Dear readers, today marks a great change for Metal Storm as an institution and as a community. For over 20 years now, we have been a leading voice in the metal underground, providing invaluable resources for music fans through our database, forums, publications, and more. Up until now, we have managed to do this without asking anything in return, powering through year after year purely for the love of the craft. Metal Storm has always operated on a volunteer basis, never motivated by profit, and we had hoped that this would always be the case. Unfortunately, as we have seen over the last year, times change.

Stringing along a site like this isn't cheap, especially with tightening privacy and security restrictions (the EU and the state of California are monstrous with this, seriously), and so we have decided that the best way to turn a profit with this thing would be to introduce a paid membership system. Modeling ourselves after some of the major news publications out there, we'll be offering readers a select number of free views each month, after which it will be necessary to sign up for a premium user account to access more content. Premium plans start at $6.66 a month (payable through PayPal, Venmo, OFX, Apple Pay, Google Pay, YooMoney, wire transfer, check, cheque, and/or exchange of rare Bathory merch) and we plan to introduce higher tiers of membership in the future as our network stabilizes. This is undiscovered country for us, so we appreciate your understanding while we adjust membership rates and perks associated with different tiers as necessary. For now, we'll be starting everybody at the base rate just to make things fair, but look forward to those Metal Warrior, Metal Elitist, and Metal God membership plans. As an additional feature right off the bat, we will be selling custom titles in several colors for 0.0000666 BTC. Available colors are green and red. Premium users will by default show up in gold.

This is not the path that we envisioned Metal Storm taking, but the important thing is to remain sanguine in the face of change and generous with your resources. We know that this will be worth the expenditure and you will love what Metal Storm is brewing for the future. For those readers who are skeptical about Metal Storm's new direction, or who are perhaps unable to keep up with our evolving requirements for membership, we ask you to consider that this is merely the price of several cups of coffee a month. Which is more important to you: your debilitating caffeine addiction or a daily barrage of ShoutBox arguments over which South American black metal bands are and are not Nazis?

-- The Metal Storm Staff

Source:

metalstorm.net