Written by:	Roman Doez
Published:	06.10.2021

So last year I made an article that detailed lots of stats about the website, what genres Metal Storm users like the most, what their favorite bands are, etc. But my craving for stats isn't over yet. This time, with a different approach, let's see what other interesting information the website has to showcase.



Metal is a vast genre, and one of the most widespread in the world... or so we might think. How widespread is it actually? Well, given the data I have collected in here, there are several things we can assess.

First, Europe is THE continent for metal. With no less than 9,524 bands out of the 15,054 the website features in its database (at the time of writing), it represents 63% of all bands here. However, the biggest country for metal isn't a European one, it's of course the good old US of A. With nearly 3,400 bands, or 22.5% of the total number of bands, it is the leader of the metal movement in the world, and by FAR. Second place is given to Germany, with a very solid 1,162 bands, which is very tightly followed by Sweden's 1,128. Then come the UK, Finland and France, with 932, 803 and 751 bands, respectively. Our top 10 is rounded out by Italy, Canada, Norway and The Netherlands, with 665, 515, 463 and 371, respectively. Together, these ten countries represent 67% of the global metal world.

Coming back to continents, the second most metal prolific one is, you guessed it, America. With 4,554 bands, the vast majority of which are from the USA and Canada, it's a good 30% of the metal world that lives on this continent. Given the fact that America and Europe combined comprise 93.5% of every band on the website, you might have guessed that the remaining 6.5% are spread pretty evenly across the 3 remaining continents. That would be a terrible guess, as while Asia and Oceania respectively have 510 (3.3%) and 406 (2.7%) bands, Africa only has 60, making up for a microscopic 0.4% of the total amount of bands. Out of these 60, 15 are from South Africa, 14 from Egypt, 9 from Tunisia, 6 from Botswana and 5 from Algeria, making the overall metal population of the continent pretty concentrated in two big areas: Maghreb and southern Africa.

I have put these percentages into the wonderful pie chart that can be seen below for a better visual representation.




In addition, I have calculated the number of bands per million inhabitants in each of these continents, which resulted in the beautiful diagram that can be seen below.




Unsurprisingly, Europe still reigns supreme. But, by a twist of events, Oceania takes the second place due to its very low population for a continent (only 42 million people in there). Naturally, America follows, with Asia in 4th place and Africa sadly in very last.

Now wouldn't it be wonderful if someone had gone through the pain of calculating each country’s number of bands per million inhabitants, and then put it on a map with colors corresponding to that number? Oh wait, it seems I did!
The color code for each country is simple:
If a country has no bands, then it is grey.
0.001 bands/million inhabitants is purple, 0.01 is dark blue, 0.1 is blue, 0.5 light blue, 1 dark green, 2.5 light green, 5 yellow, 10 light orange, 25 dark orange, 50 light red and 100 or more is dark red.
(PS: for all our colorblind friends, or anyone interested in getting precise numbers, the raw stats for each country can be found at the end of the article.)

Let's start off with the map of Africa.




As stated earlier, two major scenes can be seen: the one in northern Africa, and the one in southern Africa (although there's a small one in eastern Africa), with the most flourishing one compared to that country's population being in Botswana. It's pretty sad to see that this map is so grey, but given enough time, I'm sure the whole of Africa will have a glorious and prosperous scene.

Let's now move on to Asia.

Now that's already a far more colorful map. Only a few countries here don't have bands, including Yemen, Oman, Uzbekistan and Myanmar, but surprisingly not North Korea, which has a death metal band supposedly coming from there (although these claims are yet to be proven). The most flourishing scenes seem to be in Japan, Israel, Singapore (which you cannot really see on the map) and, to my surprise, Lebanon, Armenia and Georgia. However, the vast majority of the continent lies in the "less than one band per million people" category, with Pakistan being dead last, not even reaching 0.01 band per million.




Next up on our journey is Oceania.

Although it might look like the continent is flourishing, with Australia and New Zealand being so high each, you have to remember that these are only two countries... out of 14, which leaves a grand total of 12 countries metalless. Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tuvalu..., none have metal bands featured on Metal Storm.




Now onto the big ones, here comes America.

Now there's something pretty obvious that can be seen here; there are once again two major scenes, much like with Africa. North America is dominated by northern countries such as Canada, the USA and Greenland (yes, Greenland has its own stats, something thought physically impossible by most map lovers), although Mexico is quite lacking; South America is mostly represented by more southern countries, specifically Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. The zone in between, ranging from Mexico to Paraguay, is pretty dry in comparison, with the odd exception of Costa Rica. Harder to spot is the severe lack of metal in the Caribbean islands, with only Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the US territory of Puerto Rico being featured.




Finally, the big boss itself: Europe.

What's striking on this map compared to the other ones is how high the quantity of metal bands per inhabitant is. With the exception of Albania, San Marino, Vatican City (for obvious reasons... although the pope did release a progressive rock album) and Kosovo, every country here is at least at one band per million citizens. Of course, these numbers are absurdly increased in small nations like Monaco or Andorra, and are quite decreased in the enormous Russian Federation. What you would expect from maps like these would be a pretty obvious separation between East and West, a remain of the Iron Curtain, but honestly that's nowhere to be found here. Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania stand up against Germany or France, and these last two are even beaten by Estonia and Latvia. There is still some kind of border much farther east, as Belarus, Ukraine, the aforementioned Russian Federation and Moldova fall a bit behind the rest of the competition, along with some of their friends in the Balkans, namely Bosnia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. The obvious champions are of course Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, with the last one standing atop of the competition with nearly 150 bands per million inhabitants, although Denmark's score is decreased by the non-inclusion of the Faroe Islands, as well as Greenland, which are here being counted on their own (the Faroes aren't visible on the map, but they actually outmatch Finland in terms of bands per inhabitant).






While my previous article focused on Metal Storm's favorite bands, genres and albums, what about its least favorites? Let's check out, using the list of the 100 albums (with at least 100 votes) that have worst ratings on a website-wide scale, which bands are Metal Storm users' least favorites... or at least most harshly voted.

Let's start off with genres; which feature the most amount of albums in the bottom 100?

At last place, with one album each, are a lot of random different genres. Post-hardcore, folk, gothic and symphonic metal. In addition, there are first wave black metal, industrial metal, and surprisingly glam metal, which is way lower than I expected. Finally, symphonic and glam rock reach this spot of the list, in addition to... dubstep??? We'll leave that one to Korn trying out new stuff.

Reaching two albums each are doom and gothic industrial metal. Our good old Varg's ambient albums, as well as Babymetal's J-pop (never thought I'd mention Burzum and Babymetal in the same sentence), join the already solid roster of awful albums.

Now, we're coming onto the big ones. Groove metal, death metal and deathcore are all members of the 3-album club, joined by the odd alternative and industrial rock albums of Marilyn Manson, which unsurprisingly happen to suck.

Finally onto the top 5, at 5th place come nu, black, groove thrash and melodeath. No outsider genre this time. I have to say, I'm quite surprised by all the genres in here; I thought nu and black would get a much higher score, both of them being renowned for their massive amounts of garbage, but the "100 votes" rule must have filtered a lot of them out.

Jumping straight to 6 albums in the top each, metalcore and progressive heavy metal take our 4th spot on the list, the second one being almost entirely carried by the legendary Queensrÿche, often considered to be one of the bands with the most inconsistent discography ever.

Third place is taken by none other than thrash, and thrash alone, with 7 albums in the list. Thrash or trash, they say; well a lot of bands seemingly chose to do both, like for example Bathory, with the less-than-brilliant Octagon.

Second place is given to a nice duo; with 9 albums each come power metal and hard rock. The former is carried by artists such as Sonata Arctica and Helloween, while the latter rather chose to follow in the atrocious footsteps of KISS and the more questionable Metallica and Megadeth records.

Finally, at first place, eliminating the concurrence by a landslide, are our two winners: heavy and alternative metal. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a round of applause for the steaming piles of garbage produced by Sepultura, Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne. It's no surprise that both these genres reached 21 albums each in the top 100: quite an impressive feat.

But these pieces of garbage don't just magically appear, they're of course made by bands, and what bands produced the biggest amount of terrible albums?

Well, of course, in last place come the semi-losers, the ones who only made one big mistake. Among them can be found Candlemass, Savatage, Slayer, Annihilator, 1349, Morbid Angel...

They're followed by the failures, bands who made two mistakes. These include Megadeth, Celtic Frost, Helloween, Deicide or Bring Me The Horizon.

Rather conveniently, it appears only 10 bands have 3 or more albums in the bottom 100, making for a perfect list.

First off is Pantera, who had a pretty rough start with their first 3 albums, often referred to as "glamtera". The road to success awaited for them in more extreme music, so kids, if there is one thing to remember off of this article, it's that extremism can lead to great things.

Then comes Marilyn Manson, single-handedly bringing alternative and industrial rock down to music hell with him, followed by In Flames and their more-than-controversial form of alternative metal. They're joined by Swedish legends Bathory and their three most questionable releases, scattered in a sea of wonderful music.

But the final bosses of the bands with three albums are, first off, KISS, who aren't higher only thanks to the 100-vote criteria, but who definitely could deserve first place, and finally, the man, the myth, the twitter legend, our good old Varg from Burzum, who very tightly escaped being higher as his last release doesn't have 100 votes and Dauði Baldrs (one of the worst albums I've ever listened to) is somehow rated 6.6, barely escaping the bottom 100.

Let's now move on to bands with four albums in the list, also known as our podium of shit.

First off are the questionable Korn, bringing dubstep on this website as it deserves. Then, we come across another band rather well known for its contrasting discography; of course, the Brazilian monsters of Sepultura and their legendary 11-year run from 1998 to 2009 had to land in there. They somehow got back on their feet though, with the pretty nice Quadra last year.

Finally, the one band to rule them all, leaders in terms of atrocious music, with the rather impressive difference of 7.2 points between their best and worst rated albums, with both the 5th best (at the time of writing this, but they frequently go up to third place) and THE very worst metal album ever made based on this website's ratings. You were all waiting for it, Metallica, of course land on the podium with their very impressive résumé.

But there is ONE band that stands above all else. ONE band that managed to be somehow worse than EVERY other band mentioned previously. One band that could be even higher up above everyone if some albums had more votes. Ladies, gentlemen, and those who don't give a fuck, with no less than 5 albums in the list, today's grand winners are... Queensrÿche! They also managed the impressive feat of being the only prog band in the whole list, congrats to them, they have my eternal respect.

That's gonna be it with this part of the article, let's move on to the next one.



To finish off, let's have a look at some random fun stats I collected here and there on the website.

First, let's look at band names. Out of the 8,000 or so bands featured on the "Simple list" page of the website, a tenth have their name starting with the letter S, another tenth with the letter A, 659 with the letter D, 598 with T and 543 with M. The least prominent letter is Q, with only 14 bands starting with it. 3 bands have their name start with a parenthesis, one has an exclamation point (the excellent !T.O.O.H.!), two have a dot and one starts with a colon. Only one band is featured using its Greek name (Ψυονξηε), while four use the Cyrillic alphabet. Once again, there's one lonely band that uses the Norwegian / Danish letter Ø , and it's the wonderful and very overlooked Ørkenkjøtt. For band names starting with numbers, there is one band using the number 0, eight are using the number 1, five use the 2, three use 3, another three use 4, while two use 5 and yet another three use 6. 7 is being employed by two bands and 9 by only one. The number 8, sadly, is not used as the first character of any band's name.

Finally, the odd one out is the symbol 〇, used by the band... 〇, who in an excess of originality decided to not name their band anything, as this symbol signifies emptiness, or null and void.

All of these stats can be found in once again a wonderful pie chart featured below.



The first band in alphabetical order is Aabsynthum (not counting spaces and punctuation), while the last one is rather unsurprisingly named Zyklon-B. Although it's not featured in that list, the band with the most vowels in its name is most likely öOoOoOoOoOo, who are to no one's surprise an avant-garde act. The word "the" is used no less than 426 times, while the words "blood", "death" and "and" are respectively used 60, 77 and 38 times each. The word "metal" is used 25 times, notably by a band called "Metalstorm".

And that's about it for today's article! I tried to improve upon the last one, adding maps and diagrams and stuff, let me know if that was a good addition!

Most of the stats can be found in this Google sheets document. On that note, thanks for staying up until the very end, have a good day, and may the force be with you.