You might be a music fanatic if...

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Your favorite band is more than 5 years old.
You don’t choose your music based on what you’ve heard on the radio.
The popularity of a song doesn’t matter...the sound does!
You pride yourself on being a fan of a certain band, and that band is not a cheesy pop band.
You listen for lyrics, and you actually hear every lyric.

I can safely say that every single one of these points holds true in my own case.

... if it's 4:00 AM, and you're still glued to your turn table, or YouTube, or the like, and cannot get yourself to get up and go to bed, despite being exhausted from this reoccurring pattern...

me with all good deathcore, death metal, folk music, punk, and hip-hop

I can't say I understand all the lyrics in all the music I listen to, can be a bit more difficult with harsh metal vocals particularly if they are in another language. But doesn't bother me if I don't clearly hear and understand every word if the music makes up for it which it usually does.

If you have ever had multiple albums worth of different artists takes of the same standard.

If you can instantly recognize Miles Davis heard over a crowded room.

If you own music by over 500 classical composers.
If you own 106 albums by Franz Liszt alone.
If you own all the solo piano and symphonic music from every known Romantic, and some classical, composers.

Yes I understand everything raw black metal vocalists say.

I know nothing about different types of metal. I’ve never been into metal. Could somebody please explain it?

One a lot don't give you lyrics and two they aren't understandable so even if you are a music fanatic you won't understand the lyrics.

It's complicated and if you ask 5 metal fans you'll get at least 21 opinions.

Basically metal breaks most of the rules of pop music; the songs often are longer (or vastly shorter) than pop/rock music, and generally not limited to verse-chorus-verse structures, instead being more likely to embrace movement based structures (like progressive rock or symphonic or jazz music). Metal also tends to have longer 'riffs' than rock or other pop music genres. Instead of riffs repeating after 8 or 16 notes metal often has riffs that are 32-64 notes long, sometimes interspersed with very short bits, or sometimes composed of very similar, but not identical chunks so that the riff feels like it's repeating more often, but always going in a slightly different direction.

Beyond that metal tends to be very regressive, essentially no genuinely new genre has emerged since the 90s, instead it's largely been metal+other metal or metal+non metal to create new styles. Instead of fleeing it's own cheesy clichés metal largely embraces them. It's also by-and-large not a genre for singing along to, that's not to say you can't, but between the harsh vocals that are common and the general trend away from rhyming (harsh vocals free the lyricist from the prison that rhyming sometimes becomes) and lyrical hooks metal tends to emphasis the music more than the vocals. Basically, metal is a genre that tends to demand full attention as 'art music' instead of being made for singing along to or dancing like 'popular music'.

Fellow metalheads, feel free to criticize this. Numetal/scenecore/whatever the current iteration of rock pretending to be metal is fans, don't bother.

If your most treasured possession is a musical instrument.
If hearing the Top Ten makes you feel like you've ended up in a foreign country...
...but one that's both wierder and more boring than, say, Mali. Malian music is cool.
If your exciting new discoveries include forgotten ten-year-old albums or two-hundred-year-old piano sonatas.
If it took you twenty years to learn not to sing all the time, and you still sometimes relapse.
If you've completely filled a terabyte external hard-drive or a wall of CD racks with music you couldn't possibly get rid of.

Someone I know once bet a drummer that he couldn't go more than 15 minutes without tapping out a rhythm on some random object. He lasted 7 minutes.

I am a music fanatic...lol I used to have an email address called pinkfloydfanatic, don't even remember what site that was on. But yes I love music...a lot of it is metal, but that is not all I like. I like to listen to some older rock music and there is also newer non-metal stuff that I really enjoy.

I have never cared about what is popular, I care what sounds good...some music just gives me a feeling I enjoy or can relate to, some music doesn't do that at all, and some music makes me feel sick...like I seriously will start to feel nauseous if I hear too much current pop or 90's pop and the vast majority of country....I like Johnny Cash though.

I can't play music though, weird...seems like someone so into music might be able to play it, but nope not me...I make a better listener when it comes to music.

Out of curiosity, did you ever actually try and learn an instrument? Far as I'm concerned, whether you can play music or not is more a matter of dedication than natural talent. Sure, one may well be able to pick up an instrument and "just start playing", but no professional musician today would be where they are without having dedicated themselves to learning their instrument on a deeper level than "how to get some sound out of it".

All of those and more.

Particularly important for me is actually listening to the music; in other words listening to the music is the only thing you are doing; the music is not just on in the background whilst you are doing something else.

Since switching to buying CDs and replacing my vinyl records with CDs I find I miss the little ritual involved in playing vinyl records. You carefully slide the disc out of its sleeve, taking care not to touch the playing surfaces, put it on the turntable and very carefully lower the stylus onto it, then watch mesmerized as the disc spins and the stylus moves gently up and down as the slightly warped areas that all vinyl records have go round and round. Then there were the gatefold sleeves covered in photos or other artwork and little snippets of information. I always ended up with album covers all over the floor around me. Playing a CD just isn't quite the same. I really regret selling my vinyl albums years ago.

DITTO! The later-part of the 1960s, the 1970s (SEE LINK), and the very early 1980s rocked!

A lot of listeners would hear these decades-old songs, and comment what musical genius there was back then, and all of the CRAP today! e.g., why don't they make music like this anymore???

LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_in_music