Over the last few months, I have found myself thinking a lot about the future of BLOODRED. Not only in terms of riffs, lyrics, production, artwork, or the next musical direction, but also in a more fundamental way: how should BLOODRED release music in the future?
That may sound like a purely practical question at first. Single, EP, album. Digital only, physical edition, video, lyric video, Bandcamp, streaming platforms, social media, maybe a limited run of something more tangible. These are all practical choices, of course. But they are also creative choices. They shape how music is perceived, how long it remains visible, and how deeply it can connect with people.
For a long time, the answer seemed obvious, especially in metal. You write songs, you record an album, you release it, you promote it, and then the cycle starts again. The album was the statement. The centerpiece. The thing everything else revolved around.
That idea still means a lot to me. I grew up with albums as complete worlds. You did not just hear a few songs. You entered a sound, a visual language, a sequence, a certain atmosphere. You looked at the artwork. You read the lyrics. You noticed how the opening track set the tone and how the final song closed the door behind you.
For metal, and especially for black metal, death metal, doom, and everything that lives in the darker corners between them, this still matters. An album can be more than a collection of tracks. It can be a place.
But the world in which music is heard has changed.
Note: This article is connected to the BLOODRED video “Album vs. Autoplay”, in which I discuss how streaming, playlists, singles, EPs, and albums have changed the way we listen to music (German language stream – use subtitles in your own language!).
According to IFPI’s Engaging with Music 2023 report, people listened to an average of 20.7 hours of music per week. So music has not become less important. If anything, it is everywhere. The real change is not that people have stopped listening. The real change is how they listen.
Music has moved from the living room to the pocket. From the stereo system to the phone. From the CD shelf to the endless scroll. It follows us into the car, to work, into the gym, through the kitchen, onto trains, into late-night walks, and into every small gap between one task and the next.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. I love that music is more accessible than ever. I love that someone can discover BLOODRED from another country within seconds. I love that a song can travel far beyond the old limits of distribution, press, radio, or geography.
But accessibility comes with another problem: attention.
At the end of 2025, there were around 253 million tracks sitting on audio streaming services, according to data reported by Music Business Worldwide based on Luminate. In that same year, around 37.9 million new tracks were added. That is roughly 106,000 uploads per day.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The problem today is not whether music can be released. The problem is whether it can still arrive.
That makes the question of format much more important than it may seem. A single can be a strong entry point. It gives one song a clear moment. It can be supported with a video, a post, a story, a stream, a blog article, a discussion around the lyrics or the concept. In the current environment, that matters. A song needs space before it disappears beneath the next thousand releases.
But a single can also vanish quickly. It can become one more item in a feed. One more track in a playlist. One more notification, one more thumbnail, one more thing to save for later and then forget.
An album remains the biggest statement. It allows depth, contrast, development, and a larger artistic frame. It gives artwork more weight. It gives lyrics more context. It allows songs to speak to each other. And in metal, I still believe that matters more than in many other genres.
The interesting thing is that the numbers seem to support this tension. Streaming dominates the German music market. According to BVMI’s Musikindustrie in Zahlen 2025, audio streaming accounted for 84.4 percent of music sales revenue in Germany in 2025, while CDs accounted for 7.2 percent. On the surface, that looks like a simple story: streaming wins, physical formats fade.
But the metal world is rarely that simple.
The same BVMI report shows that rock, hard rock, and heavy metal had a particularly strong share in physical formats. In 2025, these genres accounted for 48 percent of vinyl revenue and 31 percent of CD revenue in Germany. Luminate also reported in 2023 that heavy metal fans in the United States were about 50 percent more likely than the average consumer to have purchased vinyl in the previous twelve months.
That does not mean every metal fan is a collector. It does not mean physical formats are magically saved. And it certainly does not mean we should pretend streaming does not exist. But it does show something important: in metal, music is still often treated as more than background content.
There is still a desire to own something. To hold something. To support a band in a more direct way. To have the artwork, the booklet, the lyrics, the physical object. Maybe even to place it on a shelf as part of one’s own history with music. That matters to me.
At the same time, I do not want to romanticize the past too much. Not every album from the so-called old days was a masterpiece. Not every long release deserves its length. Not every physical product has artistic value simply because it exists. And not every playlist is the enemy of serious listening.
Playlists can open doors. Algorithms can lead people to bands they would never have found otherwise. Streaming can create moments of discovery that were almost impossible in the past. For a band like BLOODRED, that can be valuable.
The danger begins when music is reduced to pure function. Music for the gym. Music for work. Music for driving. Music for rage. Music for focus. Music for sleeping. Music for the algorithm.
Again, none of this is automatically wrong. I listen to music in many different contexts myself. But extreme metal, at its best, asks for something more. It is built from tension, detail, atmosphere, lyrics, sound, rhythm, and emotional force. It is not just there to fill silence.
A 2015 study by Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle on extreme music and anger processing is interesting in this context. The study did not find that extreme music made angry listeners angrier. Instead, it suggested that extreme music could match emotional arousal and even increase positive emotions. That makes sense to many of us who live with this music. It does not simply create darkness. It gives shape to something that is already there.
That is one of the reasons why I still believe in intentional listening. Not all the time. Not in some purist, elitist way. There is nothing wrong with playing death metal while cooking or letting black metal run while answering emails. But every now and then, music deserves to be more than the soundtrack to something else.
This brings me back to BLOODRED.
The question is not simply whether the future should be singles, EPs, or albums. The more honest question is: what does each piece of music need?
Some songs may deserve their own moment. Some ideas may work best as a compact EP. Some concepts may still demand the scale of an album. And maybe the future does not h ave to follow one fixed model.
Perhaps BLOODRED should think more in phases than in traditional release cycles. A phase could begin with a single, continue with another song, grow into an EP, or eventually become something larger. The important thing would be that each release has a reason to exist in its form.
That may be one of the most interesting challenges for independent metal in the streaming age. We have more freedom than ever before, but also more noise around us. We can release music faster, but we also have to work harder to give it meaning. We can reach people everywhere, but we also have to create reasons for them to stay.
For BLOODRED, that means the music itself must remain the core. The riffs, the atmosphere, the lyrics, the production, the visual world, the human reason behind it all. But around that core, the way of releasing music may need to become more flexible.
But I know this: I do not want BLOODRED to release music just because the platforms need to be fed. I do not want songs to become disposable fragments in an endless autoplay chain. At the same time, I do not want to ignore how people actually listen today.
Somewhere between album and autoplay, there has to be a space where music can still mean something. That is where I want BLOODRED to be.
Sources and further reading
- IFPI: Engaging with Music 2023 – Global study on music listening habits, streaming, playlists, albums, discovery, and weekly listening time.
- Online-Audio-Monitor 2025 – German report on online audio usage, music streaming, devices, listening situations, and audio consumption in cars.
- JIM-Studie 2025 – German study on media usage among young people aged 12 to 19, including music streaming and daily listening habits.
- BVMI: Musikindustrie in Zahlen 2025 – German music market report, including streaming revenue, physical formats, vinyl, CD sales, and genre shares for rock, hard rock, and heavy metal.
- Music Business Worldwide: Quarter of a billion tracks now sit on music streaming services. Where does it end? – Article based on Luminate data about the massive growth of available tracks on streaming platforms.
- Luminate: Spinning Steel: Heavy Metal Fans Embrace Vinyl Records – Short analysis of heavy metal fans and their above-average affinity for vinyl.
- Robert Prey: Playlists and the datafication of music formatting – Academic article on playlists, streaming platforms, datafication, and how music is organized in the streaming age.