We've seen a lot of studies recently involving metalheads. For example, we learned metal musicians are twice as likely to die young as country musicians. We learned it only takes 28 seconds to really damage your ears at a show, and also that metal fans and classical music fans have a lot in common.
Today's study comes from Spotify, who tried to figure out which genre has the loyalest music fans, and quickly found out that heavy metal has the most loyal following.
Here's how they conducted the survey:
To find out, we first identified the “core” artists that, according to The Echo Nest (a part of Spotify), are most central to each genre, starting with the big ones, on a global level. Then we did the same thing with local genres in various countries around the world. To create a measure of genre loyalty, we divided the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners. All of the charts are normalized against the genre with the loyalest fans.
And here are the global results:
There is also a country-by-country breakdown and metal is nearly always at the top, in the top 3 at least. Obviously, this isn't the most scientific study, but the results are still fun to discuss.
The answer as to why is simple. Metal music breeds a lifestyle. When you're into metal, you're all about dresssing metal, and listening to metal as much as possible, so this isn't too shocking for us. If only the rest of the music world would recognize how valuable metal fans are… although some are clearly already hopping on the trend.
[via MetalSucks]
