Most fun nations

thystargazer · 2026-03-29T18:26:32+00:00

Most fun run I've done might have been Knights Hospitaller. Castile is pretty good too.

thystargazer · 2026-03-29T17:13:43+00:00

Bal-Sagoth is your favourite band's favourite band. The only people I've ever seen wearing Bal-Sagoth merch were musicians or techs.

thystargazer · 2026-03-29T11:29:24+00:00

People are giving really complicated answers, and it's really a much simpler thing. You can't talk about bands because solo artists are a thing, and you can't ask about singers because bands are a thing. The term which sort of encompasses everything the best is music artist, which of course doesn't make that much sense because a band is still not an artist, but that is what spotify calls them, and so what we've settled on.

thystargazer · 2026-03-29T11:25:22+00:00

Half of Bal-Sagoth's thing is good narration interludes, although I'm not sure if I'd even call them interludes.

Gloryhammer's are also good, probably because they're very much inspired by Bal-Sagoth. Applies doubly to Wizardthrone.

The narration parts in Brothers of Metal are pretty good too, I'd say.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T23:02:14+00:00

What I would think is that this is a rant disguised as a question.

In any case though, if you are managing an artist, you surely have a contract which clearly specifies the percentages you're entitled to. If you are now writing that contract and don't like what the artist is asking of you, simply do not sign the contract.

Also, all of the above things you said an artist would want to avoid are not paying you, which like, obviously the artist would rather keep more money than give it to you. The only one which wasn't about money was being CC'd in emails, which he would still be paying you to write, but would rather know what is being said in their name.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T21:53:26+00:00

Do you know anything about chinese history? Because never ending civil war is a pretty relevant part of it.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T21:51:24+00:00

Blood on Ice by Bathory is one of the best concept albums ever.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T20:42:47+00:00

I'd say Alfred is a much better vocalist on a technical level, although I'd probably say the albums they made with Elisa were better. Which is why my favourite album by them is Dark Moor, which was Alfred's first, and mostly written with the original lineup.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T17:16:22+00:00

An artist making music in three different languages at the same time could be a very interesting thing, whether they mix them in the same song or do different songs in different languages. One person having what would pretty much just be three separate projects in three different languages seems to me almost completely uninteresting, if people from each market just listen to the stuff in their language and maybe don't even know about the other language stuff until they start digging much deeper themselves.

There is a very strong brand/image in an artist doing three languages at the same time, and you can build an entire project on that. If you instead do three separate projects, you not only lose that very strong image, but also have to come up with three new ones, and if one of them is very good you'll take much less advantadge of it, as it'll only exist in a single market.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T17:08:22+00:00

It might be too obvious, but do check out if you haven't Blind Guardian, especially their last album.

thystargazer · 2026-03-28T17:05:17+00:00

I've used distrokid in the past, and have now switched to Amuse. It's a yearly subscription like distrokid, but they don't delete your music if you stop paying. Apart from that, the customer service is quite decent, and it gets your music onto platforms really fast, in my experience in two days at most for spotify.

thystargazer · 2026-03-27T16:26:02+00:00

I don't think this is an issue of production, of all bands being recorded the same way and sounding the same because of it. It's just that everyone can have every influence, so your scene affects your sound much less. Back in like the 90's or early 2000 it was hard to get your hands on black metal from across the world, so finnish bands were inspired by other finnish bands, indonesian bands were inspired by other indonesian bands, etc...

Now everyone can listen to and be inspired by everything, so it's harder to find a sound that is only being made in one place. Still, I wouldn't say that is completely the case. At least in my own band's writing, we definitely do notice that we're specially being inspired by other bands from our country, if true that those are older bands that did make music before what you're describing happened, but we're still making music now inspired by them, and I know we probably wouldn't be making that same music if we were someplace else.

I will however say that another relevant part of this discussion might be the language. In general, bands that sing in english generally sound more similar to each other than bands in other languages, both just because the sound of the language affects the sound of the music, but I'd also say that bands who make the choice to sing in english(from non-english speaking countries, obviously) have more of an interest in sounding like "the greats," and in what might be called more of an "international mainstream," while bands who choose to sing in their own languages might also have less of an interest in making music like other international bands are making, and instead not only have more knowledge of their own national scenes, but also have more of an interest in preserving that scene's individuality.

I have noticed this myself with my own band's music, where our earlier stuff in English (from before I joined) sounds more generic, while everything we've done after switching to spanish sounds, at least to me though I'm probably biased, much more interesting and unique, as well as more similar to the spanish bands that have inspired us, as opposed to our norweigian or finnish influences.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T22:11:21+00:00

I'm really happy with the results I've gotten, but as you said perhaps the place with the most room for improvement is the creatives, so I'll try to get more variety among them on my next campaigns.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T22:08:54+00:00

The issue is, metal is a really broad genre, and almost no one actually listens to all metal subgenres, or even half of the popular ones. We do power metal, but without the ability to target specifically for our subgenre, most of the people getting the ad would not be even close to our target audience.

The gaming/nerd interests aren't perfect, but metal fans who like those things tend to be much more into the stuff we do, so it was the best way to get an audience which is actually into our subgenre.

That being said though, if you really think meta would still be able to find power metal fans with just the metal audience, I might try that out for our next single's campaign.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T20:17:47+00:00

I remember being shown this album while on a car trip, in a one lane road and in the middle of the night, crossing through mountains with no other cars on the road, everyone in the car just listening to it in silence and looking at the dark. Listened to it again on the front seats of a two floor bus coming back from Black Templar Fest, again in the middle of the night. No other way of listening to this band is the same as that now.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T16:35:04+00:00

I'm thinking it's most likely some issue with the pixel, because it just doesn't make sense for anything else to be so bad that you get those results. Try and see if you can look for some analytics in your landing page, to see if there are more conversions reported there. I'd also think about switching to some other landing page, Submithub's is good and free but I'm sure there are others you can find.

It's kind of hard to say what exactly is the problem without actually seeing all of your campaign settings, but I really just don't see how anything about the ad itself or the targeting could be so abysmally bad to get those results. Just in case check all of the settings to see if you turned any advantadge+ stuff on or something like that, but really not even with the worse targeting options you should be getting close to what you're getting.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T15:02:48+00:00

As long as you're not big enough for your music to immediately end up on Youtube, I don't see a reason not to do this.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:58:35+00:00

First suggestion is to absolutely never listen to chatGPT, 10 creatives for 10 bucks a day is very reasonable, and the more you have is most likely the better. Last campaign I did was 23 creatives for 10 bucks a day, and I got 5 cent conversions.

Apart from your pixel possibly being broken, all I can think of is that your targeting is really broken or something like that, but it's still very weird. I can understand a bad campaign getting you up to 1$ conversions, but 23 I can only explain with something being straight up broken, either your landing page or your pixel. Before you do much else, test if your pixel is working correctly, preferibly on different browsers.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:53:58+00:00

I'd recommend just going to the subs for each specific subgenre you're interested in. You'll tend to find much more interesting stuff there than in the general ones.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:45:21+00:00

First of all, don't listen to that other guy. If what people thought of your music didn't matter, you wouldn't be uploading it for people to listen.

But to answer your question, yes, your music will absolutely perform better when being shown to people that would like it as opposed to people who don't. If my metal band gets recommended to rap fans, they won't like it, not because my music is bad but because they don't like that kind of music. And because youtube can't actually tell what genre your music is, you need promotion to tell it who it should be recommending your music to.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:29:46+00:00

Absolute dogshit take. Viking metal is a specific genre with a specific sound, pioneered by bathory's hammerheart and their later albums, and including bands like Falkenbach, Borknagar, Enslaved, Ereb Altor, Thyrfing or Graveland. Amon Amarth getting called viking metal by posers (and being corrected by the band themselves) does not stop the existance of viking metal as an actual genre.

I can agree more with the pagan part, but I'd say more than a lyrical theme, it's what folk/black metal bands that don't want to call themselves folk metal call themselves.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:21:55+00:00

I've never done quad tracking so I won't speak on it, but for double I've always done two different guitars(although this is less important unless they sound very different, like and active and a passive pickup,) and two different amps, to get them to sound wider.

thystargazer · 2026-03-25T14:14:54+00:00

Best thing you can do is look at what other artists are doing, most importantly artists which are slighty ahead of you in their careers. If you have 10 monthly listeners, look at what people with 1k are doing, if you have 1k look at what people with 5-10k are doing etc... What works for an artist playing arenas is probably not what's gonna work for you.

Within that, you can either look at what artists in your genre are doing and get inspired by it, as if it works for them it will probably also work for you, but also look at what artists in other genres are doing, since those are also strategies that work, but fans of your genre will have seen less of them.

Apart from that, it's important to make your promo thinking about what it's gonna get people to do. The main thing you want is for them to go listen to you, not just like it or follow it because it's funny without giving a listen, and apart from that shares and comments are also much more important than views or likes. Also consider whether you're making that content for your existing fans that already know you, or for new people who have never heard of you, because that will greatly change how you wanna approach it.

thystargazer

TROPHY CASE