Standing out vs fitting in: the problem with industry best practices
Once a niche settles on its signifiers, everyone in it starts to look the same, and that’s as true for metal bands as for old-guard businesses. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains why black metal’s illegible logos put bands in immediate comparison, then shows how Ghost, Zeal & Ardor, Sunn O))), and YOB each twisted the genre’s recipe to stand apart. He connects their leaps to the hardest part of positioning for companies: defining the one thing that sets you apart, even if it means rejecting some of your expected audience. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on heavy metal, What Heavy Metal Can Teach You About Branding.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl points out that metal is now an older, fairly conservative genre, much like old-guard businesses that have been around long enough to all look alike. Metal bands are great at owning a niche, but niches come with shared signifiers. In black metal, logos that look like piles of branches put every band in immediate comparison with the others.
Some bands break the pattern. Ghost looks hard and scary but plays pop music. Zeal & Ardor fuses metal with American Southern roots music, including songs sung by enslaved people. Sunn O))) took its name and logo from a guitar amp company and stretches heavily distorted notes over 20-minute songs while performing shrouded in fog.
Calvin closes with YOB, from Eugene, Oregon, whose website is yobislove.com and whose singer talks between songs about appreciation and communal, loving experience. For companies, he says, this is the hardest part of positioning: committing to the one thing that sets you apart, even if it rejects people who expected something else.
Highlights
Shared niche signifiers put brands in direct comparison.
Ghost’s pop sound is its differentiator.
Zeal & Ardor built a fan base by mixing genres that shouldn’t mix.
Sunn O))) pushed metal toward its purest, droning form.
YOB proves metal can be loving and thoughtfully sad.
Key insights
Fitting in invites comparison
Adopting a category’s accepted look signals belonging, but it also lines you up directly against everyone else using it.
Twist the recipe, don’t abandon it
Ghost shows that changing one part of an expected formula can sharpen focus and attract more people.
Differentiation requires rejection
Standing apart means some of your expected audience won’t follow, which is why many companies are afraid to make the leap.
Consistency still matters when you break rules
Sunn O))) and YOB each break convention, but they apply their unique stance to everything from artwork to stage presence.
Detailed analysis
The clip extends the episode’s praise of metal with an honest critique: the same niche focus that builds devoted fans can make bands indistinguishable. Calvin’s examples each solve that problem differently, through sound, genre fusion, extremity, or emotional tone, but all of them push metal somewhere it hadn’t been.
For brands, the parallel is direct. Following a category’s conventions feels safe, but the truly great brands accept the risk of rejecting part of their market to own a distinct position.
Conclusion
Fitting in gets you understood; standing out gets you remembered. The bands Calvin admires show that making the leap is what separates great brands from the rest of the niche.
Transcript
Let’s hop into it, then. I think one big challenge that metal bands do face, though, is that we don’t like to think of it, but metal is actually kind of now an older, conservative genre of music. And I think this is worth comparing to a lot of old-guard businesses that have been around a long time. You start understanding the rhythm of them. You start understanding the way they all look. When you think of how old corporate tech companies all looked the same at some point. Even metal bands face a problem with differentiation from each other. They’re really good at that niche part.
But one challenge with the niche: when you start focusing in on, we do this type of black metal, there are all these signifiers that are understood by the people who are into that genre. If you’re into black metal, you start seeing a lot of logos that look like this [unclear] one. Oh, boy, that’s a terrible image. Like this one, where it ends up looking just like a bunch of branches or something. There are memes that you’ve probably seen all over the internet if you stumble across this, where it’s like, new black metal logo just dropped, and it’s just a pile of branches on the ground, because anyone who’s into black metal knows, oh, that’s it. I might be in it.
But the problem is that it always puts you in immediate comparison with those other bands, which, as we know, can often be bad. You don’t want to be immediately compared to someone else. So there have been a lot of bands who have played with your expectations of what you think a metal band should be.
One example, honestly: Ghost. They showed up at the beginning. Ghost is a great example of that. You expect them to be this hard, scary thing, and they’re totally pop music. That’s their differentiator. And they do something that no one else has done really successfully. And it shows that you can twist the recipe that made you just a little bit to get it more focused and attract more people.
And I think for companies, this is always one of the hardest things: that differentiation, that positioning of, we do this for this niche of people, and this is the one unique thing that sets us apart. That’s one of the most challenging things to do. And I think we’re often afraid to do that, because by doing that, you’re rejecting a lot of people. Ghost is rejecting a lot of the hardcore metal people who would only be into them if their music sounded the way they look. And so that gets scary for a lot of companies, but the truly great brands understand that and are like, we have to make that leap. And so Ghost made that leap.
There are some other bands. I don’t have any imagery up for them. There’s another band called Zeal & Ardor that is great. I’ll find something for them really fast, because there’s also a lot of great symbolism. Zeal & Ardor is this metal band that fuses American Southern roots folk music. So you hear metal music combined with the classic folk music, often the songs that enslaved people sang in the US, and it’s inspired by that. An incredible mix of genres, where as soon as it happens, you’re just like, what is happening here? These shouldn’t be mixed. And somehow it creates this really big fan base that is looking for something different.
Some other bands I think have really zigged while other metal bands zagged. There’s a band that’s legendary in the metal world named Sunn O))). Sunn O))) is in itself just a great example of mixing a lot of the stuff I’ve talked about, like pop references with pagan, occult, scary imagery, and Sunn O))) does it great. So, a little background: this logo for Sunn O))) is actually directly stolen from an amplifier company, a guitar amp company from the 70s and 80s, that a lot of just metalhead, nerdy guys who are into tone, and the girls who are into, I want my guitar to do this, used. So this was the official amplifier of this genre of stoner metalheads, and so they just straight up stole the logo, stole the name, and now they’re this huge, massive band.
But the reason it’s a good reference for them is that it’s pulling from pop culture. And with the sound of their music, they got popular because their songs are 20 minutes long, and it’s often just a few notes of heavily distorted guitars stretched out over that time. Long droning. They really cut to the essence of what metal music can be, where it’s just about the distortion. It’s about extreme noise. And they’ve even mixed in a trumpet. You see that on here? They take metal to this place where it is almost its purest form, and then they do it all while looking like these spooky guys in—oops, sorry. Here. They all look like spooky guys in hoods. And when they play shows, they’re only ever completely shrouded in fog. You can’t see them.
So there’s been a lot of consistency in all these bands. It probably says more about me and the type of bands that I like, but they all have these alter egos where they’re in cloaks. They live amongst the fog. But their unique thing is just that they pushed metal to a different place it had never been. And this is their aesthetic on everything. They’re much more ethereal feeling in a lot of their artwork, and it really gets this more drone-based, almost spiritual connection to metal. So that’s what made them unique.
And in that same vein of what spiritual metal can be, there’s maybe one of my favorite bands on Earth. There’s a band named YOB. They’re from Eugene, Oregon. We all love YOB. Their whole thing is, I mean, they’re kind of a bunch of—I mean this in the nicest way—they’re a bunch of old hippies from Eugene. Eugene, Oregon, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a destination college town that attracted this specific genre of hippies throughout time. Oh, yeah. Aaron says his favorite band name: YOB. I agree. Three letters, it’s all you need. Aaron, your parents are from Eugene. Hippie from Eugene. Yes.
And they have this whole other approach. You go to their website, and their website is yobislove.com. But their music is still in conversation with Sunn O))). It’s a little more fast-paced, but it is this long, droning, often spiritual thing. And their singer leans into that in the world building aspect: every single time he comes out on the stage, he does a little prayer with his hands in the air and establishes this thing. The only thing he talks about in between songs is the appreciation of one another and how great it is to have this kind of shared, communal, loving experience through music.
And something about that is just completely outside of where we think normal metal goes, because a lot of the time we think, oh, it’s aggressive, it’s scary. And some of that even goes all the way back to where metal started, with Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper. Those guys were scary, you know? But it turns out that metal can also be lovely and emotional, and thoughtfully sad, even. And so I think they’ve pushed it to a place where a lot of other bands haven’t been able to go. So I think that is the one thing that then is worth—Aaron feels very close to YOB. Yep. I mean, who isn’t close to YOB?