We are drowning in music.
Since the DIY days of the 1980s, technology has improved and dropped in price. The result is that anyone with a computer can make and publish music now, and so we have millions of artists and very few success stories.
This illustrates a problem with the music scene. If there's too much music, and not enough stands out, everything gets forgotten. Each band gets its fifteen minutes on the iPod and then is left in the past as the listener rushes on to new things.
As a result, a situation emerges which is terrible for musicians. They are like a kid at recess, trying to pull off enough stunts or outrageous drama to get noticed, and then hoping that this fickle audience will remember their music.
Most likely, the audience will not. They are so awash in sound, band names and image that they can barely remember what they liked that day, much less what they enjoy over a longer period of time.
This drives musicians out of the field because every artist wants to be heard, read or viewed. No one produces art for their own amusement and then takes the trouble to also publish it. If they think no one will care, they go elsewhere.
Metal faces a unique dilemma in this situation. Metal music is unique and represents its own unique culture. It's more than technique. Metal has its own spirit and its own way of viewing the world, even its own method of composing.
Locrian don’t produce music that bears any tonal resemblance to metal as I know it; they deal in drone-y ambient: spacious, dark, chilling soundscapes that rest uneasily on the periphery of consciousness. - Stereogum
The differences between metal and rock are more than skin-deep. As millions of bands have exploded out of the Garage Bands and ProTools of the world, metal has become flooded with those who want to use it but do not want to respect what it is.
If they are allowed to, these people will flood metal with more of the same-same music that's drowning the music industry, and will dilute what metal is, so that it will vanish and be replaced by something not unique but generic.
As a wise man once said, "True metal it is, or no metal at all -- wimps and poseurs leave the hall!"
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