In engaging with the central themes of the genre—the conceptual dimensions in which the music unfolds as a space of introspection and existential confrontation—it remains questionable whether funeral doom is capable of permanently fulfilling the promises of an aesthetic practice.
How a genre that moves between departure and regression, between affirmation and rebellion—a genre that dedicates itself to suffering, to nothingness, to the meaninglessness of existence, to the thrownness of the self, and to the fragmentation of the ego within an increasingly cybernetic society—can endure remains to be clarified. Despite its thematic and aesthetic depth, funeral doom remains dependent on metal as a cultural and economic space and, despite all differentiations, is not infrequently performed with the intention of simply being metal.
In the context of current developments that influence the market, the question arises whether the fundamental characteristics of the genre—its aesthetic depth, its existential gravity, and its relentless slowness—will continue to endure, or whether they will be diluted or even transformed by the socio-economic challenges of the present. This chapter therefore examines the dynamics of the genre in the present and takes a look at the mechanisms that influence funeral doom as a form of extreme metal both regionally and globally: the practice of prosumerism, financial precarity, and social fragmentation. It also raises the question of how these factors affect the authenticity and the inner resistance of the genre, particularly when the market and economic conditions shape the actions of its actors and make a continual renegotiation of one’s own identity within the market necessary.

Product and Scene

As a music genre of a global community, a metal subgenre such as funeral doom cannot avoid also being a product and a market. Yet even the overarching formation of metal itself is rarely regarded from within the scene as a market. A market that presupposes economy, labor, and sales is an unromantic construct that irritates the ideal of collectively dissolving in the shared love of metal.

For many, however, metal is more: captivating music that provides strength and energy and channels emotions such as anger, joy, love, or grief. It is riffs and distortions, leads and beats that know how to capture, invite, and carry the listener along. And within this entirely subjective experience lies a collective, generalizable, and universal force.

For metal is also a community in which the audience rediscovers, recognizes, and acknowledges itself in juvenile identity; in which the anger, love, joy, and grief of one individual can find their correspondence in those of many others, and in which the single individual is not merely part of something large and shared but is also accepted and affirmed in their being with their own passion and emotions. Metal is therefore a pop-cultural music and scene with all the positive and negative aspects that a scene, as a form of human existence as both individual and community, contains.

Yet as music and as a meaning-producing aspect of the global community, metal must necessarily also be a product on the market. Within the capitalist world order, the market is a necessary transistor of collective experience. Yet metal is rarely viewed from within as a market. A market that presupposes economy, labor, and sales is an unromantic construct that irritates the ideal of dissolving in the shared love of metal.

The large formation that a scene such as metal constitutes—with its fashions, trends, festivals, concerts, labels, bands, and so on, and which defines it—does not lie within circles of friends (one’s own peer group) but between different peers, in a loose exchange under the premise of mutual benefit, recognition, and acknowledgment.

Communication about one’s own experience of making and listening to music becomes, within such an ephemeral scene community, a social event. The social cohesion of this community lies precisely in the opening up or acquisition of unknown stores of knowledge and information between unfamiliar peers. Recognition and positioning of the individual within the scene—and with it a hierarchy and cartography of the scene as a whole—thus become linked to knowledge of canonized, current, or exclusive cultural capital.

From this social order there results, causally, a continuing search—both subjective and collective—for precisely that musical experience which perhaps touches and channels one’s own anger, love, joy, and grief, as well as those of others. In this way it may even come into contact with the emotional worlds of many.

For after all, exchange within the scene is today easier than ever thanks to Web 2.0. One’s own search, in exchange with others through enthusiasm for this or that piece of music, can at least develop into a small trend.

Of Trends, Hypes, and the Democratized Market

The dynamics of the trend—already vehemently criticized in the 1990s with the slogan “Never trust the hype,” which itself became a trend and served as a programmatic motto of the alternative and grunge hype—ultimately offer only the internalized illusion of the endlessly new within the culture industry, which in fact recycles the ever-same by disguising it as individual pleasure in the service of a perpetually operating market.

Yet to be entertained also means to be agreeable, uncritical, and affirmative—thus to adapt willingly and to submit to the machinery of market and system. This is certainly not exclusive to metal. From the very beginning, scenes existed against the background noise of a liberal market as socialization institutions of the 1980s and 1990s: freely chosen religious communities of pseudo-individualism and, in widely differing embellishments—even in their most nihilistic Gen-X variants and their most consumption-critical anarchist forms—manifestations of the leisure society. Laughing or grumbling, they set out in search of the next aesthetic experience capable of generating community and identity, moving toward the panopticism of the information age shimmering on the horizon, and increasingly surviving within it in a state of growing over-ageing.

The problem that scenes have gradually lost their significance as institutions of socialization and that their audiences therefore age will not be explored further here. Yet within this thinning mass—this receding hairline of what once was, which nevertheless still persists as a scene—knowledge of the newest trends remains essential.

A trend, however, can still not be distinguished from a hype objectively but only socially. For the individual, the supposedly “real” trend as opposed to the “false” hype depends, within the weak ties of the fluid social formation known as the scene, on the approval of those people to whom the self attributes an equal or higher status within the scene. Where the self no longer perceives such equal or higher figures, only one’s own opinion and one’s own taste ultimately remain as the criterion for distinguishing between trend and hype.

At this point the role and reputation of organizational entities become visible—those institutions that, for many consumers, partly or entirely exercise a filtering function between market and consumption. Yet their significance also suffers under the autonomous and virtualized global cultural marketplace.

The DIY options unleashed by Web 2.0—arising from volatility and prosumerism—have driven the culture-industrial arm of the scene forward at great speed. Volatility describes the continuously fleeting character of social and economic progress and transformation, for example in the revolutions of chip, software, and AI development, while prosumerism dissolves the boundaries between producers and consumers.

An everyday economic example of prosumerism outside the metal scene is the installation of solar panels on private homes. Within the scene, meanwhile, the voluntary digital labor of many increasingly replaces parts of the professional work previously carried out by a smaller number of individuals. A clear example is the replacement of print magazines with paid contributors by volunteer webzines, vloggers, and similar actors, or the bypassing of labels through the possibilities of digital self-distribution.

The latter—already present within the scene through the establishment of fanzines, festivals, and labels—has assumed new quantity, quality, and scope within the low-threshold options of virtual space. The fragmentation of the scene continues to advance. Funeral doom, as part of the metal scene, finds its own spaces for international networking and for a low-threshold, prosumer exchange.

The apparent individualization of the filtering function through virtual exchange has intensified a vulgar democratization of the market toward a volatility of chaotic simultaneity, against whose background every individual actor ultimately becomes interchangeable and insignificant over time.

And if one examines more closely the network and algorithmic structures underlying this presumed global democratization, little tangible democracy—even in its most vulgar form—remains. Instead, one finds a mixture of populism and plutocracy in which volume and financial resources prevail.

Innovations and changes proceed almost hourly under the near-monopolistic dominance of YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Discogs, with a dynamic that is practically uncontrollable from the outside, while magazines—once, and perhaps still, the most reputable filters—struggle to keep pace, often appearing only monthly.

At the same time, kiosk magazines that compete for limited shelf space operate in economic dependence on their advertising partners and are therefore far from free of latent influences regarding the question of who is even reviewed or interviewed. Self-releases or small labels—which often present hardly more than a single new product per month and cannot afford advertising—simply disappear within the global current of publication floods, both virtually and in the struggle for the remaining space in kiosk magazines.

Beyond those interpreters who have achieved broader attention within the metal scene, funeral doom appears too specialized to survive in this field. Video and streaming platforms restrict sales, while taxes, shipping fees, and customs duties—particularly for smaller products—limit the international distribution of a community that still focuses strongly on physical sound carriers.

Nevertheless, whoever—if only for a moment—sets a trend, discovers it, or becomes a trend themselves, or even an inflationary cult phenomenon, gains at least for a moment that recognition within the scene from which the scene-self generates identity.

Social affirmation between recognition and self-efficacy, however small it may appear, reinforces the Schopenhauerian striving and lubricates the Foucauldian machine. Likes and clicks determine the market, which constantly demands movement, acceleration, and new impulses.

Keeping pace fully is impossible both for prosumers and consumers as well as for small and large companies that, unlike the aforementioned platforms, do not merely provide a stage for exchange but attempt to exist as actors within it. The small units of this minority mainstream—fragmented almost to the atomic level—do not possess the distribution structures and therefore the reach of large companies, while the large companies cannot keep up with the pace of releases and the sensitivity to trends characteristic of the multitude of small units.

Overload and Frenzy as Market Mechanics

And from a purely market-mechanical perspective, catching up would amount to deceleration and would remove the constant pressure for immediacy placed upon prosumers—both as content providers of Web 2.0 and as consumers and trend-hunters within the scene. Deceleration—let alone the limitation or harmonization of the market—would run counter to its primordial nature of growth and competition.

This nature constantly produces new hybrids of the culture industry and the minority mainstream that has dominated the market since the 1990s and has by now become largely virtualized. Within these formations, every artwork is a product with commodity value, and every product has a target group which—thanks to the possibilities of Web 2.0—it will eventually find.

Searching and finding on the side of the consumers has always been an aspect of pop-cultural music listening. Yet the rapid pace and opacity of the system undermine both the engagement with art as art on the one hand and the emergence of long-term cultural significance of individual units on the other, strengthening instead products with a low threshold of entertainment value.

What often remains for the individual is a fleeting consumerism shaped by sensory overload, in which life is willingly synthesized into labor power—accompanied by individual symptoms of saturation and fatigue, sometimes even culminating in conscious withdrawal. Kiosk magazines attempt to counteract this dynamic by cultivating a conservative traditionalism within their own economic bubble of circulation and sales, which may create a sense of security but simultaneously reduces the chances for growth and lasting survival in the era of digitalized prosumerism.

As shown above, prosumerism has always been part of the culture-industrial market of the minority mainstream; what is new is its radicalization through the digitalization of the market. The difference between the individual’s pleasurable truffle hunt and the frantic chase for trends may resemble the difference between an ordinary passion and what might be called—still insufficiently classified to this day—a behavioral addiction.

At the latest when a behavior continues despite harmful consequences in social, professional, or financial life, accompanied by a creeping loss of control, the emergency brake should certainly be applied. Yet even without the character of addiction, aspects such as the initial feeling of affirmation and reward in the subjective act of finding—and communicatively having found—something, which encounters an increasing development of tolerance, are part of the market mechanics operating between video platforms, the music market, and social networks.

And precisely within this ongoing exchange between action and reward lies one of the factors through which Web 2.0, in many areas far beyond music, possesses the potential to intensify individual behavior to the point of problematic excess.

Scene-based virtual markets have increasingly become self-referential and, under the panoptic crossfire of prosumerism and volatility, produce within the subset of content providers and community experts the perfect prosumers: individuals who dissolve their own selves in unpaid and voluntary labor while simultaneously functioning as permanently pressured cogs in the machinery—as customers, reviewers, and producers at the same time.

Beyond the continuous individual overload of prosumers as well as that of mere customers who simply wish to remain even remotely in touch with the pulse of their community, the global market stands as part of the increasingly real risk society of permanent crises and lasting states of exception—a system that does not merely accompany the (re)distribution of capital, risks, and the consequences of risk.

States, and even more so globally operating corporations, attempt to steer this distribution within their spheres of influence in such a way that, on the one hand, as little damage as possible occurs to themselves and, on the other, as much profit and potential for growth as possible is generated.

Even within the private economic sector, this gradual steering operates through classical mechanisms of commodity distribution and through the value-creation systems of our time: information management, the complex field of big data, and the virtualization of risk, capital, knowledge, and goods.

This distribution is lucrative because risks—and the awareness of them—shape needs that can never be fully satisfied. Remaining with the example: the individual fear of losing relevance within the large complex of the virtual scene enforces permanent activity. Wars, pandemics, and disasters intensify positioning, demarcation, and solidarity—not least through contributions to debates and through acts of consumption.

The purchase of an album by a Ukrainian funeral doom band such as Fretting Obscurity thus becomes, subjectively, an act of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in the Russian war of aggression.

Even the smallest pop-cultural units that are tied to transfers of capital or goods inevitably become objects of the dynamics of the largely unregulated large distribution machinery, which labels music through reduced hashtag categorization, declares it, assigns commodity value to it, and addresses it to the desired target group.

In this way, the prosumerist interplay between market and scene shapes within the individual an extremely fleeting illusion of self-efficacy. This illusion begins with the exclusivity of creating or discovering something, moves through the pleasure of entertainment into the reinforcement of collective recognition, and from there—or from an earlier point—jumps back to the beginning of the bored, driven, or conscious search.

The individual is constantly threatened by the feeling of having missed the connection to the scene and its movements.

A comprehensive grasp of the metal scene—and even of an extreme metal subscene such as funeral doom—in terms of histories, trends, news, and developments is in fact impossible. Monumental databases such as Metallum, Discogs, or Wikipedia represent only partial subsets of the available cultural capital.

If one includes dimensions of immediacy, time, and space, even the scene itself—understood as the collective of all its units—is incapable of being comprehensively informed about everything that concerns it. Yet the scene nevertheless operates virally through the interchangeability of the individual, permanently stimulating them to discover and know both the new and the old.

And precisely within this timeless, simultaneous, multilayered, and omnipresent contradiction of the collective, the individual stands not only as a cog within the machine but also in competition with that machine—as a consumer or prosumer.

Interaction or Cooperation

Where, how, and above all why consumers as well as prosumers—but also small and medium-sized labels, self-releasing acts, webzines, podcasts, blogs, and vlogs, along with all the individuals behind them—remain capable of engaging in critically self-determined creative activity under increasingly radicalized conditions remains an open question. Equally uncertain are the reactions observable among companies, as well as the responses that are being considered or may be expected in the future.

From a global perspective, this question can be posed particularly in light of the thesis formulated by Keith Kahn-Harris regarding the erosion of hegemonic structures through extreme metal—especially outside the EU or the United States, where entering the large niche-music marketplace increasingly becomes an arduous undertaking.

Permanent threat scenarios and the redistribution of risks through world events in the now realized risk society affect the actions of all actors involved. Yet the market continues to operate and repeatedly responds with forms of altruism and cooperation.

Smaller companies in particular often propagate a form of sociocultural altruism or justify their continued activity through their own enthusiasm for the music, largely disregarding the changing market. Bands and projects frequently operate with a mindset satisfied by l’art pour l’art. The particularization and simultaneous communicative networking of the market nourish the feeling of making music for oneself and for a group of people that, though limited in number, remains passionately engaged. Here the niches of the market seem to manifest themselves within a dialectical dualism.

Supply and demand meet each other in an ongoing symbiosis of a dialogical relationship between small acts and their audience, largely detached from explicit economic interest. Beyond the target audiences pursued by some bands and musicians, there is often little desire at the lower level of the scene for expansion or growth.

Those who are interested in broadening their reach today depend on actively engaging with the available options. Communication and continuity through a combination of real and virtual presence appear indispensable. Maintaining a stable foundation still means performing live, but it also requires sustained virtual communication.

Kostas Panagiotou of the band Pantheist emphasizes the advantages of this orientation through Web 2.0. Networking and public relations are, in his words, “crucial if you self-release your music.” Social media offers a mode of engagement that, compared with earlier times—when projects had to involve printed magazines and attend events in order to be noticed—fits better with his own introverted nature. In addition, he observes that the role of blogs and zines reviewing albums and reporting band news has declined. The particularization of the market into increasingly specific sub-niches means that five to ten publications are responsible for more than eighty percent of the promotion of his releases and are therefore sufficient.

His strategy relies on a lively, multidirectional communication (cooperation) with listeners via Web 2.0, replacing the earlier one-way communication (interaction) consisting of advertisements, concerts, music videos, and web or print zines. Through the suggestion of proximity between him as producer and the audience as consumers, this communication creates a form of social connection. In this model not only the relevance of labels diminishes; the importance of classical scene-based music journalism also fades, since the fan base no longer requires these intermediaries to reach the artists—intermediaries that genres such as funeral doom were always served by only peripherally in any case.

In contrast to this positive perspective stands Stijn van Cauter of Until Death Overtakes Me, who largely avoids Web 2.0 for the sake of his mental health and considers an established partner—such as a label handling social aspects or public relations—necessary.

“Maintaining a network is a bigger task today because there is so much music. If people get enough of your music and you don’t offer something new within a reasonable timeframe, they will find other bands, and then there is a risk they won’t come back.”
—Stijn van Cauter

His reaction to the fluidity of the market for a long time consisted in maintaining a steady continuity of releases, while his audience consisted almost exclusively of long-time fans and he was unable to reach new ones. Continuity, however, provides listeners with certainties that a rapidly changing market cannot offer. In doing so, van Cauter preserves the desire for a form of stability that stands in opposition to permanent change. On a smaller scale, the diverse projects of van Cauter thus mirror the behavior of traditionalist print zines.

Illusion and Reality of Scene Altruism

Within this dualism of old and new, proximity and distance, digital abstinence and virtual self-promotion, the often-perceived threat of the subcultural market’s extinction fails to materialize. Instead of a single grand ending, what appears is a continuous transformation accompanied by numerous small individual endings.

Artists as well as small and medium-sized companies either adapt to the situation, reshape it, or reinvent it in their own ways, while others miss the transition, deliberately withdraw from it, reduce their sphere of influence, or ultimately fail to reconcile their aspirations with the existing conditions.

Yet, as both Hangsvart of Abysmal Growls of Despair and the aforementioned van Cauter demonstrate, success on the market is no longer a prerequisite. For most sub-niche genres of extreme metal such as funeral doom, Web 2.0 effectively erases the expectation of commercial success. What remains is the activity of many individuals who together constitute the scene and sustain the fragmented transformation of the scene’s market. Economic profit, however, is generally achieved only by those who succeed beyond their own small bubble.

The reactionary refusal of contemporaneity by some artists, labels, or zines—those who reject cooperative engagement within virtual spaces or insist exclusively on physical releases—serves an existing audience need just as much as the focus on low-threshold digital distribution through platforms such as Bandcamp.

Statements from individual actors often emphasize their own passion for the music, a form of scene-based altruism, or indifference toward market considerations. Bandcamp in particular has enabled artists to distribute their music freely and directly, allowing even radical forms of indifference toward market dynamics or audience reception.

The virtual market thus allows self-publishers such as Hangsvart and Stijn van Cauter to release music without advertising costs or production expenses, largely outside broader public awareness. Hangsvart states explicitly that he considers himself outside both scene and market and that audience response does not interest him.

Yet van Cauter offers a contrasting perspective:

“I’ve always been critical of the idea that everything has to be monetized. But if people want to give you money, why stop them? I also cannot exist outside society, and if you want to participate in it, you need money. The problem is that today you need more money than yesterday for the same things.”
—Stijn van Cauter

This is a problem that labels and zines such as Aesthetic Death, Weird Truth Productions, Funere, and Doom-Metal.com likewise report confronting. Only those who do not depend on financial stability from their involvement in the business can afford such a separation from the market—something that, in the niche existence of subgenre enterprises, is more the rule than the exception.

Even so, the kind of negative dialectics opposed to the culture industry once demonstrated by Aesthetic Death through the debut releases of Wijlen Wij and Esoteric has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

Traditional bands aiming to perform live require networks within their field of activity. Interpreters and companies alike thus face the ambiguity of having to operate both locally and globally.

Even Ricardo “Lebzul” Brenes of Jaibana Records—as a musician in Doomslut and Lake of Depression, label operator, concert organizer, and webzine writer effectively the organizational embodiment of a regional funeral doom scene—describes his own activity primarily as an expression of passion. Without his involvement, the local scene would likely not exist at all.

He emphasizes the familiar romantic image that metal brings people globally closer together, even though they live and act “in very different realities.” Situations affecting one group may be entirely nonexistent for another. Cultural context and numerous other factors shape perceptions of global and economic circumstances.

Negative impacts from global crises were hardly noticeable for Jaibana Records. Panama, one of the strongest economies in the region with a stable government, remained largely unaffected by many issues that shaped everyday life in Europe. The war in Ukraine, from this perspective, appeared merely as “a television show,” since few people establish global connections or show interest in events that do not affect their own immediate environment.

Brenes concludes with a form of fatalism: that the planet will eventually “heal itself from this plague called humanity” and begin a new cycle. For the individual, what remains is simply to take the present moment and, if possible, enjoy it—a disposition toward the present that also forms part of the foundation of a certain scene-based altruism.

From another global perspective, Fernando Ruiz of Abyssal emphasizes that the geographical proximity of his Mexican band to the United States facilitates access to both audience and market. Here again, as in Europe, cross-border networking activities contribute to experiences of self-efficacy and self-realization.

Funeral doom as both scene and market thus persists through the interplay of many small, sometimes short-lived units that focus primarily on their own sphere of activity.

Only few of the actors interviewed adopt a meta-perspective, even though global transformations within an increasingly catastrophic society have lasting effects on the fragmented and niche-oriented environment of extreme metal.

Kostas Panagiotou, operating from Wales, points to the rising costs of performances due to increased fuel prices, travel costs, and accommodation expenses. Brexit has complicated shipping to the EU through additional taxes. Sales in previously lucrative markets such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy have therefore been affected.

The war in Ukraine also removed the Russian market for Pantheist, which had previously been among the top five countries purchasing their CDs. Awareness of global transformations thus often emerges only where they directly affect one’s own activity.

Despite this, none of the actors involved report any fundamental change of attitude.

The self-perception of metal participants in general—and funeral doom participants in particular—remains that of a small and largely powerless unit suspended within a global system defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Yet the metal market does contain certain strengths: visions rooted in the music itself, clarity in action, agility in methods, and knowledge transfer through constant networking.

The prosumerism of the scene contains a viral core of precisely those elements that allow actors to confront an environment in which information no longer possesses predictive value because conditions change rapidly, coalitions of interest become increasingly complex, and motivations continually shift.

Even without invoking the worn-out and always questionable metaphor of the “scene as family,” a niche such as funeral doom appears structurally prepared for these dynamics. However, who will manage to maintain a recognizable presence in the market in the short or long term remains uncertain, because this resilience relies above all on the interchangeability of individuals within the larger swarm.

The scene survives through this swarm—through continuous networking and exchange in which many different individuals can participate without their specific contributions being considered irreplaceable.

On the one hand, this interchangeability makes the scene resilient; on the other hand, it reduces the significance of the individual within it.

The prosocial behavior directed toward the scene—referred to here as scene altruism—cannot ultimately escape the logic of the cost-benefit model of social action proposed by Jane Piliavin. Even within altruism, socio-economic impulses can be identified as motives for action.

Rewards in the form of recognition for social action are experienced even on a small scale through likes and expressions of approval, often perceived—through motivation and social construction—as recognition even without direct experiential confirmation.

The expected benefit of this behavior lies in the social affirmation of the self-selected social group, within an internalized panoptic pastoral power of the scene. Pastoral power here should be understood as a form of power that simultaneously aims at control and care. It is the subjectification of the individual as a shepherd who, within panoptic affirmation, monitors and shapes both themselves and others.

Affirmation—thus submission—offers the deceptive promise of becoming empowered not only to gain control over oneself but also to exercise influence over others. The experience of self-efficacy remains fluid, since scenes do not follow stable hierarchical structures and power therefore remains constantly transient.

To surrender to the prosumerism of the scene and assume responsibility both for one’s own being and for the internal order of the scene can be interpreted as a continuation of the reflections of Michel Foucault on the political order of neoliberalism. This neoliberalism responds to the declining integrative capacity of the traditional capitalist economic and social system.

The consciousness of each individual within the scene is therefore dualistically oriented toward the scene itself: interested in its preservation and simultaneously dependent on it for the confirmation of one’s own identity.

Within such a scene network this individual striving for the preservation of the scene has a double consequence: on the one hand it guarantees the survival of the scene as community and market—a form of scene-based governmentality—while on the other hand it produces the radically neoliberal, socially Darwinist, and ethically indifferent interchangeability of the prosumer individual within the scene.

Market Without End

Ultimately, it is rarely asked what the market of the scene—as a large, self-sustaining system—will do for the individual. What remains ever-present, however, is the question of what the individual is willing to give to the scene, and thus to its market and self-preservation. The scene—understood not as a social group or small peer group, but as a collective event, a network, an apparatus, and a market—absorbs until nothing more can be given, continuously trivializing the contributions of smaller and prosumerist actors. The so-called social glue that binds small, mutually familiar groups together and supports the search for familiar and unknown cultural capital cannot be replenished from the scene’s fluidity.

The prosumerist individual is therefore fed fleeting moments of self-efficacy while facing a perpetually demanding machine that consumes endlessly. Reactions include the individualization toward one’s own audience, the reduction of communicative barriers (and thus social connection), the ver-cult-ization of one’s own output, or withdrawal from scene activity. Overall, communicative distances between actors as well as the shaping units of the scene itself have shrunk and become less significant.

A sort of social throwaway culture emerges within the scene: individuals are supplied with ephemeral moments of recognition and self-efficacy, but deep, long-term fulfillment remains largely inaccessible. Engagement with the scene continues to be shaped by the constant imperative of self-promotion.

Unfazed by the crises of a catastrophic society, this cold, ever-demanding market-and-power machine operates as a motor of community: a space where audiences rediscover, recognize, and affirm themselves in juvenile identity; where anger, love, joy, and grief of the individual find correspondence in those of others; and where the individual is not only part of something larger but also accepted in their own passion and feelings. The machine, therefore, continues—and accelerates.

Prosumerist self-realization in the scene continually consumes subjective autonomy. The scene sustains itself through global prosumer networks, while simultaneously separating and exposing its actors—creating a dualism in which engagement can yield both expertise or popularity, yet also insignificance and interchangeability within the larger system. Small subscene metal markets are thus resilient; the prosumerist scene is older, smaller, yet globally more connected, but the significance of individual figures within the whole has never been lower.

As the scene ages and habitual metal engagement disappears from everyday life, the mainstream has absorbed much of metal musically, and audiences are drawn to large events. Withdrawals and shrinkages in the subscene metal market are compensated prosumeristically by the community, maintaining identity gained through the scene’s highly formative socialization.

To preserve even fleeting self-efficacy and identity in this once-significant socialization structure, individuals are continuously called upon to sustain the scene. Yet voluntary consumption, production, and prosumption—driven by (metal) altruistic scene ideals—also produces value loss, price spirals, and interchangeability as the market’s underlying foundation.

If producers, consumers, and prosumers accept the decay and fragmentation of the scene due to aging and particularization, cultivating their own insignificance as the unimportance of the individual, they may perceive the situation of prosumerism and proximity as an opportunity to grow beyond the scene.

Severed from the scene as a habitual, juvenile identity-providing mental world, regression is excluded. Fragments of prolonged adolescence—and the internalized will to maintain or achieve status within a hierarchy of weak ties—fall away. Recognition, whether expected, imagined, or experienced, fuels the engine of the scene-market, even in times of societal catastrophe or financial scarcity. When taken from the larger network of weak ties and anticipated or experienced affirmation, individual prosumerism loses its urgent necessity, and activity in the market loses the self-sacrifice and mounting pressure of being simultaneously consumer, producer, and prosumer.

For individual actors—from consumers to stage-present subscene stars—music remains a driving force: compelling, energizing, and capable of channeling anger, joy, love, or grief. What remains for the individual is not untroubled, passive enjoyment; rather, sustaining such a perspective requires continuous reflection and awareness of one’s behavior in the market and within the scene. Only then can true empowerment within the prosumerist metal business be achieved.

Yet what we must recognize and acknowledge is that Funeral Doom exists not in spite of, but precisely because of its own marginality within a system that systematically dismantles individual significance. The scene reproduces itself exactly through the fact that its actors become interchangeable and their self-efficacy remains illusory. ‘Scene-altruism’ is merely the affective surface of a functional system that stabilizes unpaid labor.