The previous edition can be found here (2011) and here (2010).

The information provided in these graphs was obtained through the Metal Archives database; date: 2013-01-01. It reflects a vague snapshot on how the metal scene and their subgenres have developed over the years. Each point represents one inquiry on 'releases per year per genre'. As the description of the aspect of the genre is assigned to the band's sites and not to the release/s (see Discogs for instance), a lack of precision in the overall result can be identified. Nevertheless, a certain trend can still be discovered and the graphs can be used for the purpose of discussions.

All graphs have been uploaded here:
http://archive.org/details/EvolutionOfThemetalGenre2012Data



Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Heavy Metal



Doom Metal, Power Metal, Speed Metal, Folk Metal, Gothic Metal, Grindcore and NWoBHM



separate graphs for each genre has been uploaded at the Internet Archive entry as well.
Black Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... kMetal.png

Death Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... hMetal.png

Thrash Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... hMetal.png

Heavy Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... yMetal.png

Doom Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... mMetal.png

Folk Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... kMetal.png

Gothic Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... cMetal.png

Power Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... rMetal.png

Speed Metal:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... dMetal.png

Grindcore:
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... ndcore.png

NWoBHM
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... NWoBHM.png

#########################################################################

Some comparisons:
Black Metal (2011-2012)
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

Death Metal (2011-2012)
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

Thrash Metal (2011-2012)
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

Doom Metal (2011-2012)
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

Heavy Metal (2011-2012)
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

###########################################################################################

Releases per year:
https://ia601609.us.archive.org/8/items ... erYear.png

Releases per year (version 2):
https://ia601609.us.archive.org/8/items ... ntries.png
(this is the sum per genre per year. As can be seen, there is a small error, but only a marginal one. I have calculated it for each entry and it is around twenty per cent. Keep this in mind when looking at the genre graphs.)

That's quite a lot of data.

I'm just curious, how do you gather all the information? scripts?

No ... I used the search engine, while I was listening to the videos from the recent hacker conference in Hamburg, Germany; 23C3. I generally prefer multi-tasking .

Looks like doom is the only genre that increased. Interesting.

Ha, I love how it's been doing that year after year. And if you think about that it makes sense too. Lots of bands are getting sludgier or new ones have emerged and play slow heavy rock. I'm 100% for this.

I know people in the past few years have speculated as to why fewer metal bands are being added as of late. Most theories concluded that a lack of money or industry/label support is to blame for this, but I doubt that's the real underlying cause, because it still seems like more and more bands of every genre are releasing music. I think I might argue that the lack of metal albums doesn't correlate to less music being produced. I think that instead, it's a number of musicians moving on to more progressive or shred/instrumental oriented bands. There have been a huge wave of acts that have lots of metal background but still aren't typically so labeled metal. Just my hypothesis anyways. (although this may be compiled with a number of other factors. It's also true that it will just plain take a while for newer bands to be added, so all of the graphs should have a downward slope. This however doesn't explain why doom is inclining.)

I have three graphs available:
http://ia700402.us.archive.org/11/items ... 0-Doom.png
http://ia600804.us.archive.org/31/items ... 0-2011.png
https://ia801603.us.archive.org/22/item ... 1_2012.png

These are all the comparison graphs and especially the second and third are the interesting ones. Even though one might have suspected some kind of drop, similar to the one of the other genres, the doom one simply does not care about it.


There is also the aspect of saturation. When you take a look at the immense growth of the metal scene since the year 1992 some kind of downturn could have been expected at some point. Over two thousand releases less compared to the peak four years ago. Not that this is a bad thing per se.

Weird. You'd think all the Doom types would've killed themselves by now.

Seriously, I wonder if/how the trend would change if digital-only bands, previously not allowed on this site, were added.

Ahaha, why in the world is Grindcore featured?

I kinda also think that grindcore is misrepresented cause there is tons of self released grindcore and smaller labels putting out tons of killer releases. hell i'm practically finding something everyday that I want or need to get.

The graph correlates with the GDP growth rates of US/Europe

i actually think and have stated this the previous times we've talked about this is that what we are seeing is mostly related to the rise of influence internet has on metal releases.
I am pretty sure that a lot of demos and even EPS are not getting released on a physical format anymore. Just look at all the scion sponsored digital ep releases of major bands.
Also there is always a delay of a few years before every release from a specific year is added. Even now bands that are 10+ years old are still getting added.

anyway id like to see this list sans demos and one sans eps and demos. Would be interesting to see if indeed internet only releases are that common for both formats nowadays.

Very interesting. Doom seems to be on the rise. Suprised to see everything else steadily falling though.

oneyoudontknow, it might be a wise idea to look at sludge, stoner and groove, also. We've definitely seen a rise in those three in the band queue over the last couple years.

I agree with this ... some parts are missing. These genres that you mention come with problems:
While sludge is often a term that bands are solely identified with -- sludge: 4271 hits --, nearly half of the entries in the database are dealt with already: doom sludge: 2096 hits; and this is only one combination. But maybe a different graph would be interesting, separated from the main one, because this genre would get lost among the bottom ones. The same would be true of Stoner: 3653 hits. Pagan, Viking and all this stuff is ignored for a similar reason. Metalcore should have its own entry as well ... All of this would be easier would the way of obtaining this kind of information would be less time consuming.

Groove -- 6180 hits -- falls into the same category. I vaguely remember that I had made a graph on metalcore, groove and all this stuff once, but I cannot trace it. Lost maybe.

Grind: 10604 hits.

It makes up a good proportion of the database, more than twice of the folk entries. Therefore, this genre has to be covered. It is a blurry thing, but as we do not not have genre descriptions for the releases and as it is next to impossible to describe one piece with one sole descriptor, it is messy anyway.

A comparison:
*core: 19944 hits
grind*: 10604 hits
metalcore: 5533 hits
thrashcore 150 hits
deathcore: 1457 hits

I will think about adding metalcore in a future version of it.


And a lot of grindcore bands have not been added ... and never will be. Similar to the noise genre, it is quite difficult to thoroughly grasp the complexity.


If you consider the drop in the amount of demos over the years, then this aspect does not seem to play such a large role any more. While it may have been responsible for the rise of the since since the mid-90s, it has seems to have taken a different path since.

On presenting the graphs without the demos and eps:
that is a lot of work... especially with the current version of the search engine. It would be interesting to see this, but the amount of time/energy necessary to such a task is something I will not force myself to spend on it.

That would the Ad Populum fallacy. If you want to make a chart for metal include metal genres exclusively; it wouldn't be difficult to to make a core chart as you seem to be already working towards such.

^ I am not doing a scientific study. This is just something I had started some years ago and considering the amount of grindcore releases in the MA database, it feels like a minor/negligible nuisance to have it displayed among the other trve genres.

The speed metal graphic is just totally insane. There's a huge spike in the early pre-thrash speed metal scene, and then it just plunges down - but there are constant little peaks. All the other genres seem to have had slow and steady increases and declines in popularity over time.

Is this because "speed metal" tends to be a pretty broad descriptor that can cover everything from early Priest to Helstar to thrash acts in-all-but-name, or what?

It's the opposite, really; speed metal is such a specific thing that tweaking anything one way or the other will give you either thrash metal or power metal.

One other thing: there are tiny, tiny blips in the folk metal chart in 1978 and 1980. I had no idea anybody was doing anything like folk metal at the time.

there is one band that is responsible for these peaks in the folk metal:
http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/%C3%91u/26362

At first I wasn't too thrilled that there was no metalcore/deathcore curve but then I realized if you were to do one, it wouldn't be accurate at all. There are just simply way too many bands that aren't on the archives for it to hold any sort of truth. Good work though, these are pretty interesting to look at.

Thanks ... but I will add a metalcore graph in the 2013 version.

The Internet Archive has been edited properly and presents the graphs in a better way now.

Is Thrash Metal's downward trend due to most recent Kreator album then?

I thought metal evolution was a bad thing.

Hate to bump such an old thread, but the information is just fascinating and deserves more discussion. But particularly I am interested in what happened to the metal by countries charts. When you were doing these a few years ago, you (or someone) made a map with a gradient representing the concentration of metal bands in the population of each country. Why wasn't this continued? Did the map look virtually the same? Also, it would be nice to see them ranked in order via text instead of guessing some of the more ambiguous placings based on color.

It was not continued by me, because it was never done by me in the first place. This world map had been the work of someone else.
I would like to do some charts on the metal by countries and present them in the way I have done for some time already, but gathering all this information is a nuisance and considerably time consuming. There is (currently) no way in getting this type of information from the database in a neat and simple way.

What format is the site's database in? SQL? It would be awesome if the Archive's creators made a phpMyAdmin type interface that allowed us to run SQL queries on the database (Without ability to add entries, of course). That would certainly streamline the data harvesting for these types of projects.

I did some research for a school project using the Archives, in which I had a table listing the number of new bands each year from 1986-1994 from a select few countries, and boy was it a tedious process. I know there is some way to automate it using scripts, but I lack the programming knowledge, and I don't think the Archive's code is open source.

^ I did something similar too for my dbms course eons ago. Quite basic to be honest but I had a lot of fun. This is the map CF_Mono was talking about - http://i.imgur.com/zRDq4.png

Also, I wouldn't agree on the database being opened up even for whatever good that might come out of it. It's the website's USP. Queries shouldn't be allowed to be passed through third party websites when it can be done via MA itself...unless of course the elder mods agree to it. Anyway, for some analysis and data crunching, Empath has done quite a brilliant job using MA's database of bands, review scores etc.