KMÄNRIFFS: "I've always had a need to remain part of the scene beyond just being a fan / listener"

When I started my online journey years ago, looking for some like minded people around twitterverse, one of the first kind folks I came across was KMäNRiffs. Deeply impressed by his knowledge and the passion for our beloved music, he became a wonderful source for musical discoveries, discussions, and also an inspiration for myself and this place here. 

Since I often get confused reactions about the fact that I find most of my new music on Twitter, which has the reputation of being a hateful and toxic platform, I decided to do an introduction of our little island within this weird place, and the centre of it, as without Kman, we wouldn't be there. 

Links: TWITTER / FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / KO-FI / LINKTREE

So let's first give the word to the man himself! Welcome to follow us into a world where Fridays come with Full Force, delivering mind blowing tornados of riffs on a weekly basis. 

Cheers K, thanks for making time to answer my questions. How are you today?

Hey Katha! I’m going well. Been off work on my annual 3 week mid-year break, so I'm pretty relaxed and fitting way more music into my day than would normally be the case.

Great to hear :-) Could you please introduce yourself and KMänRiffs to our readers?

I’m Australian born and a Heavy Music fan of some 44 years or so. I had my own Metal radio show from 1990-2001. Having children brought that to a grinding halt, but I've always had a need to remain part of the scene beyond just being a fan / listener, so I wrote reviews for a couple of online Zines in the early 2000’s - I think I have 100 or so listed on Metal Archives. 

I had a few dormant years where life just got in the road and my music collection was boxed up in storage for a while. In 2017, upon reshelving my collection and looking for another way to remain part of the scene, I discovered the power of Social Media in sharing my collection and conversing with like minded people. Twitter (or X as it attempts to be now) was my go-to, as it was the easiest platform to traverse. My handle was just something I came up with on a whim, as KMaN (my former radio host alias) was unavailable. So I added RIFFS to it - I hardly thought about it. 

6-7 years later, my account has turned into a bit of a monster. It’s been a 100% organic process in its growth and development. Never did I ever conceive its format as a pre-planned idea. I just wanted to share my music collection initially, but now it’s a full blown Heavy Music promotion page! It has become a major interest of mine - more than a hobby, and the most relevant way I can stay involved in the scene as I was in my earlier days. But with its growth and my pursuit for it to be more than just another account, there’s also an expectation from people. It’s a major go-to spot for many people. I feel a responsibility to deliver.

And you absolutely do!! "Full Force Friday" & Co offer the most compact and easiest way to keep up to date with new releases, also bringing a lot of underground bands to light that might have gone unnoticed otherways. For someone who is completely new to your timeline, could you quickly describe the meaning of the different features, please?

All of the following abbreviations are a hangover from my radio days. I was always trying to come up with catchy segment titles for radio - just like the magazines did in the 80s/90s. I loved doing feature sections on radio, so I’ve just adapted that idea to Social Media. 

FFF - Full Force Friday

This is the standard bearer feature segment. EVERY Friday I post 99% of all new Metal album releases on my timeline. It includes all the relevant artist details, a streaming link (usually bandcamp) and the artwork. I schedule the posts to drop every 8 minutes for the first 5 hours, and then the rest every 4 minutes - mainly so it gets completed before I get around to the end of the day summary post. 

Of all the features I do on my X account, FRIDAY gains the biggest traffic of the week. If you follow me, then your timeline probably floods like spam on a Friday! Most weeks can range from 40 to 60 + new releases. 

I’ve always been one for lists and looking for what is coming out in the next month or so, and I just knew that the majority of the new Metal albums were released on a Friday - it’s now the universal release day for all music genres. So I decided to make it a weekly thing. 

DDD - Deth Dekk Dominions 

This is the title and hashtag used for all new albums / eps that are non-Friday releases. I used to have some really convoluted titles for new daily releases but ‘Deth Dekk’ was always there - I stole it straight from the 90’s Kerrang magazine. 

So in line with the three letter FFF, I added ‘Dominion’ to the original DD as representation of what was dominating the new releases for that particular day. We generally have DDD’s every day of the week, even Sunday! 

The Upcoming Terror 

This feature is all about ‘future’ releases to come down the track, sometimes months ahead. A lot of followers tend to ‘bookmark’ these posts on their account and check it from time to time as dates approach. The title I took from the 1987 underground debut Thrash album from German Band Assassin.

Tornado of Souls 

With a nod to Megadeth, this is the feature title I use with a graphic as a lead into the next Full Force Friday dump. I use them in tandem over a 24 hour period, with TOS being the lead in promo that people see every week. 

Regular followers are used to seeing it, and it works as a reminder that the next drop is almost on them. As most people know, it's a 7 day turn-around between FFF’s and if you don’t (can’t) keep up, you’ll miss a ton of new music.

Fire in the Hole

This is the title of the weekly ‘Album of the Week’ post. Usually (but not always) it is an album from the previous FFF that I found worked best for me. As the title suggests, it's the album that blew up the week, in my opinion. Sometimes they are very predictable, but I do dig deep in my listening and often find something different to highlight in this feature. From what I gather, it’s anticipated by my following and many have let me know that without it, they probably would not have listened to the FITH ‘pick’ at all. 

Of course, for any Thrash fans, Fire in the Hole is the opening track on Laaz Rockit’s classic ‘Annihilation Principle’ album from 1989. This is how I roll…

Mountain Kings 

Whereas most of what I do is about promoting new music, I needed to ensure I recognised all that has come before us in heavy music. This is my nod to the past. Basically my acknowledgement of the classics that forged the genre. The best of the best. A Hall of Fame, if you will. Except calling it such would be treading on the toes of others who also do it and it’s also not that inventive. So, I thought Mountains are pretty Metal - epic and majestic in scale - how about we come up with a list of albums that you would place on a Mountain top? - the Kings of the Mountain. Of course, I've also bastardised Savatage’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ album title to help me along the way. 

So far, the Mountain Kings feature has listed 60 albums as part of an ongoing, albeit, off and on feature. It is a rather epic undertaking, especially with the graphics and logo work involved. My good friend and follower Simon (@sEYEmon) offered to work some of his graphic art magic - he drew the logo from some basic ideas I gave him and generated all that you see. I just put the final product together as needed. 

Just as an aside, a quick shout out to Simon who did all my graphics and logos - the KMAN in my avatar is constructed in the font of classic Overkill lettering - noting that he only had the letter K as a template to work with to generate the other 3 letters. It’s brilliant. Bobby Blitz himself has seen it and gave it the thumbs up! It’s now all over my merchandise!

Riffs of Metal History 

Linked to Mountain Kings, this feature is also my acknowledgement of the past and aims to highlight a specific song that contains a memorable Riff, THAT Riff that just makes the song so classic. This is a very new feature and we’ve only listed 20 so far, with at least another 200,000 yet to consider…ha!

Haha - Glorious! With so many new releases to be covered, how do all of these normally find their way to you, and then into your timeline?

Has anyone ever heard of Bandcamp?? Well, I have the great pleasure of trawling through 120+ a day BC notifications from PR groups / Bands / labels that I chose to ‘Follow’. This is what happens when you follow 13,704 Bandcamp pages - yep, that’s my number to this point. This is pretty much how I end up with links to new releases - either via posting The Upcoming Terror posts (so the link is easily pasted into the specific FFF post later) or just before the next Full Force Friday. 

Anything else outside of Bandcamp I find via a couple of well known new album release pages which are generally correct 90% of the time. Of course, not all bands / labels use Bandcamp so I have to find digital links via another means. This is where you may see a link title that I have called ‘Whipped’ which uses an online link generator ‘Songwhip’ to provide other music streaming options for that album. It’s actually been a lifesaver for many FFF posts as people are given more than one option - YT, ITunes, Amazon, Deezer, Tidal etc to help them navigate to a link other than Bandcamp. Unfortunately, Songwhip was deactivated and I had to quickly scramble to find an alternative - Odesli - very similar to Songwhip that even provides album links ahead of the release date.

As for how everything ends up in my timeline / feed, it’s now a very well oiled machine that we have in process here. I’m preparing FFF posts some 3 weeks in advance, filling them up and attaching links as they arrive and get closer to release date. 

All posts are ‘scheduled’ using the X unlimited scheduling functionality - The ONLY platform that does this exclusively well! Instagram, Threads and Facebook have nowhere near the functionality of X - without the unlimited scheduling feature I could not do what I do. 

When the first FFF post drops at 8am on a Friday morning (Australian time), I’m at work in my other professional career, the UK and Europe followers have just gone to bed on their late Thursday night, and depending on where they are in the U.S., it is midday Thursday when it happens for them. Looking on the other side, Australia is only a couple of hours from the international date line, so Mark in New Zealand is about the first person in the KMaNriffs world that gets to new albums!

Yes, every Thursday night it's like "should I stay or should I go..." for me, as the first FFF post drops at midnight my time. Waking up to a Metal flooded timeline is always mind blowing btw :-) 

Thinking back to 2018 when I came across your account, we were around 1500 followers, and sometimes just like “Wow, we have 20 releases this week, that’s absolutely insane!”. Since then, FFF has grown to a real beast with 20.000 followers, and 50+ releases per week seem to be “normal” nowadays. How does it feel for you to see this incredible growth, and what impact does it have on your daily life and routines?

Firstly, I am incredibly humbled. The whole thing was never planned, it evolved organically. As for the numbers, well, I used to get hung up on them early on, trying to understand why some would follow in the first place and why some would just up and leave. I think I celebrated the first 10-14 thousand benchmarks, but have since become a little skeptical around what is suggested and what is actually real? The ‘Bot’ factor is a major distraction. 20K means something I suppose, but the Twitter algorithm and feed-reach landscape has changed so much since Muskstik took over, that I tend not to worry about it anymore. I’ll acknowledge 20K when it happens, but I’ve worked out who is real and understand that I have a very loyal core group who continue to stick fat and show up to support the work I do.

As for the impact on my life, well I pretty much work it around all of the gaps in my weekly routines. I am highly organised. Every morning I wake to 120+ emails and immediately filter the wheat from the chaff. This has to be done daily or things will slip through. Any time I can listen to music, I will. Any time I can add to my lists and prepare posts, I will. 

I do have a demanding and highly stressful professional career, so I view this as my escape, my down time, my time away from ‘work’ as such. I still need it. I really do lead a double life - my professional colleagues don’t have a clue about what I do on Social Media, and I don’t want them to (the use of pseudonym is 100% deliberate). KMaNRiffs is completely separate from that life. I’d absolutely love to replace my current income with what I do here and make it a full time job (cos it feels like it at times) and be 100% dedicated to what I really love instead of working ‘for the man’! Is this even possible??

Over the years, you tried to transfer your offering to other social media platforms, but they don’t seem to work that well in this context. Why is Twitter still the place to go? And where do you see the biggest chances and challenges there?

Yeah, this has been something I’ve wrestled with as things grew on Twitter. Each platform has its own little eco-system, its own community. And of course, as an everyday Social Media consumer it’s a difficult thing to even stay on top of one platform let alone be across multiple. 

As my work on Twitter became more prominent and the following grew, there was always the fact that Heavy music fans / Metal heads over on IG, Threads and FB etc that had no clue about it. So it became clear that I needed to create some sort of base level presence on those platforms as well. So, yes KMaNRiffs exists on IG, Threads and FB - but only in summary post form and linking FITH picks to the relevant bands and labels. I even tried for a while to post on IG in the same manner as Twitter, but this required a ‘manual’ copy and paste because the two platforms don’t align with simultaneous posting - but even with that, the engagement wasn’t and is nowhere near the level of Twitter.

Links: TWITTER / FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / KO-FI / LINKTREE

Despite all of the pitfalls around Musk and his Twitter takeover (and I get the vitriol), functionality wise, the platform is easily the best for what I do. No other platform allows me to schedule posts without limits and get it done in an efficient, timely manner. I’ve tried the others. They don’t have it. Twitter rules all in this regard. 

The biggest challenge for me is dealing with Twitter’s previous and current reputation and getting Metal fans who are not familiar with it to give it a chance. It goes without saying that Twitter is very much maligned for its toxic, non-filtered shit-posting environment. If you want to go down that shallow rabbit hole you can go for your life. It’s a massive waste of time and totally unproductive. I use Twitter in a different way - with careful filtering of who and what you follow your feed can be entirely curated to meet your needs. You don’t even need to get on the public feed at all. Don’t make it part of your life.

So why not make it exclusively Metal? I’ve done it, and so can others who wish to keep up with what is going on in our exclusive Metal World. I’m using Twitter to promote heavy music to like minded people and fans. It’s actually the only sole reason to use the platform. Engage in it for this one purpose and boom, you’ll have riffs coming out of your eyeballs. 

I’ve had so many followers tell me this - how they found the page through someone’s recommendation and the number of new bands and albums they had no clue about! The page has reinvigorated many followers' listening habits. Yet, 20K followers is nothing compared to what it could be as I know there are 100s of thousands who just have no idea it exists or won’t take a chance on the platform due to their preconceived ideas and beliefs about its status and worth. I suggest to those people to ignore the noise and just view the platform as a place to go to find a highly curated daily and weekly Metal source that you won’t find anywhere else. The community I have built is strong and so positive and supportive. You can read your lists and visit your news and review sites, but no one else does it like this. Ask them.

Author's note: I did of course ;-) You can find some quotes already in here. But when I started to ask around for thoughts about KMänRiffs and metaltwitter, I got back way more than expected, impressively showing what this place can be. Welcome to learn more HERE

With all your experience: Where do you see the biggest chances and challenges for bands today regarding reaching their respective audience?

Well, first of all based on what I feature daily and every Friday this whole ‘Rock is Dead’ discourse espoused by a few prominent voices is a lie. The Heavy Music / Metal scene is incredibly fertile. Anyone who complains about a lack of new talent or new music is living under rock. They are just not looking. Hence, the reason why KMaNRiffs exists. However, the difference between the 80s/90s and today is that there is so much to choose from. There are so many bands, so many new albums - As stated 50-60 every 7 days for virtually the entire year. Traversing that landscape can clearly be very overwhelming as a dedicated music fan. You cannot keep up. It’s the one thing many of my followers complain about - so much music, too little time.

And thus we have the biggest challenge facing bands today - how to get heard, how to be seen, and how to make an impact. Even if they get the lead in promotion right via their own hard work or a label and PR groups, they have literally seven days to grab hold of a potential audience. Then comes the next lot of new releases. If you don’t have or refuse to have any Social Media presence (a certain death knell!) or the wherewithal to finance lead-in promotion then I’m afraid you’ll disappear into the ether.

It’s a double edged sword - You need it to be seen and heard, but the ‘impact’ window is relatively small. The evils of instant technology has meant that the attention span of humanity has been whittled away to less than 30 second sound bites. Our scene is no different from others in this regard - even some of my followers in their attempt to traverse the weekly Friday dump state that they’ll give an album a shot and if it doesn’t grab hold in 2-3 tracks then it's an easy choice to move on to the next.

I’d like to think that some of us more ‘veteran’ Metal listeners are a little more forgiving than that and get to sit with an album a bit longer. Of course, well established bands get far more kudos and patience granted to them come their time, but yeah, for new bands the landscape is brutal, no doubt. I like to remind myself that the now well established bands (who are going to disappear soonish) were also once new bands trying to find their way. Still, the competition wasn’t as fierce.

Couldn't agree more... Before we wrap things up, what can you tell us about your future plans?

Global domination is the goal! Ha! I only half jest, because I truly believe KMaNRiffs provides a huge service to the Metal community - it has a prominence within one of many Social Media platforms, and I do have some skin in the game with many industry contacts, but at the same time I also think it's a little fish in a big pond. 

As stated previously, I’d like to think it could become so much bigger. Again, it’s a unique place for what it does - it's not replicated by anyone else. I just need to keep on getting the word out to the rest of the world and continue to grow. I don’t think it’s reached anywhere near its full potential. Maybe I take it far too seriously, but for me music is serious business. I don’t know how people operate without it. It’s a dream, and I’d need someones back for it to happen, but I’d also like to make this my full time job. I’ve done enough for my other one!

That's an epic closing - Thank you very much for joining me in this, and giving us these insights into your incredible work, that goes way beyond "just sharing music". Whatever the future holds for KMänRiffs, count me in!  \m/

And to all interested readers: There's still enough space on the K-Train, welcome to jump on board :-)

Links: TWITTER / FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM / KO-FI / LINKTREE

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