Loyal fans keep heavy rock and metal above the genre decline

Despite a dearth of rock acts in the higher echelons of the charts, heavy rock and metal continue to generate strong business thanks largely to the staunch fan loyalty that proponents of pop fail to muster. Four decades after the likes of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple first swaggered on stage pioneering the sound of heaving riffs and wandering guitar solos, metal’s appeal remains untarnished by a sharply diminished appetite for rock in the mainstream market. The number of rock songs in the singles chart fell to its lowest level in 50 years last year with only three tracks, which the Official Chart Company (OCC) categorises as “rock”, making it into the top 100 selling tracks of the year. Rock music, in terms of singles sales, is as far from being in vogue as it has ever been.

But the ongoing demand for rock’s heavier and more experimental sub-genres appears to be unabated. Acts including Iron Maiden, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Biffy Clyro and Rage Against The Machine, all of which can be loosely termed as heavy rock or metal, continue to trouble the higher echelons of the charts. Meanwhile, a healthy number of specialist labels, the majority being independent, are working hard to generate sturdy business from the genre, even if their releases largely bubble under the Top 75.

OCC senior licensing manager Phil Matchum, whose job it is to immerse himself in the charts on a daily basis, has seen that without fail there are new albums every week from the specialist labels including Roadrunner, Napalm, Nuclear Blast, Metal Blade, Peaceville, Spinefarm and Epitaph.

And, while these albums will not always challenge the Top 75, they consistently flirt with the top 100–200 of the albums chart. “There have been releases from acts such as The Answer, Machine Head, Mastodon, Blink 182, and Evile – and that is just the tip of an iceberg,” says Matchum. “With that amount of releases, and from a mixture of new, contemporary and classic acts, it shows the metal market is in a pretty healthy state. The albums may not sell in vast quantities – in terms of crossover/mainstream – but the labels clearly know who their audience is and that audience is clearly still hungry for new metal music.”

Cooking Vinyl, a label celebrating its 20th anniversary, is among those looking to sate that appetite for heavy rock, and has of late been taking an increasing interest in the genre. Since releasing the biggest-selling independent album of 2009 with Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy, whose single Omen won a Kerrang! award, Cooking Vinyl has generated significant interest among artists wanting to work with the label, not least shock rocker Marilyn Manson. Manson signed to Cooking Vinyl, which recently tied in with the new multi-million-pound investment fund backed by Icebreaker. The result will be a new Marilyn Manson album released next year.

Cooking Vinyl director Rob Collins admits that heavy rock is not an area that the label has really explored before. “[Signing Marilyn Manson] has led us to look at more alternative rock and metal acts, but in a broad sense – at one end of the spectrum there is The Blackout, a young UK band who were nominated for three Kerrang! awards, and at the other end we have a punk band from New York, Cerebral Ballzy,” says Collins. Indeed there is no lack of heavy rock sub-genres and one label that has been exploring the more experimental and extreme exponents of hardcore rock for many years is Nottingham-based Earache, whose acts include Evile, SSS, Savage Messiah and Singaporean grindcore trio Wormrot.

Earache has been releasing extreme metal music for the best part of 25 years but label manager Dan Tobin, who has been with the company for 17 of them, describes Wormrot as being one of the most extreme acts the label has ever worked with. Despite, and possibly because of, the band’s obviously uncommercial sound, Wormrot are building strong support and have become one of Earache’s priority acts. While Tobin admits that record sales of his artists rarely trouble the charts, he points out this is not necessarily the primary focus and that naturally heavy rock acts do not sell as much as pop bands because they are not as accessible and do not get the mainstream exposure. “The way these bands and the labels that support them make the money is through touring and merchandise; and that’s the way we have always done it. I don’t think anyone judges success by record sales anymore. It is about how many people you play live to and how many T-shirts you sell at the end of the night,” says Tobin.

When it comes to performing live, demand certainly appears to be stronger than ever with the recent Download Festival having attracted an audience of 72,000, while Kilimanjaro’s Sonisphere announced that it expanded its capacity at the July event at Knebworth.

Download festival promoter Live Nation’s Andy Copping is adamant that while major labels have failed in recent years to sufficiently develop new artists, live promoters and independent labels are playing a more important role than ever. “Independent labels are doing great deals with the acts that they are signing because they understand the artists and how best to get behind them,” says Copping. “They are developing them, which the major labels aren’t doing. It’s almost like punk rock again with artists signing to independent labels that are working in new and interesting ways and are happy to explore new things,” says Copping.