock artists including Jimi Hendrix and Guns 'n' Roses have licensed slot games complete with official artwork.
Slipknot had a starring role in the video game Dead by Daylight in 2024, suggesting that the band is both immediately recognizable and appealing to players of Behaviour Interactive’s cynical horror. Back in the 2000s, when Slipknot moonlighted as one of the most vicious bands in metal, this kind of partnership would have seemed like a fever dream.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band arguably set the scene in the 2000s. The former game even had an official Metallica version.
Don’t worry, though, only bands that have breached the album charts seem to get this kind of attention from marketers, but it nevertheless indicates that metal is a newly palatable thing for modern listeners. It's probably still not your parents' thing, however.
