Since my bout of rampant music stats geekery I’ve been getting a tad OCD over the last.fm listening habits of you metal heads. So much so that I wrote a PHP application that queries the API and pulls back lots of lovely data (I’ll unleash this on the public when I’ve had the chance to debug it and tidy it up a bit). I’ve been munging and caressing the data to see what wonders it yields, some of which I’m going to share with you over a few articles.

Previously I uncovered In Flames fans’ obsessive behaviour by observing the interaction between their playcount and listeners. This is interesting, but only tells us part of the story. Just because a band’s fans listen to lots of their tracks, doesn’t mean that they spend that much time listening to them. Napalm Death fans listening to their debut album Scum will consume 28 tracks in 33 minutes, whereas Earth fans would only squeeze 1 track off of Earth 2 in that time. So we need to look at another dimension: track length. To do this I calculate the average track length from the band’s 50 most listened to tracks then multiply that by the overall playcount. This is what we get:

	Band	Average Song Length	Total Minutes Listened
1	Metallica	5:56	769,675,558
2	Nine Inch Nails	4:26	436,266,693
3	Iron Maiden	5:43	396,650,321
4	Linkin Park	3:19	382,221,816
5	Tool	5:45	367,679,593

(Just in case you were wondering, that amounts to Metallica fans having collectively spent 1.5 centuries listening to their beloved band)

This doesn’t really change the picture that much. Metallica are still way out front, and the big boys still dominate. So let’s look at a slightly different stat – Average Time per Listener. We get this by multiplying the Plays per Listener with the Average Song Length. A pretty fuzzy calculation I know, but indicative none the less. Here’s what we get:

	Band	Average Listener time	Average Song Length	Plays per Listener
1	Opeth	9:35	7:26	77.41
2	Metallica	7:55	5:56	80.1
3	In Flames	7:38	3.50	119.55
4	Nightwish	6:39	5:01	79.35
5	Deathspell Omega	6:11	6:53	53.9

So here we see that Opeth fans spend quite a lot more time lost in the meanderings of Mr. Akerfeldt than any other band. In Flames, perhaps unsurprisingly, make a reappearance, and bringing up the rear, the real underdog, the dark lords of Orthodox Black Metal – Deathspell Omega.

Interestingly this does even the score somewhat with the critics list, as we now have Neurosis and Tool in the top 15, however, Black Sabbath suffer even greater humilation in this list as they drop down to number 49, just behind Lostprophets…ouch!

So, what does this tell us about the listening habits of the metal head? Well, I think it demonstrates that we’re and obsessive bunch, and we like what we like, and lots of it. Also, stats like this go some way to filtering out the noise of the casual listener and indicate where the real heart of the metal community lies.

Tags: Black Sabbath, Deathspell Omega, Geekery, In Flames, metallica, Nightwish, Opeth, Statistics

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under music stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.