MS Top 100 Bands By Weighted Average Album/EP Rating
MS Top 100 Bands By Weighted Average Album/EP Rating
A list of the top-rated bands using the average of their MS album ratings, for those with 3 or more. It started as one for my favourites and then just spiralled into chaos.
Why 3? An arbitrary number, to be honest. Old fashioned ideas about being established? Bias towards Dissection? Both are likely. Interestingly, the data eventually showed that a band's third album would usually be their highest rated.
Dataset:
340 bands • 2906 albums • 400 EPs
Sorting rules:
Where ratings are exactly the same, they are ordered by total albums.
Where albums are also the same, they are ordered by range.
Top 100 facts:
644 - Total albums
165 - Total EPs
95 - Different genre tags
21 - Different countries
26 - Biggest total discography: Katatonia
17 - Most albums: Iron Maiden
11 - Most EPs: Katatonia
8.37 - Album 3 has the highest average rating
6 - Albums per band on average
2.82 - Biggest discography range: Iron Maiden
0.56 - Biggest beneficiaries of a weighted average compared with flat average: Edge Of Sanity
0.44 - Lowest discography range with 5+ albums: Mourning Beloveth
0.03 - Lowest overall discography range: Mar De Grises
Top 5 countries:
🇺🇸 United States - 20
🇸🇪 Sweden - 18
🇫🇮 Finland - 13
🇬🇧 United Kingdom - 10
🇩🇪 Germany - 9
Top 5 genre tags:
Progressive Metal - 23
Melodic Death Metal - 14
Death Metal - 13
Black Metal - 11
Progressive Rock - 10
Thanks to F3ynman, Roman Doez, Vellichor, Redel and the mighty Ch'ti for their help and suggestions.
Last update: 21/12/2025 - added EPs, changed entry criteria to 3 total releases and added weighting suggested by LeKiwi and The Melting Snow.
Why 3? An arbitrary number, to be honest. Old fashioned ideas about being established? Bias towards Dissection? Both are likely. Interestingly, the data eventually showed that a band's third album would usually be their highest rated.
Dataset:
340 bands • 2906 albums • 400 EPs
Sorting rules:
Where ratings are exactly the same, they are ordered by total albums.
Where albums are also the same, they are ordered by range.
Top 100 facts:
644 - Total albums
165 - Total EPs
95 - Different genre tags
21 - Different countries
26 - Biggest total discography: Katatonia
17 - Most albums: Iron Maiden
11 - Most EPs: Katatonia
8.37 - Album 3 has the highest average rating
6 - Albums per band on average
2.82 - Biggest discography range: Iron Maiden
0.56 - Biggest beneficiaries of a weighted average compared with flat average: Edge Of Sanity
0.44 - Lowest discography range with 5+ albums: Mourning Beloveth
0.03 - Lowest overall discography range: Mar De Grises
Top 5 countries:
🇺🇸 United States - 20
🇸🇪 Sweden - 18
🇫🇮 Finland - 13
🇬🇧 United Kingdom - 10
🇩🇪 Germany - 9
Top 5 genre tags:
Progressive Metal - 23
Melodic Death Metal - 14
Death Metal - 13
Black Metal - 11
Progressive Rock - 10
Thanks to F3ynman, Roman Doez, Vellichor, Redel and the mighty Ch'ti for their help and suggestions.
Last update: 21/12/2025 - added EPs, changed entry criteria to 3 total releases and added weighting suggested by LeKiwi and The Melting Snow.
12.
Opeth
8.51 • 🇸🇪 • 14 albums • 2 EPs • Extreme Progressive Metal, Progressive Metal, Progressive Rock
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41.
Shylmagoghnar
8.34 • 🇳🇱 • 3 albums • Atmospheric Black Metal, Progressive Black Metal, Melodic Death Metal
|
64.
Oceansize
8.27 • 🇬🇧 • 4 albums • 5 EPs • Alternative Rock, Progressive Rock, Space Rock, Post-Metal
|
71.
Sentenced
8.25 • 🇫🇮 • 8 albums • 2 EPs • Death Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Suomi Metal, Depressive Heavy Metal
|
92.
Katatonia
8.22 • 🇸🇪 • 15 albums • 11 EPs • Blackened Doom Metal, Death Doom Metal, Alternative Rock, Gothic Doom Metal
|
Disclaimer: All top lists are unofficial and do not represent the point of view of the MS Staff.
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Posts: 1258
Forest Of Shadows definitely make the cut
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Karnivool Maudlin Of The Well Mithotyn Worship Sybreed The Prophecy Arena Beardfish I don't know what is the minimum number Of ratings required for this list but you can check: Grai Tharaphita Poem Extradasphere
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Posts: 171 |
Posts: 171 Written by Ch'ti on 30.06.2025 at 20:03 Thanks mate, added.  There is no minimum vote threshold - this is a weakness of the data, but it also means exposure for those bands and I'm sure the ratings will balance out with more votes. 
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Posts: 96
I love the work you did here. Did you run the analysis in Excel or more advanced data tools?
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Posts: 171 Written by cynicoren on 05.07.2025 at 07:01 Cheers mate. I just used Excel formulae and copied the data across. I'll probably produce something with Power BI at the end of the year.
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Posts: 794
Interesting idea. I am curious about how the average is calculated. Does it take into account the number of votes? Or just the rating? As in, If a band has an album with a rating of 9 after 100 votes, and an album rated 1 after 10 votes, is the average of 2 albums: 1. (9+1)/2 = 5 2. ( (9x100) + (1x10) )/110 = 8.27?
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Posts: 171 Written by The Melting Snow on 15.07.2025 at 21:50 Just flat averages for now without taking into account the number of votes. It is certainly a weakness of the list, but part of the justification for this was to give exposure to bands with fewer votes and let the list evolve over time. I have been contemplating doing a weighted average version of it, though. I am not a statistician or similar by training/education, so I've been researching the best way to do this i.e. Bayesian. Your equation looks ideal, would you say that's the best way to do it?
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Posts: 4326 Written by Languedocian on 15.07.2025 at 22:35 WeightedAvg=(Album1Rating*Album1Votes+ Album2Rating*Album2Votes+… AlbumNRating*AlbumNVotes)/TotalVotesBand As an example:
(10*10+9*50+8*40)/100=8.7 Something like that would be easier so that you don’t have to get the number of votes by rating.
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Posts: 4326
Also cool list! How did you get the data? Manual through scraping? I’d love to do something similar
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Posts: 171 Written by LeKiwi on 16.07.2025 at 01:08 Thanks for this mate, it's really appreciated. When you say "so that you don’t have to get the number of votes by rating" - what do you mean? Aye, just a manual scraping - took a while but I like my spreadsheets! I had the idea of maybe doing a series of them, by weighted average/median/range or whatever, and then ranking each of the totals in a meta list that attributed 100 points, 99, 98, etc. to each place in the previous lists. Any advice you have, or if you fancied doing one, would be great.
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Posts: 4326 Written by Languedocian on 16.07.2025 at 14:55 No problem! I mean an alternative way would be getting the number of 10s, 9s, 8s... for all albums and then divide it by the total votes. Something like this: WeightedAverage=(10*CountOfRating10+9*CountOfRating9...1*CountOfRating1)/TotalVotes Essentially what The Melting Snow mentioned. It works, just has a few extra steps. The other way is a bit easier because I think the discog page of each band displays the rating and the number of votes. Written by Languedocian on 16.07.2025 at 14:55 To be honest, I'm not that well-versed in that area of computing hah. I did some scraping through VBA before at work, but it was always super rough...just enough to get by. I do have some ideas, but first I'd like to check what the rules are for scraping for valid use cases like this with the staff. corrupt, what do you think about scraping for this case in an automated way?
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Posts: 171 |
Posts: 171
Have moved to the weighted system suggested by LeKiwi and The Melting Snow, and also included EPs in the data.
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Posts: 794 |
Posts: 794
Interesting. i was curious about how the bands would stack up when we take into account number of votes. thanks for the update!
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