The verdict first, because the rest of this is evidence for it. Between 1988 and 1995 about six companies decided which death metal records came into existence, and only one of them had been founded by somebody who set out to release death metal. The others were an import agent, an anarcho punk tape label, a hardcore mail order list, a French mail order list and a distribution business. The genre was carried by people who had arrived in it sideways, which is precisely why they signed things a metal specialist would have refused.
The Nottingham end of that story has a chapter of its own and is left out here on purpose. What follows is everybody else: the money, the ownership, the sales and the endings, set against the music itself, which is in a history of death metal. The bands that these companies actually paid for are spread across the chapter this belongs to and its neighbours.
Roadrunner: from import agent to a line in a spreadsheet
Cees Wessels founded Roadrunner in the Netherlands in 1980 to bring North American metal records into Europe, which is a distribution business rather than a label, and the habit of thinking like a distributor never left it. An American office opened in New York in 1986, and from there the company signed Obituary, Sepultura, Deicide, Malevolent Creation, Suffocation and Cynic inside four years, a run of A and R that no independent has matched since.
Then the arithmetic took over. In 2001 Roadrunner borrowed fifteen million dollars from Edel Music and sold a stake of 49 per cent for thirty million; in July of the same year Island Def Jam bought half the company for thirty three million. Warner Music agreed to take 73.5 per cent on 18 December 2006 and closed the deal on 29 January 2007 once the German regulator had cleared it, then bought the remaining stock on 11 November 2010. On 26 April 2012 Warner announced cuts across the whole operation: the British and Canadian offices shut, the Dutch office shut, and Wessels stepped down from the company he had started. Roadrunner became a sub label of Elektra in June 2018 and was folded into 300 Elektra in June 2022. Thirty two years from importer to imprint.
Relapse: the only one built on purpose
Matthew Jacobson started Relapse in Aurora, Colorado in August 1990, and the first releases were seven inch singles by bands nobody has heard of since. What followed was not. Deceased, Suffocation and Incantation came early; William Yurkiewicz joined as a partner in 1991 and brought the grindcore half of the roster; Release Entertainment was set up in 1992 for the ambient and industrial material; a promotions office opened in Berlin in 1998; the whole operation moved to Upper Darby in Pennsylvania in 2000 and opened a shop on South Street in Philadelphia the following year. In 2010 Relapse acquired the international rights to Chuck Schuldiner's Death and Control Denied catalogue, which is the single most valuable asset in the genre and is now held by a label that began with two men and a mailing list.
The two German companies, and what they were worth
Nuclear Blast opened in Donzdorf in 1987 and Century Media in Dortmund in 1988, and between them they financed a very large share of the European catalogue of this music, including bands from countries that had no functioning industry of their own. Both endings are matters of public record. Sony acquired Century Media outright in July 2015 for a figure reported at about twelve million pounds, roughly seventeen million dollars. Believe took a majority stake in Nuclear Blast in October 2018 for what was understood to be an eight figure sum, with the founder Markus Staiger keeping a shareholding; he later started a new label.
| Label | Founded | Founder | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roadrunner | 1980, Netherlands | Cees Wessels | Warner, inside 300 Elektra since 2022 |
| Relapse | 1990, Colorado | Matthew Jacobson | Independent, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania |
| Nuclear Blast | 1987, Donzdorf | Markus Staiger | Believe majority since 2018 |
| Century Media | 1988, Dortmund | Robert Kampf | Sony since 2015 |
| Peaceville | 1987, Dewsbury | Paul Halmshaw | Snapper Music since 2006 |
| Osmose | 1991, France | Herve Herbaut | Independent |
Two of the six are now owned by companies whose other business is pop, one is inside a French digital distributor, and the three that stayed independent are the three that never grew.
Peaceville and Osmose, the two that changed what the music sounded like
Peaceville is the strangest entry on the list. Paul Halmshaw started it in Dewsbury as a tape label in 1981 for demo cassettes, turned it into a working company in 1987 and 1988, and came to metal through anarcho punk and crust rather than from any interest in the genre as such. The roster that followed, My Dying Bride, Darkthrone, Katatonia, Autopsy, Anathema, Paradise Lost and Opeth, is the most influential set of signings any small label in this history made, and it produced two entire subgenres by accident. Halmshaw left in November 2006 after twenty five years, and Paul Groundwell took over management following the sale to Snapper Music, which had distributed the label since 2001.
Osmose Productions did the same job in France with a narrower remit. Herve Herbaut created it in 1991 after three years of running a small mail order operation, and put out early records by Immortal, Marduk, Impaled Nazarene, Angelcorpse and Absu. A striking number of those bands then moved to Nuclear Blast, Century Media or Metal Blade, which is what happens to a label that finds bands better than it can afford to keep them, and is also the reason the big companies could sign so confidently in the late nineties.
Who decides now
The current gatekeepers are smaller again, and deliberately so. Profound Lore was set up in Canada in May 2004; Dave Adelson founded 20 Buck Spin in 2005 and named it after a song; Matt Calvert and Cory Richards started Dark Descent in 2009 as a label and a mail order at the same time, which is exactly the model Relapse used nineteen years earlier. None of them has a staff you could not fit in a van. Between them they now release most of the death metal that gets written about, which suggests the industry has completed a full circle rather than an ascent.
What all of this says about the music is simple enough. The records were made by bands, but the map of the genre, which scenes were audible and which were not, was drawn by a dozen people making commercial decisions in the back rooms of small towns. The clearest case of that is a single office in Nottingham and the country it made audible, which is the UK Death Metal Scene.
