It could be we're going to finally get a break from the crowd. When there's too many metalheads, quality material gets drowned out by the herd, and most of those "metalheads" are johnny-come-lately kids hiding Nas CDs under the Blasphemy. As they all fade away, the times of qualtiy metal return -- which you can see by the resurgence in the old school death metal and black metal bands now touring and releasing new albums.

http://metal-blogs.com/death/2009/07/31 ... tal-falls/

Is this going to affect ZT mag at all?

Nas is a bit special though

All pointless though, the more popular a genre is will only increase the chances of more quality bands coming through surely?
Or does the 'scene' only produce quality music when fewer people buy the stuff/watch bands live?

Yeah because as a metalhead i google those terms all the time.
What fucking bullshit is this i see before me?
This means nothing.

Surely a better analysis would be to search for the most popular bands in any given genre of metal and y'know, compare that.

If anything I would actually say metal in general has got more popular recently, probably due to guitar hero and what-ever that other game is, rock star or something.

IF less people are listening to death/black metal, it may have something to do with both of those genres being mostly stagnant.

^^^ Yes agreed, it seems all too easy for many people these days, more often than not the 'elitist' ones, to say BM or/and DM is dead or hasn't released anything worthy in years. While that wouldnt be true with DM its certainly a million miles away with BM. Clearly the people who say such things are those for whom if it doesn't sound identical to Darkthrone and was not recorded on an answering machine it cant be BM.