Have you come across a map on social media showing the ratio of female to male metal musicians by country? Or have you seen a bar graph showing what months the most metal albums are released annually? If you have, there is a good chance that you have come across data visualizations created by Metal Stats.

In this episode, the Boo Boo Butt Boys™ Judge Dredd and Wulf interview Metal Stats about his process for scraping and shaping data from Metal Archives while controlling for variables. They discuss the eternal questions regarding regionalism in metal, such as the infamous Denmark Paradox (a.k.a. in light of having produced Mercyful Fate, why did Denmark never produce black metal to the same degree that the rest of their Scandinavian brethren did?). We also explore the relationship between a country’s GDP and metal produced by that country. Finally, we investigate why both creators and viewers of data visualization need to think critically about data that is being presented. 

We make references to many maps and graphs, mostly created by Metal Stats, throughout the episode. Check out the links below to see them for yourselves!

Episode References:

• Map of countries by metal bands per capita
• Metal bands in Finland per capita by municipality
• Comparison of metal bands per country per 1 million people and country average happiness score
• European metal vs. non-metal albums statistics
• Deep dive and analysis of the trifecta
• Ratio of female to male metal musicians by country (1 female:100 male ratio)
• Metal databases beyond Metal Archives
• Metal release counts over time by release type (LP, EP, video, box set, etc.)
• Metal release type breakdown by percentage of all releases by subgenre
• Metal band name length distribution
• How many albums have metal bands typically released?
• How many bands have metal musicians typically been in? (does not include live members)
• How many members do metal bands typically have?
• Metal album release count by day of the year
• Number of bands compared to how long it takes them to release their debut
• How much time do metal bands typically take between albums?
• Network of similar artists with "technical" genre tag

Metal Stats' Socials:

• Flourish (data visualizations website): app.flourish.studio/@metalstats
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Metalplots
• Wordpress: https://metalstats.wordpress.com/