I don't understand the hostility towards others music opinions. I think it's a big reason why metal music won't be "big" anymore, there's way too much hatred within the community towards each other, sometimes because one's opinions aren't "metal enough" which is ridiculous. Like the people in the Progpower community who shit on Night Flight Orchestra... just keep your negative and hateful opinions to yourself. You don't need to like it, but there's no reason to shit on it.
I agree with this 100%. 1000%.
I agree with this, but only 50% or less
yeah, there's a lot of hostility out there. But, there's people who engage in good-natured ribbing of bands other people love. Sometimes, the metal community goes nuts over those few bands that are aggressively marketed as "that cool new band that elitists just love to hate because they hate fun" by Nuclear Blast or whoever (like Sabaton, or Amaranthe, or Ghost, or now TNFO - finally one band I actually love!!), and it's not fun being the curmudgeon that's being told by everyone to shut up about not liking them. When you're in a bad mood, or when you're online, or when you just can't read other people's intentions all that well because you don't know them that well, it's easy to misread someone's opinions and think of them as a dumbass elitist.
I have a friend who pokes fun at my taste in music all the time. His favorite genre is 90's death metal. I imagine he finds new bands to listen to by firing up the advanced search on Metal Archives, selecting "demo", typing in "death" into the search box, limiting the timespan to "1989 - 1999" and looking up the recordings until he finds one that someone actually uploaded to Youtube. Sometimes I wanna poke him right back about how the music he listens to is objectively bad on several different counts, and generally unappealing to me
but if I do that, I lose, because he's just shooting shit and expecting me to take the bait.
Back when metal was big, you could get serious shit thrown at you for just, like, adding keyboards to a few of the songs. Or having your songs played on the radio in the first place, because that is untrveee. Bands with female vocalists were barely considered, there was barely any outside influences in metal - Cynic got so much shit for advancing their genre, Death too. I think nowadays metalheads are much more open minded than they were back when Metallica played stadiums.