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oneyoudontknow
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Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 6:25 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 9:48 am 
 

Older threads on this topic:
http://www.metal-archives.com/board/vie ... hp?t=60693
http://www.metal-archives.com/board/vie ... hp?t=54760

Every graph is uploaded here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Evolutio ... re2010Data
(entry has been updated ... more to come ... maybe)

Here is a zip-file with all graphs:
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... re2010.zip


A general overview:

Image

Image

For those who have difficulties with the colours:

http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... e2010Data/
every of these graphs is listed there separately.

Comparison of the year 2010 with the 2009 entry

http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... e2010Data/
The largest five genres have been compared (Black, Death, Heavy, Thrash, Doom):

Image

Final note:Please keep in mind that this are no exact results, but merely some sort of evolution based on the MA-database. There are double entries etc... so, it is nothing you could use for a scientific analyses; at least not in the current state.

edit1:
Three additional graphs have been added in posts below.
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Last edited by oneyoudontknow on Mon Jan 03, 2011 6:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
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tomcat_ha
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Joined: Fri Oct 27, 2006 8:05 am
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 11:06 am 
 

stuff is pretty much like i expected other than for heavy metal. I guess a large amount of heavy metal bands got deleted or something? Anyway there does seem to be a drop of heavy metal releases while for the other genres there mainly seems to be a case of unknown bands which haven't been submitted yet.

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AppleQueso
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 11:26 am 
 

not too surprising that metal as a whole seems to have been on a decline since ~'06

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Spiner202
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Joined: Wed May 06, 2009 3:32 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 12:24 pm 
 

AppleQueso wrote:
not too surprising that metal as a whole seems to have been on a decline since ~'06


I guess it depends on what Metal you listen to. I would say that things had been bubbling for a while, but it didn't really pick up until '07 and ever since, there have been tons of great releases.

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~Guest 98976
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 12:36 pm 
 

Is this just a listing for the total number of albums released per year(s) in a given genre per what's on Metallum?

If so, the thrash metal stat makes perfect sense. The community has had a huge influx of thrash metal acts that released albums in 2004, '05 and '06, but most of them have yet to release sophomore efforts.

It's also interesting to see that everything is on the decline in 2009, '10.

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Thumbman
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:38 pm 
 

Its too that doom metal is not doing very well. I didn't realize that there were still that many death metal bands. I guess since I feel like the genre has gone stagnant I haven't been paying attention.

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Gelseth_Andrano
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:40 pm 
 

I'm not surprised about the '09-'10 decline. it's gotta be hard to write a really good ground breaking album these days. Everyhting has been done, and only the truley great bands can still make good albums these days IMO
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SharpAndSlender
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:28 pm 
 

Keep in mind that the 'decline' you're seeing could be related to the lack of saturation in '09 and '10 submissions. It takes several years for the site to stabilize and a good majority of bands to be listed. We're barely out of '10- it will take several more years for most of the '10 bands to be discovered and submitted. I think the numbers will stabilize after that.
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oneyoudontknow
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Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 6:25 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:48 pm 
 

tomcat_ha wrote:
stuff is pretty much like i expected other than for heavy metal. I guess a large amount of heavy metal bands got deleted or something? Anyway there does seem to be a drop of heavy metal releases while for the other genres there mainly seems to be a case of unknown bands which haven't been submitted yet.

When you take a look at this:
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... -Heavy.png
then you see that some bands seem to have been deleted, because otherwise you would find it difficult to explain the two graphs. But even if the total number in the MA has dropped, this does not explain the general trend.

FasterDisaster wrote:
Is this just a listing for the total number of albums released per year(s) in a given genre per what's on Metallum?

releases per year per genre
FasterDisaster wrote:
It's also interesting to see that everything is on the decline in 2009, '10.
Things will change a bit over the next months and years. To get an impression of the change, please take a look at these:
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... -Black.png
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... -Death.png
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... 0-Doom.png
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... -Heavy.png
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... Thrash.png

They show the differences between 2010 (when I did the previous 'analysis') and today. I only took the largest ones, because they tend to show a clear trend and deviation.

dystopia4 wrote:
Its too that doom metal is not doing very well. I didn't realize that there were still that many death metal bands. I guess since I feel like the genre has gone stagnant I haven't been paying attention.

I would disagree. Please take a look at these
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... 0-Doom.png
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... _Heavy.png
Then you see that doom does fairly well; compared with Death or Heavy for instance.

SharpAndSlender wrote:
Keep in mind that the 'decline' you're seeing could be related to the lack of saturation in '09 and '10 submissions. It takes several years for the site to stabilize and a good majority of bands to be listed. We're barely out of '10- it will take several more years for most of the '10 bands to be discovered and submitted. I think the numbers will stabilize after that.

For some genre but not for all. The trend in Heavy seems to be 'irreversible'. There seems to be a real change.
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iriki
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Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 12:02 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 4:00 pm 
 

Is there any reason I missed of why Prog Metal isn't in the Graph?

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oneyoudontknow
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 4:10 pm 
 

iriki wrote:
Is there any reason I missed of why Prog Metal isn't in the Graph?

Yes, there is a reason. When you search for Prog metal, then you get all kinds of stuff: prog death, prog black, prog thrash ... etc. The statistical spread is simply too large and the graph would actually be meaningless, because it would be impossible to differentiate between each of the subgenres. You can entaggle this mess, but this would be quite an effort and cost a considerable amount of time. That is the reason I did not include it.
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Orange_Gem
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Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2010 10:52 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 4:45 pm 
 

Some people speak of the decline as if it's a seriously bad thing. But think about this: does anyone really care if in a given year there are 900 power metal albums or 600 power metal albums? Probably not when you're unlikely to listen to more than 25 of them.

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Apteronotus
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Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:07 am
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 6:11 pm 
 

Orange_Gem wrote:
Some people speak of the decline as if it's a seriously bad thing. But think about this: does anyone really care if in a given year there are 900 power metal albums or 600 power metal albums? Probably not when you're unlikely to listen to more than 25 of them.


I think people care because of the very strong relationship between number of albums in total and number of quality albums. Suppose 1 out of 100 releases were just mind blowing to you, in your example you get 6 instead of 9 that you really enjoy. Granted it might be crappier bands giving up but I don't see any reason to think that it what is happening. It is very possible that metal will go the way of ragtime eventually. Though it may be premature to say so now but the data sure suggests that the local maximum if not the zenith of metal has passed. Maybe there will be a resurgence like with heavy metal, who knows?

When v.2 of the archives comes out with band member biographies it would be interesting to see average age as the years have gone by to see if the genre is suffering from a lack of new blood.

For the fun of it I ran some very unscientific non-linear regression analyses on data on releases per year. I am not particularly mathematically inclined so this was limited to just sticking data into excel and having it go through different degree polynomials. I bet someone smarter could do a reasonable forecast of when the last metal release would happen based ONLY on this information. In other words, if the decline were to continue as it is. I know it is kind of useless to speculate on such things because there will be unforeseeable changes, but I still find such things interesting.

I bet that the post-rock shoegaze black metal stuff would have an upward trend on these graphs.

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CF_Mono
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 9:28 pm 
 

I thought two years ago when this began we decided that the reason for the dropoff in metal recently was because MA only accepts bands with physical releases, and more and more bands today are releasing their material digitally instead, without the need for physical releases. this decreases the need for demos, and as a matter of fact, the few demos bands do write now, are usually made for free streaming on myspace or something.

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LegendMaker
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 11:12 pm 
 

The idea is interesting and thanks for offering these graphs. That said, indeed these results should be taken with quite a pinch of salt. On top of the previous comments, bear in mind that the genre selection is made based on the *band*'s genre tags, they're not specific to each album. So for instance, you actually see results for... "power metal" in 1977, only because of Riot's and Thor's debut albums. These bands' respective genre tags on MA are "Heavy/Power/Speed Metal" and "Heavy Metal, Power Metal", causing these false positive results to appear. You also see "speed metal" results for 1970. So it's really to be taken as a rough, approximative big picture. There might very well be at least some discernable trends showing on those curves that do not match reality at all.
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oneyoudontknow
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 5:15 am 
 

LegendMaker wrote:
The idea is interesting and thanks for offering these graphs. That said, indeed these results should be taken with quite a pinch of salt. On top of the previous comments, bear in mind that the genre selection is made based on the *band*'s genre tags, they're not specific to each album. So for instance, you actually see results for... "power metal" in 1977, only because of Riot's and Thor's debut albums. These bands' respective genre tags on MA are "Heavy/Power/Speed Metal" and "Heavy Metal, Power Metal", causing these false positive results to appear. You also see "speed metal" results for 1970. So it's really to be taken as a rough, approximative big picture. There might very well be at least some discernable trends showing on those curves that do not match reality at all.

I see this problem as well. There is some amount of inconsistency as well as inaccuracy in these graphs. The only viable to solution would be to calculate it out:
- by using a certain parameter (year x 0.8 or even lower)
- creating graphs for every possible combination.

It should be kept in mind though, that some combinations like black/thrash or black/death would need an album by album discussion about the degree in falls into either category. This is beyond anything that can be done.

Image
(the one posted yesterday had an error in the average graph, which is fixed now)
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oneyoudontknow
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 6:24 am 
 

Releases per year

Image

Image

I did not know that it was possible to use the search engine to search for every release per year; because it would lead to too many results; I tries this late yesterday. One flaw of the graph are split releases, because they appear more than once.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 12:11 pm 
 

While it looks like there has been a significant decline recently, I think that might just be a product of the massive upswelling before, and the recent slump in the economy. A lot of the bands that released albums in '07 or '08 probably wouldn't be ready to release another until a few years later than that anyway, and given that metal is an expensive hobby for the vast majority of bands, during these financially tight times many bands have probably held off on blowing cash on a new album.

I predict the recent downward trend will start to reverse itself in the coming years, as bands from the peak years have a chance to write new material and the economy in general improves.
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samekh
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 1:47 pm 
 

I think part of the upswing in bands a few years ago was part of the "Myspace effect." A lot of new bands and projects emerged then, and many of them might have released a demo or two and then fizzled out like Myspace itself.

A number of bands from that era have been deleted this year, too. I had a project that was on MA but someone felt it did not qualify and deleted it, and I'm sure mine wasn't the only one.

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peterott
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 1:56 pm 
 

oneyoudontknow wrote:
Image


I don't get this :(

Even after I have thought a lot about it, I don't get the x-axis and a "wording" about the differences of the graphs.
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oneyoudontknow
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 3:26 pm 
 

peterott wrote:
oneyoudontknow wrote:
Image


I don't get this :(

Even after I have thought a lot about it, I don't get the x-axis and a "wording" about the differences of the graphs.
Simple.
2009: data from the survey done in the first week of January 2010. Then all bands of the 2009 had been added and a first survey can be done.
2010: the same ... on done in the first week of January 2011.

By adding both graphs together, it is possible to see the difference in the amount of releases. While the black metal genre has remained steady, death metal has decreased a bit and doom metal and increased. Would I only provide the graphs for only one year, it would be more difficult to show the evolution of the genre.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 3:44 pm 
 

peterott wrote:
I don't get this :(

Even after I have thought a lot about it, I don't get the x-axis and a "wording" about the differences of the graphs.

You have to remember that not everything that was released in a given year is added to MA by the end of that given year. In this year's graph you can see that the number of releases from 2009 was actually a lot higher than originally appeared in last year's graph. That implies that the drop-off this year isn't nearly as significant as it appears now, because by this time next year a lot more 2010 releases will have been added.
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tomcat_ha
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 9:12 am 
 

i also have to add that we had this drop ever since someone started tracking this stuff and every year after the drop starts roughly 1 year later.
However for heavy metal it does look like something is actually happening.

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