It’s a bit quiet around here innit? Unfortunately the pressures and distractions of the real world have rendered me with little time to maintain a decent blog. Running a blog is an order of magnitude harder and more time consuming than I ever dreamed it could be (Cosmo Lee put it far better than I ever could in his recent sign-off). It’s taken me a while to admit it to myself, but The Inevitable Nose is dead. It’s been a magical ride that’s taken me many places, introduced me to countless new people and taught me about writing, criticism, music, life – it literally shifted my worldview. I’ve come a long way, although I still don’t claim to be a good blogger/writer/critic, I’ve got a LOT to learn. I wish I had something more profound to say – something philosophical to sign-off with – but alas, the dimise of this blog was somewhat mundane, and thus so is this epistle. Perhaps in the future I’ll try my hand a blogging again, or whatever new-fangled innovation replaces it.

In the meantime, I’m not disappearing completely. I still love discovering new music and sharing it with other people, I just don’t have the time to write verbose articles on the subject. So, in a Doctor Who style regeneration, I’m going shortform, changing identity (the moniker ‘The Inevitable Nose’ was rather flippantly selected and is something I largely regret doing) and moving to Facebook (and maybe Twitter and some other places). Henceforth I shall be known as The Eschatologist, and I can be found here, please join me.

Metalheads do like to label stuff. The proliferation of metal subgenres is nothing sort of staggering. According to the Encyclopedia Metallum – The Discordance (basically a big old database of metal based information mined from the Encyclopedia Metallum – thanks to Cosmo at Invisible Oranges for publicizing this fascinating site):

There are almost 5500 “genres” attributed in [Encyclopedia Metallum]. 5000+ of these have fewer than 10 bands each. Almost 4000 of them are assigned to exactly 1 band. But this chaos of descriptors is actually constructed of a fairly small set of significant terms, rearranged in more or less every possible permutation and assembly.

When describing music it’s essential to have a lexicon of descriptive terms to work with. Conveying the essence of a song, sound or style in words is not easy, so saying “X sounds like Y” is an essential mechanism. When certain styles repeat often enough we create classifications for them, usually described as genres. Most types of music have a pretty discrete set of genres supported by a range of other related terms to help qualify and further refine one’s description. So if we take an Indie band, for example Elbow, we could describe them as “British prog inflected melancholic indie rock”. This not a genre in itself – most people, on hearing the music would simply call it “Indie”, or “Alternative” or maybe just “Rock”, those words are just one person’s description. However, in the metal world, Tombs are not simply described as “blackened hardcore”, to metal fans the are Blackened Hardcore. It’s not enough to say that At the Gates are Death Metal, they are Melodic Death Metal. Melodic Death Metal may be a sub-genre of Death Metal, but they are not the same thing. Most other genres don’t suffer from this genre proliferation. We have shoegaze indie (and shoegaze metal lately!) and Happy Hardcore is a sub-genre of dance, old-school Hip-hop, Alt-Country, Prog Rock, but it usually stops at a single sub-strata rather than branching endlessly as sometimes happens in metal. So we have:

Metal ->

Death ->

Progressive Death

Brutal Death

Gore Metal

Deathcore

Melodic Death

Death/Doom

Technical Death

Blackened Death

We see this to an extent in other genres, but it it somehow seldom manages to stick in the same way (eg. Big Beat, Nu-rave, and Acid Jazz were all pretty short lived. That said NWOAHM and Pirate Metal are unlikely to stand the test of time).

In metal, it gets more baffling still when you look at the lexical topography of the metal genre spectrum. At first glance it would appear to be broadly taxonomical – that is, there is a rigid hierarchy of genres and sub-genres, and any given band fits somewhere. We start at the top with Metal (itself a subset of Rock), and below we have the mainline sub-genres, eg. Thrash, Death, Black, Hardcore…hold on, isn’t Hardcore a sub-genre of Punk? But its influence on metal (not mention the influence of Punk in general on metal) is huge. So here we hit our first problem – Metal isn’t pure, it’s an amalgam, and strictly taxonomical structures will not easily apply. If we gloss over that we hit other issues. For example, Deathcore would probably considered a subgenre of Death Metal, whereas Mathcore is most definitely a subgenre of hardcore. So although the *cores are (somewhat dubiously) afforded a common heritage, they are taxonomically fragmented. Then we have the issue of genre bleedthrough – Alcest are both Black Metal and Shoegaze. Neurosis could variously be described as Post-hardcore, Sludge, Doom, Post-rock etc. etc. And what of Sludge? A sub-genre of Doom or Punk? And try even classifying Baroness, SYL, Cobalt, Om, Earth…

(Incidentally an attempt has been made to establish a taxonomy of musical genres in an attempt to make sense of the burgeoning availability of music in the digital era. Read about it here.)

The ‘structure’ is perhaps more ontological (in the more modern sense of the word), where genres are related to each other in a more semantic sense. So Symphonic Metal, a sub-genre of Power Metal, is like Symphonic Black Metal even though they’re from a pretty distinct lineage. Some genres are grouped geographically – Swedish Death metal was very much a style of its own, NWOBHM (and the various other perversions of that acronym that we’ve been subjected to since). NWOBHM could also be taken to denote a period in time and only bands from that period (late 70′s to early 80′s) could belong to this genre – bands practising this type of music these days would probably be described as Classic Metal. Death Metal derives (to a significant extent) from Thrash, but is not a subgenre of Thrash. Thrash in turn borrows from hardcore although it largely derives from NWOBHM and proto-BM.

Some genres are stylistically ridiculously broad – Folk Metal (which encompasses some pretty disparate regional influences), Post-Hardcore (this one pretty much defies any meaningful definition and probably doesn’t exist at all). On the other hand some descriptors and sub-strata are pretty definitive, and a genre of 1 (or very few) is a very real concept. The Black Metal fraternity are particularly proficient at this, being so pathologically tribal. So there’s really only a couple of Orthodox Black Metal bands, and post-BM and Depressive-BM are pretty sparse. I think this gives us a suggestion of what all this genre chaos is about – loyalty, belonging, pride.

The bewildering array of sub-genres is as constraining as it is helpful, and many bands balk at the being pigeon-holed, but still journalists, record labels, bands and fans alike create and perpetuate these labels. Metallers are often outsiders, and tend to cluster in cliques of similar minds. The different genres attract different types of metalheads, and the genre label acts like a badge, drawing people to it and each other – something more tangible to take pride in and remain loyal to. I also think metalheads are often shameless geeks – like stamp collectors they collect and group and organise, like train spotters they note sightings.

Interestingly, genre labels are often synonymous with feelings of quality. So labelling something Nu-Metal is generally derogatory, whereas calling something ‘Progressive’ is generally considered good (despite the link with the overtly indulgent and un-cool  70′s prog scene). These days the *cores are often seen as bad, mainly by the metal snoberatti and hardcore purists. Black Metal kvltists are notoriously defensive of their beloved genre to the extent of attempting to ‘unclassify’ bands that don’t suit their view of what the genre represents, despite clear lineage (Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Bogir). There’s actually a report in The Discordance that claims to quantify this (see it here).

Perhaps the most compelling reason for metal genre proliferation is simply the diversity of the metal genre. When both Steel Panther and Sunn O))) coexist under the metal banner which derives influence from Hip-hop, Folk, Classical, Dance and even Country some serious descriptors are needed just so we can get a feel for what stuff might suit our particular taste. The ‘metal’ genre itself comes with much baggage and preconceptions particularly with outsiders whom I find often have a narrow view of what that tag represents. Simply calling a band ‘metal’ does little convey what the bands represent (unless perhaps you’re talking about archetypes like Judas Priest or Iron Maiden) so a more specific definition would seem appropriate – shame they often mean nothing to anyone not pretty well acquainted with the genre!

It’s a fascinating subject, and you could probably write a whole book on the variations, nuances, idiocies and inconsistencies contained within the metal subgenre spectrum. At the end of the day, call it what you want – if it sounds good then stop talking about it and concentrate of listening to it!

…has this changed me permanently? What exactly is my taste in music? How will I know if the stuff that thought I liked was not just a product of my addiction? Only time will tell I guess…

I wrote those words the better part of a year ago referring to my taste crippling addiction to my last.fm playcounts and the various insalubrious statistics which one can derive from it. It turned out I wasn’t the only one. One commenter wrote:

You have opened my eyes, this has to stop. Today I’m removing my the AEP counter from my page. This can’t go on. Scrobbling should be about the fun!

Indeed. More recently I received an email from a fellow sufferer looking for guidance:

I recently read your article on your LastFM addiction (I’m very behind I know) and I HAVE THE EXACT SAME THING. How has your withdrawal gone? I’ve wanted to delete it several times, but I feel like losing all my Scrobbles would be wasted ‘work’ or something. Plus I’m just now getting into Porcupine Tree, and I’ve got this ridiculous idea that not being able to see how many Scrobbles I have of them will prevent me from gauging my ‘progress’ in getting into them. I would try and stop visiting the site and scrobbling, but I know I CAN’T DO THAT NOW because I’m hopelessly addicted. I also have the problem you had where I’m not even sure if I really like artists or if I’ve convinced myself I have to increase my versatility. Anyway, any tips? How did your attempt to break the addiction go?

I did break my last.fm addiction, for the most part. Here’s how.

After writing the article I struggled on for a few more weeks and nothing had really changed. Even if I wasn’t checking my last.fm stats (which I still felt compelled to do, at least once a week), always present was the knowledge that it was there, and everything I listened to was still out there for analysis and interrogation. Some more drastic action was needed. I toyed with the idea of deleting my account entirely, but it still seemed like an important document to me, so in the end I simply opted to cease scrobbling. Job done. I scrobbled nothing for at least 6 months.

Knowing that no-one but me would know what I was listening to I was slowly allowed to listen to music free of that volition. It felt really liberating, and what followed was a voyage of rediscovery. The feeling that I could listen to anything that I wanted was an intoxicating one – holding on to this feeling is what allowed me to finally kill my addiction. Eventually, what I discovered was that my music taste wasn’t as perverted as I had expected, just a little more directed – I was always listening to what I wanted to listen to, for the most part, but now it doesn’t feel like a guilty pleasure.

However, in the end, I really still valued the service of having a log of all my music listens – I’m both a music and stats geek (as you may have noticed) so the lure is inevitable. After some agonising, soul searching and mental preparation, I fired up a fresh last.fm account and started scrobbling again a couple of months ago, but this time with a resolve to use it as it was intended, to log mine and my family’s music listening in all its dread reality, warts and all. There’s no point in hiding from yourself, it will always catch up with you in the end.

Ironically, when you install the iTunes Scrobbler it scrobbles your entire history, which for me went back years, so my new account is pretty similar to my old one. However, I only check it occasionally. I checked my AEP once, but It’s not on my profile and it’s not something I pride myself on (there’s nothing that commendable about taste diversity after all, is there?).

Recently my son, 3 years old, learned to adore Neil Young’s Live Rust (don’t ask how he stumbled upon that album, I hardly ever listen to it!). He listens to it all the time, and each time it gets scrobbled (I intercepted a few but the vast majority are). It irks me a little, but I can live with it. I think that is a sign of recovery, for the most part.

In the end, my ‘addiction’ was probably a manifestation of some latent OCD tendencies, and these things should be tackled head on, which is what I eventually did. There was always a hint or irony in my original article, there are many worse an addiction to have after all, but I’m absolutely serious when I say that it had a real affect on my life, and I felt genuine elation to be rid of it. You’ll also see that I’ve learned to control last.fm and use the beguiling data in there for more constructive purposes.

Music isn’t and should NEVER feel like work, it is one of the ultimate escapes and releases. Music should be celebrated in volume and at volume, not measured out in rations.

So, am I reformed, rehabilitated? As much as I need to be and probably as much as I’ll ever be. Music, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and outside influences will always play a part in your music tastes and last.fm is but one of these. I can live with that.

Here’s my last.fm account if any of you want to join me on are bored/perverse enough to spy on my listening habits.

Related Articles

The last.fm straw – A Tale of Addiction

Lemmy - a skew loose?

So we’ve learned that some bands have pretty obsessive fans. It’s nice that they’re listening to a lot of Opeth’s music, but are they just getting gooey over one album or even a single track? Let me demonstrate what I mean at its most extreme – the one hit wonder. This is not a phenomenon that’s particularly prevalent in the metal genre, so we’ll look to the genre most susceptible: pop. When I think of one hit wonders, one track always seems to spring to mind: Deep Blue Something – Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s a nauseating ditty that seems to blight the airwaves still, even 17 years after its release. Let’s see what Deep Blue Something’s last.fm listener profile looks like shall we?

Breakfast at Tiffany's and some other tracks

Oh dear, a staggering 83% of Deep Blue Something’s overall listens were from that one track that you doubtlessly find occasionally looping round in your brain, eating away at your soul. In statistical speak this effect is broadly referred to as Skew or Skewness. According to Wikipedia “In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable.” Ummm, yes. Put more simply, and in the current context, if folks are listening to 1 or 2 songs from a bands catalogue lots, and hardly anything else, then that band’s playcount would be considered to be skewed. In last.fm circles, the calculation for this is often referred to as AEP (I won’t bore you with what it means, other than it’s a fairly arbitrary statistical calculation) which gives an indication of skew across a band’s top 50 tracks. The AEP is a value of between 0 and 5 that indicate skewness, where 5 is not skewed at all (all tracks listened to exactly that same amount of times) and 0 (or less) is very skewed. Thanks to that wretched track, Deep Blue Something’s AEP is -13 (yes minus 13), compared to, to pick another more successful pop act, Michael Jackson, whose AEP is a respectable 2.7.

So, how does my list of metal acts fare in the AEP stakes? Let’s have a look:

So here we see a different picture again. These are very high AEP’s, which indicates that the bands’ top 50 most listened to tracks are listened to a comparable amount of times. What this suggests about a band is that they’re not just a 1 trick pony – their fans love a wide variety of their tracks rather than listening to just a couple before moving on. Predictably, In Flames make a reappearance, Opeth remain strong, and we all knew that Devin Townsend fans were an obsessive bunch (this incidentally, doesn’t include all the numerous variations on Townsend’s solo band names, or SYL, who are #32 in this list). This is a respectable list – Neurosis, Tool, Cathedral, all at the top of their game and widely respected, and there’s a real mix of genres here. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a quality all round band, no filler. Albums bands, career artists.

This may all be true, but things get a lot more interesting, and confusing, if we consider the other end of my (far from exhaustive) list:

Yeah, a bunch of flash in the pan, one hit wonders – non-players. Oh wait…those would actually be some of the most revered and respected bands in the rock/metal arena! What went wrong? I’ll give you 5 reasons: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Crazy Train, Paranoid, Black Hole Sun and last, but by no means least, Ace of Spades. If you don’t know exactly what those 5 labels refer to, then you must have been living in a cave for the past 40 years. Now, for many of these bands, these tracks are the worst, but not the only, offender (Come as You Are is a close second for Nirvana for example), but each bands have significant skew thanks to these BIG hits in their back catalogue, something that few of our least skewed acts have. So we’re still missing a dimension here…

Let’s take Mötorhead, who are skewed into minus numbers by their ‘classic’ (quoted as Lemmy doesn’t reckon it’s their best track) Ace of Spades. Now, as we saw earlier, Breakfast at Tiffiny’s accounts for 83% of DBS’s overall listens, so what of Ace of Spades? Well, it clocks in at a modest 10% of Mötorhead overall listens. So where are all the other listens going? Well, remember that AEP is calculated across a band’s top 50 tracks, so the majority of listens of Mötorhead’s tracks must be happening outside of their top 50. Given Mötorhead’s rich and voluminous back catalogue this is hardly surprising.

So, there’s another calculation that will tell us which bands benefit from this sort of listener attention, it’s called the Long Tail and we’ll discuss this in the next article.

Related articles:

A long tail of a critical discrepancy

Numbers of the Beast #1: Love you long time

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted, largely because I went on holiday, and I’m still recovering from the mental fug that left me in, and a mild case of writer’s block. A few things have transpired since I posted here. So, time for a short retrospect.

Pavement, O2 Brixton, Wednesday 12th May 2010
Their entire career lo-fi indie legends Pavement had displayed a flagrant disregard of convention, either musically or genre imposed, focussing more on the deconstruction of musical art rather than its fulfilment. Their live show is a glorious, ramshackle celebration of chaos, irony and bare faced lunacy. That’s not to say that Pavement don’t take their art seriously, it’s just that they don’t think art needs always to be so serious. Their entire back catalogue is spanned almost at random in a show that covered classics and obscurities in equal measure. The highlights were rabble rousing Unfair, Steve Malkmus throwing a hissy fit and throwing down his malfunctioning guitar on the floor half way through Summer Babe, and 5000 people shouting ‘NO BIG HAIR!’ at the culmination of Cut Your Hair.

Pavement are more punk than many a punk or hardcore band around today. I think some of this loose, lo-fi aesthetic and ethos is missing from the punk and metal genres. Once upon a time it was “pick up a guitar, learn 3 chords, write a song”. These days in metal it’s more like “pick up a guitar, a shed load of effects and Pro-Tools, learn Dream Theatre’s Octavarium, note perfect, from beginning to end, spend 2 years writing a prog metal epic”. But the pursuit of art isn’t confined to endless noodling, expanding, refining. Pick up Napalm Death’s Scum, and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and learn a little about experimentation.

Cathedral, ULU London, Thursday 29th April 2010
Doom should be played loud. The bass emitted by a doom show should loosen your teeth in their sockets. Whether it was the lack of sound check (the bands collectively arrived late) or some stupid sound regulation is unclear, but one way or another this show was nowhere near loud enough. Because of this, Japanese serial killer obsessed doom merchants Church of Misery, a band I’m not particularly familiar with, failed to have an impact on me, so I spent their set outside catching up a long lost friend that I’d bumped into on the night.

Cathedral too suffered with the auditory depravation, but still managed to put on a spirited show. Playing various tracks from their lauded new album The Guessing Game mixed in with classics such as Hopkins (Witchfinder General) and Ride, in all other facets the show was everything a Cathedral show should be. Singer (and bone fide doom legend) Lee Dorian’s manic flailing makes for an entertaining spectacle, and the crowd departed with a collective smile on their faces. Good enough for me.

RIP Ronnie James Dio
There’s nothing that I can say about Dio that hasn’t been said a million times by now. There are few icons in the metal genre that can match his stature and influence. Dio’s gargantuan voice formed a vital part of the soundtrack of my formative years. It is Dio and not Ozzy that provides that voice for my favourite Black Sabbath song:

His legacy is a fitting enough tribute in itself, and should speak (howl, wail, scream) for itself. Rest in Peace Ronnie, you will be missed.

The Inevitable Nose is 1 year old
On the 31st of May 2010 it was a year since my first post on this blog (I urge you not to waste your time checking out my early posts, they are poorly written, inaccurate nonsense for the most part), which in the intervening year, has formed a vital part of my existence. Started as a mechanism to recommend music to my mates, it soon turned into a musical odyssey that would have a massive impact on my life. I’ve discovered musical forms that I never knew existed, learned that I know nowhere near as much about music as I thought I did, met people who have become good friends who I otherwise would not have met, rediscovered old friends, helped found a forum and fanzine and improved my writing skills massively. It’s sometimes hard to remain interesting, relevant and maintain quality, but writing this blog never feels like a chore, and thus far has propelled me to fascinating and inspiring places. To those who have tuned in over the past year, thanks for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

You gotta do it all yourself these days

It’s all about the music, isn’t it? No-one needs to make money to make music, but it certainly helps. Modern music begs to be created by and channeled through increasingly advanced technology, to be heard on multifarious shores. Music is global, dispersed and, increasingly, non-commoditised. Some money is necessary to facilitate this, but there’s less and less of the filthy stuff around. In 2009 global music related revenues slumped 7%, continuing a decline that began in the early naughties when the digital revolution took hold.

But it’s not as simple a picture of piracy induced decline as the record industry would like us to believe. What’s most important to understand is that digital theft is only partly to blame for these financial woes. Due to the ease on distribution of the new digital formats, and the ability to buy single tracks off of albums without buying the whole thing, sales have migrated away from lucrative CD sales (which supports a massive production and distribution infrastructure) to considerably less lucrative digital forms starving both the recording and distribution industries of cash. The way people consume music has changed forever, but the music industry was slow to catch on.

There has also taken place a devaluing of the music. Because of the ease of distribution of digital media, and no tangible way of stemming the free exchange of digital music files, a key economic law has been violated: the law of scarcity. Put simply, a ‘commodity’ that is desirable but abundant or freely available has a low (or non-existent) intrinsic value. Musicians and the industry alike would probably balk at this, but it’s an immutable law of economics that everyone’s going to have to get used to.

That said, the digital market is thriving in almost every territory, and the music based revenues in Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Sweden and the UK grew last year because of this. But it still remains harder than ever to make money out of music, and as a result record labels (key for providing funding for bands to produce and market their wares) are less able to take on new acts. This is leading to an anti-diversification of the music that’s being marketed to the masses and a preference for pushing legacy acts. This trend is likely partly responsible for the fact that digital sales, volumes of streamed tracks and even those of pirated tracks are all trending towards the popular end of the market. The ease and low cost of production and distribution of music mean that there are more acts than ever competing for listener attention. These three facts, among many others, mean that it’s tougher than ever for a marginal/unsigned/independent artist to get heard, let alone make money.

As a result bands are having to become marketing/promotion machines on top of all the other diversifying tasks they are having to take on in the absence of labels. Some see this as bad thing, others see it as bands being forced into taking control of their own destiny – this may come with much more work, and countless pitfalls and gotchas, but for those successful the immediate rewards are much higher. Unfortunately, only bands with a lot of nouse, real dedication and a lot of luck are likely to make this a reality, which leads us back to the labels – the market needs for them to start taking risks again, and quickly.

Instead, the big players have been trying to litigate and legislate their way out of their deepening hole. The former has yielded little success and cost a lot of money, the latter has had some success with legislation passed in both France and UK. The UK’s Digital Economy Act is controversial to say the least (it gives media companies the power to request that repeat offenders have their internet cut off) and was rushed through in a potentially unconstitutional fashion. This legislation is unlikely to work, not least because it won’t grow any teeth for at least 2 years, by which point Plan B will (God willing) have taken hold.

What’s Plan B? Well it’s already happening around you and the record industry is only mildly less worried about it than they were when this pesky digital revolution thingy started happening in the first place: streaming.

Industry backed Spotify currently dominates the European streaming market and is already becoming ubiquitous. The last software update saw them integrating with Facebook and including listener’s own MP3 library in playlists – a move which should give iTunes pause for concern. However, Spotify isn’t making anyone much money at the moment, least of all the artists, and there’s a palpable sense of “when will they shut it down” in the air. Until that is rival little cousin We7, whose revenue and royalty payout model yields better results, posted profits last quarter apparently proving that an advertising based streaming service can be profitable. The market is really hotting up, and with Apple recently squashing streaming service Lala, rumours are rife that they are preparing an iTunes based streaming service in an attempt to muscle in on the party.

These streaming services will need to become truly mobile before they are a viable alternative to MP3’s (Spotify already are for paid subscribers) and even with We7 turning a profit, it’s unlikely that they’ll be really embraced by the industry unless they can turn over a bit more cash, most likely via mandating paid subscription. One way or another, streaming would seem to represent the future of digital media, and once firmly established should render filesharing redundant.

This being the case, the situation we’re currently in, where making money out of selling music directly is nigh on impossible, will remain so for the foreseeable future and probably forever. That’s not to say that one can’t make money out of music. Live music is a big growth area at the moment, with many record labels looking to monetise their acts this way. However, this is driving ticket and bar prices up which could have the effect of squashing this market too.

An interesting side effect of digital streaming is that it’s actually widening the music listening audience. 60% of people never buy music, however, services like Spotify are engaging these people into actively consuming music and converting them into potential revenue targets – they may not want to buy music, but they may well pay to see it, or simply swallow some advertising for the privilege. Understanding, expanding and exploiting this ‘new’ audience will be key to the evolution of the music industry.

So where does all this leave the music industry? Well there’s a bunch of people that don’t make music who probably will have to find careers in different industries, but the people who do make the music are likely to carry on doing so, regardless of the economic welfare of the music industry. The economic battle will be fought by suits who will utter the word ‘licensing’ a lot while worrying about the logistics of an increasingly complex royalty system. The music is thriving, even if it’s not as good at generating dosh as it was before, and thanks largely to the advent of digital distribution, there’s a larger audience than ever before. The music exists without the industry, and that’s what matters.

last.fm's top metal artists

In this digital age of seemingly infinite choice of music that’s easy to access and at low cost (or free) it would easy to assume that the music listening masses would broaden their horizons a little. The Long Tail economy surely applies to music as much if not more than any other popular media. Not so according to various sales and download figures which suggest that in the current market, music sales are showing a higher propensity to the more popular tracks/artists than they did 5 years ago. There are various possible reasons for this (the paradox of choice, pack mentality, an explosion in poor taste) and it would be easy to dismiss this as this as mere statistics, but with recording artists struggling to cover costs and labels slashing rosters the harsh reality is only too obvious for some. What’s even more depressing is that there’s evidence in the movie and book worlds higher selling items often get better reviews, even when they suck. This is a known phenomenon:

In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

Could this be the same for music and more specifically metal? My apparent snobbishness leads me to automatically assume that it doesn’t. Metal is a hugely diverse genre, and metal fans, despite being somewhat cliquey, are a diverse and contrary bunch who positively revel in the lonely outposts of the long tail. But is this really the case? I decided to do a little research on the matter. This lead me on a bit of an odyssey. I’m a closet stats junkie, and I’m easily distracted by trivia, so this is more of a journey than a destination, but I thought I’d share what I found anyway.

So firstly, do metallers show a propensity to rate popular music more highly? I headed off the social review site rateyourmusic.com and pulled the charts for the highest rated metal album of all time.

1. Black Sabbath – Paranoid
2. Metallica – Master of Puppets
3. Black Sabbath – Master of Reality
4. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
5. Metallica – Ride the Lightning
6. Megadeth – Rust in Peace
7. Kyuss – Welcome to Sky Valley
8. Tool – Ænima
9. Slayer – Reign in Blood
10. Death – Symbolic
11. Opeth – Still Life
12. Opeth – Blackwater Park
13. Tool – Lateralus
14. Iron Maiden – Powerslave
15. Judas Priest – Painkiller

(full chart here)

Now, I’m not going to get into the relative merits or shortcomings of this list, I don’t really agree with it, however it seems reasonable and everything there certainly warrants a mention in the context of the best ever metal albums – there are no real stinkers here. The caveat here is that folks who write reviews on this site will tend to be self styled ‘critics’ rather than the casual listeners.

So, how does that compare to what people actually listen to. I pulled a (somewhat patchy) chart of overall listens of metal bands from last.fm.

Well, that’s a bit of a difference! Only 4 of the critics’ choice bands appear in the top 20 most listened. This is far from scientific, but it would seem that (Metallica excepted) metallers have a somewhat different perspective on what they think is of ‘quality’ and what they actually listen to. Clear critical favourites and genre instigators Black Sabbath are right down the rankings with 32,298,137 listens, lower even than perennial noughties favourites Opeth with 35,744,109 listens. And what’s with Korn in the top 15, I really didn’t think anyone seriously listened to them any more. And Nightwish? Really? The European influence I guess.

There’s quite a few caveats around this list, for example last.fm attract a certain demographic that’s perhaps not universally representative, plus song length will play a part (you can listen to 4 AC/DC songs in the time it takes to listen to 1 of Opeth’s), and this is last.fm’s lifetime list, so more established bands are more likely to appear, but it’s still indicative.

Anyway, I couldn’t make last.fm give me any data on overall lifetime listening stats for the metal genre, so calculating the long tail was impossible, and by now I was being distracted by the list I had compiled, and its various curiosities. For example, why the hell are In Flames so high? I realise they’re a pretty influential band, but they’re above Iron Maiden for gawd’s sake! The answer to this conundrum is in the listener figures. If you divide the total listens per band by the listeners you get a rough indication of listens per user. Order list by this value and you get a somewhat different picture.

As you can see, certain bands have more modest numbers of ‘fans’ with a propensity to listen to their music a hell of a lot. In Flames fans seem particularly enthusiastic about the band’s music. You’ll notice also that the list is considerably less ‘commercial’ with the likes of AC/DC, Slipknot and System of a Down disappearing from the top 10. This is explained when you look at the track play volume profiles of In Flames vs AC/DC:

In Flames

AC/DC

The slope on the AC/DC is much more pronounced. Essentially, many more people are listening to a much smaller selection of AC/DC tracks, probably hitting Back in Black in their collection every so often, amongst Lady GaGa or U2. In Flames fans listen to a much greater selection of tracks, and probably favour albums over single tracks, thus driving the overall play count per listener up.

What’s also curious is that Black Sabbath, who dominate the critics album list, have a somewhat low plays per listener count of 27. Coming into this with no knowledge of the Sabbath you may assume, on viewing the critics’ list, that  they are an albums band, which is true to an extent, however, Sabbath’s profile is insanely skewed towards Paranoid and Iron Man which suggests that they attract a lot of casual listeners:

Anyway, I could noodle about with figures and stats all day, but where is this getting us? Well, we could surmise that the critics and fans aren’t really in agreement when it comes to voting with their feet. This is also evident in the public arena – Terrorizer Magazine’s albums of 2009 put Converge and Cobalt at the top and Behemoth somewhere in the 30′s, whereas the fan survey put Behemoth at the top of almost every category. On the other hand, Metalsucks famously triggered a minor insurgency when their poll of the top 21 albums of the 21st century – voted for by critics, bands and industry types – was mauled by their more discerning readership.

I’m really keen to understand whether metal is a long tail genre in comparison to, for example, Pop which I assume is by definition a populist genre, but decent stats are hard to come by. It’s a murky picture and one that dominated by dodgy data, countless caveats, spurious statistics, cliques and fraternities, but my quest will continue, to understand what makes the metal world tick.

The good

Spring 2010

What a marvelous season Spring 2010 promises to be for live music. I’ll personally be attending gigs from 3 bona fide legends: Opeth’s 20th anniversary show where they will be playing Blackwater Park in its entirety in the regal surrounds on the Royal Albert Hall. The mighty Cathedral are playing in a broom cupboard at the University of London in late April supported by Japanese doom icons Church of Misery. Finally one of the greatest alternative bands of all time, Pavement, are playing to most of the population of London on their marathon 4 night stint at Brixton Academy in May. I may be deaf, but at least I’ll be happy.

Warrior Soul

I’ve recently rediscovered Warrior Soul. Quite why this band slipped largely off my radar for the best part of 15 years I’ve no idea. Some sort of acid-psych-metal-punk hybrid, Warrior Soul made a big splash in the early 90′s but never managed to capitalise on the early success and widespread critical acclaim. It’s a shame, because listening back on their classic albums Last Decade Dead Century, Drugs, God and the New Republic and Space Age Playboys, they the still sound fresh and their snarling polemic is more relevant today than ever. They released new material last year that’s well worth checking out. You can get their albums on Ebay for real cheap, go treat yourself!

Profound Lore

I didn’t realise that I was a big fan of Canadian label Profound Lore until I realised that many of my favourite releases of the past year were from bands on that label: Cobalt, Krallice, Ludicra, Worm Ouroboros, Portal (well, favourite is a strong word here, they are certainly one of the most interesting acts I’ve heard recently). Unlike many labels that claim to foster creativity, but merely churn through generic sub-genre acts, Profound Lore are really tinkering on the blurry edges of the metal genre. Try listening to Worm Ouroboros and Portal in the same sitting and you’re likely to need a period of recovery in you local asylum.

The Bad

Varg Vikernes

No friends

Varg Vikernes had a unique opportunity on leaving prison. He had gained near legendary status among the Black Metal kvlt and kudos disproportionate to any artistic merit or talent displayed in his early work. Having released some shoddy synth music under the Burzum moniker while in the locker, his first album proper after Filosofem was his chance to dispel the haters and reclaim his throne as the dark Pope of misanthropy. Gloss over those overt racist views, keep a low public profile (as is de rigeur in BM cirlces) and record the forward thinking, but backwards glancing record of his career – that’s what was needed; the ever conservative BM community would have hoisted the bugger on their shoulders for a victory lap of Hades.

Prison was never really a place to broaden your horizons and hone your media skills. Vikernes came out of prison all guns a blazin’ like the new sheriff in town. On release of his anticipated new album Belus, amidst a mini media storm related to some overtly racist comments, Varg whored himself out to any metal publication that would interview him and proceeded to contradict and undermine himself with every sentence. He claims to hate the media for vilifying him, despite the fact that he’s a convicted murdered. He claims to not care what people think of what he says, so why say anything at all? Apparently whoring yourself out to the media is furthering an agenda of apathy towards them and their readers. He says we’re all stuck in a ‘politically correct sewer’, and thus have a narrow or directed worldview, then aligns himself with NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal – basically a bunch pubescent, redneck, corpse paint wearing Neanderthals looking to irritate their parents) – find me a more narrow worldview than that!

The simple fact is Varg did some very ill-considered and bad stuff as a stupid, naive teenager and paid the price. He’s now a bitter old racist hick who lost half of his life to an adolescent mistake, and has a chip the size of a burning church on his shoulder about it. Now he’s trying to dress his self loathing up in a veil of mystique and black metal misanthropic posturing.

Top work Varg. With your shallow polemic and sensationalist, Daily Mail baiting, cover story grabbing antics you’ve managed to utterly fail to capitalise on your ‘legendary’ status and lost all credibility in the process. You’ve recorded a dated and mediocre album and the black metal fraternity has already disowned you. Bravo Varg! (Perhaps this should have gone in the ‘good’ section!)

Is Doom becoming popular?

Liz Buckingham - poster girl for the Doom scene?

It couldn’t happen could it? We’ve been discussing this at length over at Thee Big Black. Suspicion started when Electric Wizard played to an unprecedented Scala crowd last year, then Sunn O)))’s huge Koko gig attended by those of good hair. Since, there have been increasing numbers of sightings of unshaven, poorly coiffured, trucker capped stoner types lurking around the streets of Britain seemingly starting to outnumber the moping packs of pierced Emos. Well, the last thing any self respecting Doom head wants is for a bunch of Jonny come lately’s trampling their arid, barren lawn. Then there was this…on please god nooooo!

…and the Ugly

It may not be very metal to admit this, but I’ll pretend to be kvlt and not give a f*ck what you think – I go running several times a week. It’s a pastime that I actually quite enjoy. I do it as much for getting rid of anger and aggression as the calories I accrue from regular consumption of booze and lard, and for this reason heavy music is the perfect accompaniment to this solitary activity.

However, not any old heavy music will do for a good power jog. I listen to music while running for several reasons:

1. Distraction – it really helps me to forget about any pain or exhaustion and get into the meditative state
2. Noise – I find hearing my own breathing is a real reminder of the energy I’m expending which makes it feel more taxing
3. Passing the time – simply, it makes the time pass more quickly
4. Keeping rhythm and pace – it’s this I want to discuss in more detail

The music best suited for running needs to be a fairly constant, driving mid-tempo. This is because I tend to subconsciously match my pace to the beat of the music. Too slow and the effect is lost, and I generally find slows me down overall. Too fast and I risk tiring myself out too quickly, or simply not being able to match the pace. So Cathedral’s Forest Equilibrium is out, as is Slayer’s Angel of Death. Also, a very changeable tempo renders the overall effect useless. Subtle tempo shifts across longer tracks, or between tracks are very welcome (especially if you’re doing aerobic/anaerobic alternation), but spazzy stuff like Grindcore or the constant ebb and flow of Opeth is simply not up to the job, no matter how much I like it at any other time.

The other attribute I find helps immeasurably is aggression. Yes I could stick on a dance mix and achieve roughly the same effect with regards to tempo, but nothing beats balls to the wall angst to get you pounding the pavement.

What I’ve discovered is punk/hardcore is great for running to, as well as standard old school heavy metal and some hard/classic rock. Avoid anything drone or extremely down tempo and most doom, stoner, death, black.

Here’s my playlist for a 25 – 30 minute power jog. I start off slightly down tempo to get warmed up, and slowly wind up – this is how I like to structure my run (I find it easier to push myself at the end when the endorphins are flowing). The idea is to match your footfall to the tempo of the track.

The moderate start

High on Fire – Fury Whip

Ghost of a Thousand – Bright Lights

The mid-paced midsection

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Milk Lizard

Refused – Summerholidays vs Punk Routine

The sprint to the finish

Carcass – Heartwork

Black Sabbath – Neon Knights

(Disclaimer: I’m neither a fitness expert nor a personal trainer. I accept no responsibility for any damage you may do to yourself while using this playlist during recreational exercise. If you’re not an experienced runner, you should probably try and find other tracks of a similar tempo to tracks 1 and 2)

If anyone else has any recommendations of songs to run to then please let me know!

For better or for worse, here’s my attempt at a top 10 albums of 2009 (in no particular order).

• Alice in Chains – Black Gives Way to Blue
• Mastodon – Crack in the Skye
• The Devil’s Blood – The Time of No Time Evermore
• Photonic – Recorded Contact
• Griftegard – Solemn.Sacred.Severe
• The Devin Townsend Project – Addicted
• The Devin Townsend Project – Ki
• Baroness – Blue Record
• Cloudkicker – The Map is Not Territory/Portmanteau
• Lamb of God – Wrath

In truth, given that this list is restricted to albums recorded/released in AD 2009, it’s still a work in progress. For example, I recently purchased Napalm Death – Time Waits for No Slave and Krallice – Dimensional Bleedthrough. Both are already tantalizing my eardrums, but I believe that any album needs 2 weeks and 10+ listens before they can conscionably be considered for such a list.

Since I restricted myself to 10 albums (a convention that I’m obviously not revolutionary enough to buck), which is clearly not enough, here are some notable omissions:

• Revocation – Existence is Futile
• Om – God is Good
• Shrinebuilder – Shrinebuilder
• TrippyWicked – Movin On
• Necro Deathmort – This Beat Is Necrotronic
• No Made Sense – The Epillanic Chorigi

Compiling this list was neither easy nor enjoyable. Like most music addicts the experience of music is a continuum of discoveries, rediscoveries, epiphanies and disenchantments. No arbitrary period can constrain the cycle of subjective musical experience. As such a list like this is never satisfying as it so poorly represents the music that I have loved this year – most of which wasn’t recorded this year. For me this is a more acute counterpoint this year than in any year I can remember. Since beginning this blog in earnest over the summer it has taken me on such a paradigm-shifting voyage of musical (and personal) discovery that asking ‘what was the best stuff released this year?’ seems somewhat beside the point. In an effort to redress the balance, here some other bands (both familar and new) that I have loved this year: Earth (particularly The Bees Made Honey… and Hibernaculum), Electric Wizard, Valient Thorr, Opeth (as ever), The Pax Cecilia, Torche, Pavement, GBV, Extreme, MC Rut, *shels, Boskk, Sunn O))), Pelican, Eagle Twin, Deathspell Omega, <code>, Dycian Maze, Thin White Rope, Emperor, Sleep, Swervedriver, Jesu, Nadja, (lots and lots of) Neil Young, Virus, Pentagram, Monster Magnet, Cymbiotic, Stone Circle, The Drones, High on Fire, etc. fucking etc.

There’s so much more out there to discover, many back catalogue albums to hear from bands I discovered this year, new bands on the scene, anticipated releases from established heroes (expect more surprise and more disappointment), that regardless of what actually comes out next year, it promises to be another vintage year for music in my world. Please do join me as my voyage continues.