Our interview with Markus Eck, founder of the German PR agency Metal Message Global, is now live on themetallist.com in English and Ukrainian. Markus set up Metal Message in 2001 to promote metal and hard rock bands, mostly self-released acts with no label behind them, and the agency is marking its 25th anniversary this year. Markus answered our questions by email.
Before PR, Markus was one of the busiest writers at the German print magazine Legacy. "I wrote and wrote and wrote back then!" he told us. "At times it amounted to 15–25 reviews per issue, plus around 7–10 interviews and countless more features." He says he started the agency out of frustration with how parts of the commercial music press wrote about his favorite bands, and because so many musicians kept telling him how hard it was to get their music heard.
He has watched the business change several times over: the CD boom, when metal websites were "springing up like mushrooms," then file-sharing and MP3s, MySpace as the forerunner of social media, and Facebook taking over. Even so, he believes promoting bands has become much easier than it was in 2001. Asked whether he would promote AI-generated music, his answer was short: "I haven't done that yet, and I never would."
Also in the interview
- why he only works with music that excites him personally, and his one absolute rule
- the two or three times he turned a band down
- HEL / ASH OF ASHES and SCARLET ANGER, two acts he has worked with from the start
- whether he has worked with Ukrainian bands
- why quitting was "not for a single second" an option, and how he got through the Covid years
- his top 5 albums of 2026 so far, including OLD RUINS' Mount Arreat, which we reviewed and gave 7/10
Read the full interview: Metal Message Global: Markus Eck on 25 Years of Metal PR, the Legacy Days and a Hard No to AI
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