Who decides who gets heard

Two labels divide the Florida bands between them, in Monte Conner's own account: Roadrunner, where Conner signs Obituary, Deicide, Cynic and Malevolent Creation and routes Sepultura, Pestilence, Gorguts and Suffocation to the same room, and Earache, the boutique extreme metal label that takes Morbid Angel, Nocturnus, Massacre and Terrorizer and pays for four Morrisound sessions between 1988 and 1991 [V13] [WEA]. Combat, which released Death's first three albums, becomes the American licensee for the Earache batch of 7 December 1990. Metal Blade takes Cannibal Corpse and never lets go; Nuclear Blast takes the second tier of the Florida wave and, after Conner moves there in 2012, most of the survivors; Century Media builds its death metal run on Morgoth and then on the Swedes and the revival; Relapse ends up owning the Death catalog and releasing the bands that play it [MBC] [WMC] [WRL].

The studios are the map's second institutional layer, and the reason the geography looks the way it does. Sunlight in Stockholm, Fredman in Gothenburg, Unisound in Finspång, The Abyss in Pärlby, Slaughterhouse in Driffield and Music Lab in Berlin are each the room a local scene converged on, as Morrisound was in Tampa, and each is on the map with its own verified credits [WSU] [WSF] [AEB]. Mana in St. Petersburg and Audiohammer in Sanford are the Florida rooms of the second and third generations.

The venues and networks are the third layer. The tape trading network carries the demos in both directions; the Masquerade in Ybor City, now the Ritz Ybor, is where the Europeans fly in to see Obituary, Morbid Angel and Atheist in 1987 and 1988; Ace's Records is the shop and WXTB's The Pit the radio show; the Brass Mug is the room that has outlasted all of them and hosts Tampa Death Fest every September [JPMS] [RVO] [WRZ] [CLB] [TDF]. Milwaukee Metalfest is where Eric Greif meets Chuck Schuldiner in 1987 and where Century Media sees Cryptopsy in 1997; Maryland Deathfest, Wacken, Hellfest and Dynamo are the festivals the map records the Florida bands passing through; Decibel's Hall of Fame is where the canon is fixed, and its books are where the studio's history is now written [WMW] [BEG] [DHF] [GEH].