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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?