What metal bands can teach every business
A niche is what gives a company permission to ignore everyone else. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how metal bands are accidentally incredible at defining a niche, using genres like black metal and doom metal as a model for telling some people they’re simply not your audience. He then looks at Ghost, a band that pairs pop-rock songs with an evil, Catholic-inspired metal aesthetic to reach people who like pop music with an edge. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on heavy metal branding, What Heavy Metal Can Teach You About Branding.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl defines a niche with a simple example: a company that makes hammers for really tough carpenters. Metal bands, he says, are accidentally incredible at this, because a niche is what gives you permission to ignore other people.
He compares a company’s niche to a genre. Committing to black metal or doom metal means accepting that fans of nu metal bands like Disturbed and Mudvayne won’t like you, and every company needs that same willingness to say you’re not for us. Bands choose their audiences through the same tools companies use, especially logos and aesthetics.
Ghost is his case study. The band looks like a spooky metal act, with a frontman dressed as an evil pope and masked, nameless bandmates, but its music is closer to pop rock. That combination connects with people who accept the sound of pop and love the metal aesthetic.
Highlights
A niche gives a company permission to ignore other people.
Think of your niche as your genre.
Metal bands pick their audiences through logos and aesthetics.
Ghost pairs pop-rock music with a hyper-reality metal look.
Key insights
Exclusion is a feature
Being willing to tell some people you’re not for them is what makes a brand clear to the people it is for.
Niche and audience are related but different
The niche is what you do and for whom. The audience is who you attract, and bands are especially good at picking theirs.
Aesthetics can define an audience
Ghost’s look does the work of finding its fans, signaling an edge that its pop-leaning sound alone wouldn’t.
Detailed analysis
The clip translates a music scene into business terms. Genres function like positioning: they tell people instantly what to expect and who it’s for. Ghost shows that the visual identity can even reach a different audience than the product alone, by pairing approachable music with an unapologetically dark world.
Conclusion
Every company needs a genre and the confidence to own it. Metal bands prove that a clear niche, expressed through a distinct aesthetic, is how you find the people who will love you.
Transcript
I already kind of hinted at this, and this is the idea of niche. So niche, for a company—the niche is like, we do this. Our mission is we do this: we make hammers, and our niche is for really tough carpenters. So we make hammers for really tough carpenters, or something like that. That’s kind of a simple example, but metal bands are accidentally incredible at doing this.
Oh yeah, Nick put Journey. Journey, legendary metal band. Yeah, good. I mean, you know what? There’s probably deeper ties to Journey than any of us would like to think in the metal scene, but we just don’t want to claim them.
And so, okay, niche. I think the thing about niche that is really cool is it’s what gives you the first permission to ignore other people. Metal bands do this in awesome ways, because the bands I’m going to talk through today are very specifically bands I like. I like a lot of black metal, which comes from the old Scandinavian black metal that we’ve all heard about, the guys with the face paint. So I’ll take you through a lot of bands in that vein. I like a lot of doom metal, which is this slow, methodical, melodic kind of sound. And I love a lot of those types of bands, so you’ll see some of those in here.
But the thing that I think is really good about those things is that’s the way to think of a niche for a company. It is your genre. It is your permission to be like, you know what, I’m all in on black metal. People who are into nu metal—you know, you’re fans of Disturbed, Mudvayne, those kinds of things; those bands are back now—you aren’t going to like us. We make this thing. And it’s great. Every company needs the willingness to just say you’re not for us. And that’s good.
The audience—so niche is kind of related to audience, but they’re really good at picking their audiences. And the way they do that is through all the ways that a company does. You know, there’s photography, there’s messaging, but the big one is logos and aesthetics.
And I think one of the bands that is a great example of this—because every time I’ve mentioned to someone over the last week that I’m going to focus on heavy metal branding, the first band that comes up, everyone is like, “Have you seen Ghost? Do you know that band Ghost?” And Ghost is a really unique study in what a metal aesthetic can do.
Ghost, by all accounts, looks like a spooky metal band. They’ve claimed this evil, Catholic, demonic, almost hyper-reality metal thing. But then you listen to their music and it’s actually kind of just pop rock. It’s in a pop metal genre. They still have spooky lyrics. They still talk about evil stuff. But for some reason they just doubled down on this look, and they nail it completely. So they are so good at understanding their audience for this. It’s people who accept pop music but want an edge to it. That is their audience, and they do it all through this cool aesthetic.
They still have metal parts of their music, but their singing is generally standard singing, where a lot of the bands I’ll talk about are screaming, all that stuff. So these guys really connect to a specific audience that is okay with the sound of pop and loves the metal aesthetic, and they’re really good at that. And I mean, whenever you look at all their branding, it’s just great. They’ve got one of the coolest logos in all of metal.
So Ghost—you know, they look like this when they’re on stage. The frontman dresses as an evil pope, and all of his bandmates are nameless followers. They all wear masks. You’re going to see a lot of people with masks in this, because I think that comes out of even back to the land of Kiss, even though all the metalheads will be like, “No, Kiss, don’t talk about Kiss.” So I think they’re really good at hitting that niche and