Encyclopaedia Metallum - Interview from Arsenic Magazine

The interview was recorded in December 2007 and published in Arsenic Magazine issue #9 in June 2008. Since the original interview was in French only, we are providing an English translation for our international visitors, with the kind permission from Arsenic's editor. We have also taken the liberty to slightly clarify a few answers which meanings were slightly lost or altered during the transcript, as well as inserting some additional information if the answer happens to be out of date (these will be marked as [Morri notes: ...]).

Enjoy.

By Satannick

For those who are not familiar with Metal-Archives, we could describe it as a sort of free encyclopaedia of metal (kind of like Wikipedia), where people can add bands or update their entry). With a search engine and discussion forum, this website is actually truly made in Québec! (PsyKo: I learned about M-A's existence from an Australian woman, 4 years ago!) Oh yes: residing on the island of Montreal, our two accomplices – Morrigan and HellBlazer – have accepted to share their adventure with us. Interview made in Montreal, on December 9th 2007.

HellBlazer: It's been around for a bit over 5 years: July 2002. I wanted a place where people could learn about tons of bands, because I noticed that there was no website regrouping every metal band. There were some which specialised in certain styles, but not like how I envisioned it. At first, I thought of doing everything by hand: building each HTML page myself... but after 5-6 bands, I got sick of it. Doing all of that manually is too much trouble. One or two years later, I had the idea of building the system we have now, where anyone can sign up and contribute information.
Morrigan: We only knew basic HTML at first, that's why we thought, "fuck that!", until we learned how to build a database with a back-end and front-end in school.

Morrigan: Strangely, I did not really know that site back then. It's kind of a coincidence. It's only after having started Metal-Archives that we noticed BNR Metal Pages, Rockdetector and other similar sites. BNR was really about bands that the guy listens to – and he does listen to a lot of stuff. He adds his own personal comments, so it's a different approach. For us, whether we love or hate them, all the bands are there and the information is neutral. It's a bit more "encyclopaedic", I'd say. However, there's a funny anecdote about Rockdetector... at first, they were complaining to us, saying we were plagiarising them. They may not have understood our system. We only complied with them to remove the copied biographies, because those are a creative effort and thus a violation of copyright, unlike pure information. They were very arrogant and said they were a "professional website", and had a rather poor impression of us. But the funny thing is, some of our users noticed one day that it was Rockdetector who were copying some of our content. We found that rather weird. Apparently they often take album covers some of our own users scanned. It does not bother us, but don't start calling us the plagiarists!

Morrigan: In fact, there were some of our Internet acquaintances who were helping us to test the site before it was officially online. One of them told me it looked stable and that we should launch it. He asked if he could plug it on a forum. I accepted, and he posted on the Metal-rules.com forum. He made a thread with a joking title, "Time to plug a site which will overthrow metal-rules" or something like that, but that's actually kind of what happened, at least in terms of traffic!
HellBlazer: After he posted on Metal-rules, the floodgate opened. A lot of folks from that board came. Afterwards, there were people from all over.

Morrigan: Yes. It was much higher than I could have ever imagined. We thought it would slow down at some point, but it never did. It just keeps going!

Morrigan: We don't accept everything, we have pre-established criteria (which are sometimes admittedly arbitrary). We are the ones who have to draw the line and decide if it's metal or not. People submit bands, which are added to a queue for our approval or those of the moderators (whom are appointed either by us or the more experienced moderators).
HellBlazer: We started the points system to incite people to contribute. But now, some people add just about anything just to get more points...
Morrigan: There are some who are REALLY obsessed with their score. Sometimes we remove some because they added stupid crap, and they email us or post on the forums saying things like "AAH! What happened to my points???" Relax... it's just a number on a virtual web page! Some folks are just neurotic about it.

Morrigan: Yeah! (laughs) In summary, one has to read the FAQ and the rules before trying to add a band. It's really that simple. If you read those, and still have doubts, it's no big deal... anyone can make mistakes. If you add Slipknot, however, you're done for.

HellBlazer: Probably dozens of times!
Morrigan: When we got sick of always seeing the same crappy bands in the queue, we created a blacklist. So if you tried to add Slipknot today, you will get a generic message saying, "The band you have tried to submit has been blacklisted. If you believe this is an error, contact us." It can happen that we change our mind and eventually accept a formerly blacklisted band. Sometimes, bands are not "metal" initially, but became metal after. Anyway, the blacklist sort of protects the queue from the stupid shit some people can pull.

HellBlazer: The side-projects rule!
Morrigan: : We allow some side-projects, metal or otherwise, in our database. But it stirred so much shit! For example, TWO, Rob Halford's industrial band; not metal at all. We allowed it because it's Rob Halford, it could be interesting and have certain relevance... but now, there are some who are all, "hey, random band's got this random country pet project, let's add it too!" It created a very frustrating precedent. Everyone complains about it. Even our moderators argue a lot about it! When it's really controversial, we have the veto. If I don't know the band well (or at all), and the moderators tell me we should accept it, I will trust their judgement. Of course it's biased, but what can you do! When they disagree and I have to draw the line, I may have to listen to albums by borderline bands... and it's very annoying, especially when it's bloody metalcore! Recently, there was Skinlab. I always thought it was nu-metal or some shit like that, but then I was told they had a groove/heavy metal album... So I hear it, and ok... passable. Sounds like Pantera. I don't like it one bit, but I have to force myself to give it a fair listen. I try to be as rational and objective as possible.

HellBlazer: Initially, we launched the message board to create a sort of community for the site. There was the "Metal discussion" sub-forum, "General discussion", a section for site-related complaints and suggestions, and a section to discuss album reviews. Afterwards we added a forum for musicians, for trading, and eventually for promotion – either for labels or bands – to avoid seeing random plugs all over.
Morrigan: For taboos, if you want to stir shit, start a topic about Metallica (laughs). Then there are those threads with nazi/racist propaganda which get removed immediately. Everyone is entitled to their extreme opinions, whether it's left- or right-wing, and we don't want to censor them. But there are limits. Rational discussions are fine, even if the posted opinions are extreme (even those can be discussed calmly and rationally), but there have been some who abused our tolerance and took advantage of it to post full-on propaganda.

Morrigan: Sellouts! Haha, in fact, they're affiliation programs. People who are interested in buying the albums can click the link and once on the merchant site, if they decide to buy something, we receive a small percentage. We will use this kind of revenue to pay for a better server, because we know the site has suffered from many problems of downtime and slow speed. We want to improve that, and a good dedicated server is not cheap. But the fun part is that if the affiliate links annoy you, all you have to do is edit your profile, uncheck a box, and you won't see them anymore. Sure, you have to be a member in the first place, but it's free to register. We did not want to put obtrusive banners and say "Come on, click ‘em!". It's far less intrusive that way. But we can't support just any kind of distro, unfortunately. There has to be an affiliation system in place to track the clicks. Commission Junction is a third-party which can be helpful if one does not have the time or resources to build such a system in-house. If you have a merchant site interested with that, feel free to contact us.
HellBlazer: We'd love to support any metal distro, but if they track everything by hand, it's not very reliable.

Morrigan: (laughs) I know it's been 2-3 years that we are talking about it already. Yes, we want to redo the whole site – not the actual entered data, but the framework on which it runs.
HellBlazer: The scripts are really old and crappy, since they were written over five years ago and we had much less experience then. We both have careers in web development, so we know the do's and don't's now.
Morrigan: The problem is that the code is so old that we cannot add new functionalities. It would be much too troublesome and would create more bugs. Forget it! There's not much else to do except start again from scratch and do everything cleanly, but unfortunately, that's a lot work. We want to add individual artist pages, with biographies, RSS feeds for reviews, label pages, etc. We are not abandoning the project, but we both work full-time and we don't have a lot of time.
HellBlazer: Especially since we program all day, so we don't feel much like programming again in the evenings.
Morrigan: About the appearance – it will not change much, but we'll certainly make it look nicer. I have a web designer friend who's pretty good and who may give us a new layout we could use. But it will never be very graphic-intensive. I prefer simple websites myself, with easy access to the content.

Morrigan: Absolutely. He hasn't changed job in a long time, but I have. It's a great boost on your resume to have a site with so much traffic and with a high Alexa rank. According to the Alexa samples, it's the 1365th most popular website on the Internet! [Morri notes: Alexa refactored their calculations of their rankings recently, and the rank dropped to 2648 as of June 17th, 2008]

Morrigan: Around $120 USD per month for now. It's a shared server with really piss-poor customer service. The technical support is in India, but the company, called Fuitadnet, is in Ville Saint-Laurent. In any case, I would not recommend it. [Morri notes: this was before the late December 2007 fiasco which made us leave these wankers for good, so I recommend them even less today!]

HellBlazer: We have around 56,000 daily visitors. It keeps increasing! We have had to host our image files on another server because the bandwidth kept rising, and so did the bills... the traffic doubled in the last year!
Morrigan: At first we went with another company to host the images. A guy from that company contacted HellBlazer and told him, "I use your site a lot and I work for a web hosting company. I think we'll be able to host your images." We thought it was an interesting idea. The package was not too expensive and we had unmetered bandwidth. But in the end, he had underestimated our traffic. One week after we started using them, they emailed HellBlazer and told him we were using too much CPU! And it was not even to make the site run, but merely to deliver the images. (laughs) But another generous bloke is hosting the images for now, so it lightened the load.

HellBlazer: Yes. Some guy once made a very insulting offer of $2500.
Morrigan: ...If we'd merely put Google Ads, I think we could stop working with all the money we'd make. I'm not kidding. I work in the field so I know how it works. But we don't want to do that, by principle. Anyway, about the guy with his $2500; it wouldn't have covered the man-hours we spent on even coding the thing on a minimum wage. I really thought he was trying to insult me at first, but apparently he was very sincere... go figure.
HellBlazer: Afterwards, another guy from another site made us an offer of $25,000, which we refused. He upped it to $35,000 and then $50,000... but we're not at all interested in selling the site.
Morrigan: Oh! Forgot another funny thing about the $2500 offer. His first email asked me how much I'd be willing to sell the site. I said we weren't interested, and he replied that "everyone has their price". So I made a joke and responded like in Austin Powers: "One... hundred... billion dollars!" I was hoping he'd get the hint, but then he said "Haha, funny, ok... how about $2500?" That's when I got miffed. Besides, I don't want to sell this baby.

Morrigan: (laughs) Well, my child, sure, if the price is right, but Metal-Archives, never! ...Ok, just kidding... (laughs)

Morrigan: We keep receiving insults and hatemail, like people saying we're posers and we should die. Another called us "poseur Jews" and wanted to kill us, along with all the Jews. Anyway, they were quite hateful, and we found that a bit bizarre. We thought, "Ok... complete mental meltdown or what?" (laughs)
HellBlazer: A guy from Calgary would tell us, "Come over to any concert in Calgary, I'm going to fucking kick your ass!" And that was because weren't fast enough to his liking to correct some mistake.
Morrigan: One day, there was one who reported an error for a song title. I think it wasn't specified that the song "I Love the Dead", by Samael, was an Alice Cooper cover, or something like that. The guy called us a bunch of cretins, idiots, poseurs who should die, and so on. Take it easy mate! It's just a small mistake. Some people don't understand how the information can be added (and corrected) by anyone.

Morrigan: I am 25 years old. I like pretty much every style, except anything that ends in –core. Can't stand that shit at all. Well, old 80's hardcore is tolerable, especially if it's close to thrash, but the modern stuff, yuk. Skyclad is one of our favourite bands... but I sure love the classics: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead... I am also very fond of folk/viking – such as the Blood On Ice/Nordland era of Bathory, or Moonsorrow, Einherjer. I've always loved Therion (all eras), and the traditional heavy metal bands such as Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate (and King Diamond), Saxon, Jag Panzer, Manilla Road, Metal Church, Angel Witch, Running Wild... I am not the biggest fan of death or black but I do love Summoning, Immortal, Varathron, the first two Darkthrone, Dissection, Luciferion, The Chasm, Bolt Thrower, Behemoth. I like epic doom also, such as Candlemass or Solitude Aeturnus. The best concert I've seen was probably Iron Maiden with Dio and Motörhead. More recently, Heaven And Hell kicked my ass.
HellBlazer: I'm 26. My tastes closely resemble Morrigan's, but more doom-oriented: Reverend Bizarre, Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Sleep and of course Black Sabbath. I also like folk but the genre is starting to stagnate a bit. I also listen to a lot of thrash and NWOBHM, not so much of death or black (with a few exceptions); bands like Exodus, Sabbat (UK), Kreator, Summoning, Death and Quo Vadis. But my favourite band is really Skyclad.

Morrigan: Before we had the links for The End Records, eBay, etc. there was a section for donations – Paypal only, sorry. Our Paypal address is moc/sevihcra-latem//snoitanod.
HellBlazer: We have hesitated a long time before making a page like that, because we thought that people would donate a lot at first and it would stop quickly enough... and that's exactly what happened! (laughs) We'd have to always bring it up, but we don't want to annoy people with that. [Morri notes: donations are no longer needed anymore, thanks to everyone who helped!]

[Morri notes: Thank you Satannick and Arsenic for the interview, and to the visitor for having read it. And of course, thanks again to all our contributors, big or small – you have made it all possible. ]