Commercialization of Black Metal

Commercialization of Black Metal describes the genre’s passage from a small, tightly policed underground into a profitable and internationally visible music business. By 2003, its records sold widely, its major groups toured around the world, and its music reached radio and television; yet commercial success did not erase the notoriety that had helped make Black Metal compelling, or settle the argument over how much its crimes belonged to its cultural identity.

From underground network to market

In its early Norwegian formation, Black Metal was not defined by music alone. Its principal elements also lay in the beliefs and outlook displayed by musicians, while the boundaries of the genre shifted over time under the influence of prominent personalities. Mayhem occupied a foundational position in Norway, and its members’ reputation grew alongside rumors and an insistently sinister public image. The scene’s identity was therefore shaped not only by records but by who was accepted as serious, what attitudes they displayed, and how those attitudes were made visible.

The infrastructure was small and personal. Slayer magazine, published by Metalion from his home in Sarpsborg, connected him to the underground as both an observer and participant. At first, the network itself was sparse: people who shared an interest in the music found one another through correspondence and telephone calls, and might meet at a concert in a major city. As more bands formed, Aarseth became a point of contact for groups including Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Thorns, and Emperor, and planned to release much of their work through Deathlike Silence Productions. The transition toward a marketable genre thus began within relationships, labels, publications, and places that also enforced subcultural standards.

Acceptance could be deliberately difficult to earn. Ihsahn recalled an atmosphere around the shop in which newcomers had to be trusted and regarded as serious before they were welcomed. Visitors sought recognition from Aarseth and older members of the scene; the shop’s force lay partly in this informal hierarchy and in the desire to belong to it. Such gatekeeping did not disappear simply because the music later reached a broader audience. It helped establish a distinction between an underground understood as committed and an outside world imagined as ordinary or insufficiently extreme.

A commercial breakthrough with a dark reputation

By 2003, that once-marginal music had become a significant source of income. The genre’s popularity appeared undiminished, its leading groups sold substantial quantities of records, and their extensive tours drew large audiences. Satyricon’s single Fuel for Hatred received heavy airplay on one of Norway’s three biggest radio stations; Dimmu Borgir’s forthcoming album was set to be promoted with television advertisements. The contrast with the scene’s earlier isolation was sharp: a sound once cultivated by a small network was now being carried by established promotional channels.

The book presents this growth as a change in both livelihood and incentives. Most of the genre’s protagonists, by this point, had little interest in committing crimes and took their musical careers seriously. A jail sentence did not enable recording, touring, or making a living. Commercial success could therefore encourage a practical separation between musical work and criminal activity, without requiring musicians to abandon the genre’s dark presentation or the identity built around it.

Nor did wider acceptance simply make the scene’s earlier history irrelevant. Black Metal had become both critically acclaimed and commercially appealing, and supporters within mainstream media were now prepared to defend it. That defense marked a change from the period when the music was chiefly a source of alarm, but it did not remove the spectacle of transgression from its public image. Commercial legitimacy and a deliberately threatening reputation could coexist, each addressing a different audience.

Notoriety as cultural capital

The book resists a simple account in which crime was merely an incidental stain on an otherwise musical history. It argues that grisly crimes contributed substantially—and perhaps more than musical achievement or originality—to Black Metal’s allure and stature. Although most people in the scene were law-abiding, those responsible for murders and church burnings were often central figures rather than peripheral hangers-on. Some key magazines treated real killers as celebrity acquaintances or heroes, giving criminal reputations a place within the scene’s own mythology.

The account of Mayhem shows how consciously image could be cultivated. Aarseth recognized the force of a militantly sinister presentation and described a plan to spread evil to the public. Mayhem’s rare live performances became especially associated with its image, and the 1990 Sarpsborg concert later circulated in a bootleg release whose cover reproduced a disturbing image of Dead after his death. Such circulation made the band’s notoriety part of the material surrounding its music. The record was not the only thing that could travel: images, stories, and reputations could travel with it.

Church arson likewise carried an interpretation that its perpetrators supplied themselves. Vikernes and others convicted of burning churches described their actions as retaliation against Christianity. The book compares this stated rationale with revenge-motivated arson, while emphasizing that the Scandinavian cases were, to a large degree, unprecedented. The crimes therefore functioned both as attacks on religious institutions and as public claims about the scene’s opposition to Christianity. Their symbolic force helped connect the music’s anti-social posture to actions outside the recording and performance context.

Media attention and the unstable boundary of the scene

The media could amplify notoriety while distorting who belonged to the culture. In discussing a later chapel desecration in Norway, the book notes that tabloid coverage speculated about Satanic ritual and prompted calls to outlaw Black Metal. It also stresses that the arrested former band member had long since been fired for musical reasons and was largely ostracized from the scene. His drug use was cited as a possible factor in his behavior; the account suggests psychological and pharmacological explanations were more plausible than attributing the act to music or Satanism. The episode demonstrates why sensational coverage could not serve as a reliable map of the subculture.

At the same time, media attention could help produce the status it reported. One later assessment argues that coverage had been invaluable to Vikernes in constructing a near-mythological public image and that the scale of attention intensified internal competition to become the dominant personality. The media did not create the scene’s internal dynamics, but in this case it may have magnified them. Public visibility thus had a double effect: it brought Black Metal to a much larger audience and offered subcultural figures a route to notoriety that could reinforce their standing within the scene.

The revised edition’s 2003 account holds these developments together rather than treating commercial success as a clean break with the past. Black Metal had become a viable product, one that bands could sell and performers could build careers around. Yet its appeal remained inseparable, in the book’s analysis, from the dangerous image, criminal history, and media-generated reputations that had helped turn a small underground into a subject of wider fascination. Its commercialization changed the scale and economic prospects of the music; it did not resolve the tension between artistic work and the spectacle of transgression.