Asbjørn Slettemark

Asbjørn Slettemark is identified as an editor of the Norwegian music-business weekly Faro-Journalen, whose staff included the Scandinavian correspondent for Billboard. In his discussion of Norwegian Black Metal, he speaks from a position attentive to both the music scene and the record business. His comments trace a period when the genre seemed poised for mainstream expansion, explain why that prospect narrowed, and examine how promotion, sales claims, and musical reputation shaped the career of Dimmu Borgir. Rather than treating commercial success as a simple measure of popularity, his account shows how it depended on access to audiences beyond the underground and on a market whose figures were difficult to verify.

Professional Position and Perspective

Slettemark’s stated role connects music journalism to the business of recording and distribution. Faro-Journalen was a Norwegian music-business publication, and the presence of a Billboard correspondent on its staff placed it within a broader Scandinavian and international industry context. The account does not supply further biographical details, but it establishes why Slettemark is asked to assess both the scale of Black Metal’s popularity and the commercial mechanisms behind it.

His interview is organized around concrete market questions: whether Norwegian Black Metal had become popular, how much its bands sold, and what happened when a larger label signed a group such as Dimmu Borgir. These are not merely questions about audience enthusiasm. They ask how an underground style might be translated into sales, what kinds of bands a label could promote, and whether the public numbers repeated around a successful act could be trusted. Slettemark’s answers distinguish the genre’s reputation from the narrower conditions that produced a commercial breakthrough.

A Genre at the Edge of the Mainstream

Slettemark recalls that, two or three years before the interview, Norwegian Black Metal had seemed close to becoming substantially bigger. International press interest was present, and he suggests that more bands with the mainstream potential he associated with Dimmu Borgir and The Kovenant might have carried the genre into the major league. The possibility was real enough to be framed as a missed or interrupted opening, not simply as a genre that had never attracted wider attention.

In his account, that opening narrowed when powerful elements within the scene turned inward and returned to an older, harder form of Black Metal. The shift helps explain the tension at the center of his assessment: the sound and attitude that sustained underground distinction did not necessarily align with the broader accessibility needed for expansion. The evidence does not identify those forces individually, so Slettemark’s point remains a description of a turn in the scene rather than an attribution of responsibility to particular musicians.

He also describes a recent period in which a Norwegian Black Metal band could expect a record deal because labels believed a release from Norway would sell at least 5,000 copies. That expectation helped produce a flood of releases, including what he regarded as weak material issued through German and Dutch labels. The audience, he says, remained faithful, but the market had changed: by the time of his account, quality counted more, and established veterans were the acts that sold. The contrast suggests that early label interest and durable commercial standing were not the same thing. A nationality-linked sales expectation could open doors, but it did not guarantee that every signed band would retain listeners.

Sales, Evidence, and the Limits of the Numbers

Slettemark describes sales boasting as a practice that had lost its appeal among Black Metal bands. A small group of acts sold well, with releases moving roughly 10,000 to 20,000 copies, but he cautions that the figures were difficult to establish. Labels could exaggerate, while many specialist retailers did not register sales. The market therefore generated numbers that were both commercially useful and uncertain: the apparent precision of a sales claim could exceed the quality of the underlying records.

That uncertainty matters to his discussion of Dimmu Borgir. The label representative Yorck Eysel attributed 150,000 sales to the band’s latest album and 400,000 records overall during its time with Nuclear Blast. Slettemark reports that these totals were repeated by people working with the band, while also advising caution because inflated figures were an old sales tactic. A record presented as a chart success was easier to sell than one known only to a small group of devoted collectors. He does not dismiss the numbers outright; he separates their promotional function from their reliability, then concludes that Dimmu Borgir had nevertheless sold an impressive quantity of records and that Eysel credited the band’s own merit.

Dimmu Borgir and the Work of Promotion

Slettemark’s explanation of Dimmu Borgir’s rise gives the label’s marketing choices a central role. He suggests that Nuclear Blast may have selected the band partly by chance, and that the records which secured its contract were not, in his estimation, especially remarkable. But the band was still developing and was willing to participate in image-building and magazine-poster promotion. In his comparison, Mayhem and Darkthrone were more established acts and could not be sold in quite the same manner. The distinction is not simply between better and worse bands: it concerns the different promotional possibilities attached to an evolving group and to veterans with more fixed identities.

He further locates Dimmu Borgir’s opportunity in the divide between audiences for mainstream Metal acts such as Korn and Metallica and the Black Metal audience. Bridging that separation, he estimates, could triple sales. Dimmu Borgir attempted that crossing, and promotion toward the mainstream press was an important part of the effort; such attention was unusual for Black Metal bands. With a professional company behind them, the group received aggressive marketing, including substantial promotional material and conspicuous posters for record shops. The campaign made the band more visible to potential listeners beyond its existing audience, while also marking it out from competitors who did not receive the same level of support.

Slettemark places Nuclear Blast’s scale in perspective: compared with multinational record companies, he characterizes it as relatively small, but notes that it was based in the world’s largest heavy-metal market and had an American distribution deal with Warner Records. Its importance in this example lies not in matching the largest companies in size, but in its capacity to move records and organize a professional campaign. The result, in Slettemark’s account, is a qualified picture of commercial success: promotional skill and openness to image-making helped Dimmu Borgir reach a broader market, yet uncertain sales reporting and the scene’s own turn toward a harder, more inward-facing style limit what that success can demonstrate about Black Metal as a whole.