I’m into metal. Metal music, that is. Not surprisingly, I looked up a few facts on metal statistics and found some fairly interesting data. Long story short, we can see that metal prevails in most of Scandinavia.
This definitely does not surprise me since the last we heard of this [in the public media] was Obama’s comment “I do want to point out, that Finland has perhaps the most heavy metal bands in the world, per capita,” (3) while on the topic of Finland. On the map above, it is subtle, but you can note that the color legend is not linear. In other words, as the color changes, the amount of change in color does not correspond to how many metal bands exist per 100,000 people. In Scandinavia, there are about 50 metal bands / 100k people. But even we move onto orange, there is almost half that value at about 26 people (1). As we progress downward we can see an exponential correlation between these values. So why is it that some populations have a massive amount of metal groups whereas those immediately outside have half or less?
Looking at what we have learned in class, you can trace it back to the simplest of explanations. The relationship between those who do listen to metal is tightly knit. There is almost a society of people, who are loyal to metal and tend not to extend their interest in music anywhere outside of metal. This can be seen in the form of triadic closure where person A and B are friends (due to music taste) and since A and C are friends (due to the same reason) then they must all be friends. But how can we explain the fact that outside the region there are lower numbers of metal? Well there must be an edge bridge which connects one group of people to another group that listens to other music. Yet, it is clear that there are very few edge bridges since the number of metal bands decrease by half.
To support the claim that these groups are tightly knit we can see a study completed by spotify recently claiming that the most loyal listeners are metal heads !
Metal heads also clearly dominate the stage as well, coming in at 30% higher than the rest of the popular genres. (2)
Sources:
(1) http://copyranter.blogspot.de/2012/03/world-map-metal-bands-per-100000-people.html
(2) https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/04/02/loyalest-music-fans-by-genre/
(3) http://pitchfork.com/news/65541-president-obama-shouts-out-finlands-metal-scene/
very interesting!