Do You Remember the Article bout The Contemporary economic and social Condition of Funeral Doom?

With the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), another cost and compliance factor has entered the international market. The regulation has generally applied within the EU since August 12, 2026. It also concerns packaging in e-commerce and introduces, among other things, requirements concerning packaging minimization, recyclability, and further obligations that are disproportionately complex and difficult to navigate for very small providers.
Put simply, the effort required to sell a small individual product to Europe, a shirt, a CD, or a patch, is increasing disproportionately. The result is an indirect market selection through rising compliance and transaction costs. To be clear:

this is not a shipping ban. It is a complication and increasing formalization of the ability to ship.

The reaction of the scene is therefore unsurprising. Small and medium-sized labels and self-releasing musicians from non-EU countries are discontinuing shipments to the EU due to increasing regulatory and logistical requirements, particularly those associated with the new packaging regulation. We have already seen the first major disruption of this market following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russian companies in response. Here, we encounter another step toward the harmonization and formalization of the European single market, one that also raises market-entry barriers for micro-providers and thus further encourages the exclusion of non-EU sellers from parts of the market.
This further restriction does not, if we maintain the basic assumption of the first article, lead to the collapse of the Funeral Doom market. Further fragmentation, however, is already becoming visible. For small actors, additional registration, documentation, packaging, and shipping requirements are disproportionately burdensome because the resulting costs and administrative effort have to be distributed across very small quantities. What constitutes merely another compliance cost for already globally operating corporations can mean that a one-person label is better off abandoning the EU market for physical products altogether.
The structure of the market therefore appears to be changing further. The digital part of the scene remains globally accessible, while the physical movement of goods is becoming increasingly regionalized.
It is not only about higher prices. It is about selection. The decisive change emerging from the new rules is that the market may increasingly determine which Funeral Doom releases receive access to the infrastructure required for international physical distribution.

Digital Globalization vs. Physical Regionalization

An album can remain known worldwide and be available on Bandcamp or streaming services while its physical release becomes effectively inaccessible to European listeners unless a licensing market for small runs emerges through regionally active labels. As a European, I am looking toward Meuse Music here.
Instead of direct shipping from a non-European label to the individual buyer, European distributors, warehouses, and intermediaries could once again become more important.
This would partially reverse developments of the past decades. Digitalization had reduced traditional intermediaries and enabled more direct contact between producers and consumers, while the increasing complexity of international trade could now generate new intermediary structures.
Under the resource constraints described above, such distributors are likely to be particularly attractive for releases that are economically viable enough to justify the additional costs and risks. This could further reduce the visibility of the smallest and most marginal actors. Physical releases through established labels could consequently regain importance. Larger and better-capitalized actors would once again have a structural advantage because they can distribute production, storage, compliance, and distribution costs across larger quantities, while smaller acts may increasingly be limited to digital releases and small CDr runs for regional distribution and self-distribution on tour.
Assuming a distribution of economic risk, regionally active print-on-demand labels could also claim a share of this market and charge for their services according to the respective production, storage, and distribution costs.

Think Global, Act Local

At the same time, the scene can be expected to attempt to close the gaps that emerge. Once again, we can look to an European Label such as Meuse Music, but not only there. This is where the scene-altruism of the global network returns: group orders, private redistribution, small EU-based import structures, or informal distribution networks would be typical prosumerist responses.
The consumer once again becomes a producer of infrastructure. They take on storage, importing, distribution, or promotion not primarily for economic gain, but out of commitment to the scene. This would particularly confirm the thesis developed in the first article:

The scene sustains itself partly because its own members voluntarily take on tasks that, under other circumstances, would be performed by professional market actors.

The result would therefore probably not be the simple dissolution of the Funeral Doom scene, but further differentiation. Some labels will discontinue their international physical distribution, others will raise prices, seek distributors and cooperation partners, or restrict their activities to particular regions. At the same time, new regional networks may emerge. Funeral Doom could thus find itself in a paradoxical situation:

the scene would operate in an increasingly global and cooperative digital space, while its material infrastructure would once again become more regional and personal.

Market and Scene

The change in marginality is particularly interesting here. Funeral Doom was previously marginal primarily because relatively few people consumed this music. In the future, an additional form of marginality may emerge: an album may become difficult to access not because there is no demand for it, but because the costs and requirements of international distribution make the existing demand economically uninteresting.
The distinction thus shifts from “I do not want to buy this record” toward “I can only acquire it with disproportionate effort.” Economic infrastructure increasingly determines which parts of the scene remain physically accessible at all.
The more globally interconnected the scene becomes, the more its concrete existence depends on infrastructures beyond the control of its individual actors. And the more these external structures create difficulties for small actors, the more the scene must compensate for its own gaps through voluntary labor.
This is precisely where the ambivalence of the “scene-altruism” described above lies: passion and mutual support are real and keep the scene alive, yet they also transfer necessary labor onto individuals who thereby become part of the very market mechanisms whose gaps they are attempting to compensate for.
In the end, perhaps we are once again confronted with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre question:

Who will survive, and what will be left of them?