These top 16 bands showed up on around 30% of the top ten list spots available. This level of dominance/concentrated popularity is roughly comparable to 2015 (where popular releases came from Ghost, Deafheaven, Iron Maiden, Tribulation, Mgla, and High on Fire). The top six bands showed up in 16% of the available spots, which was identical to how concentrated the most popular six bands were in 2015. For the four years Contaminated Tones has been collecting data, only one other band has dominated to the same degree as Power Trip's extremely popular release Nightmare Logic, and that was Behemoth's The Satanist in 2014 (which also showed up on 37.5% of available spots).
Here are the top 2017 releases in list format:
Power Trip - Nightmare Logic
Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper
Pallbearer - Heartless
Converge - The Dusk in Us
Enslaved - E
Immolation - Atonement
Code Orange - Forever
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
Spectral Voice - Eroded Corridors of Unbeing
Vulture - The Guillotine
Elder - Reflections of a Floating World
The Ruins of Beverast - Exuvia
Spectral Voice - Eroded Corridors of Unbeing
Vulture - The Guillotine
Elder - Reflections of a Floating World
The Ruins of Beverast - Exuvia
Cannibal Corpse - Red Before Black
Dying Fetus - Wrong One to Fuck With
Nokturnal Mortum - Verity
Godflesh - Post Self
The rate that hybrid/mixed genres showed up on lists was also similar to 2015, and this year follows the trend of the last four years where death metal and black metal were most popular after mixed genres. Other sub-genres again fell below bands that were not metal, which again was also similar to 2015. This year, around 11% of the non-metal releases were due to the popularity of Converge's The Dusk In Us. Doom metal's 19.5% rate was up from 2016 (11.3%) and 2015 (12.34%), and close to its 20% showing in 2014. For the third year in a row, black metal was the most dominant sub-genre.
For 2017, the most interesting result from the data was the relative absence of one of metal's most historically powerful labels: Century Media. In 2014 and 2015, Century Media was the second most dominant label for our data, and in 2016 the company was the 4th most dominant. In 2017 however, Century Media fell behind 18 other labels and tied with another 13 that had three spots in the data set. Nuclear Blast, in contrast, had around 10.25% of the spots available, which ties with the other most dominant label we have historically, which was also Nuclear Blast, but in 2014. Unlike in past years, no other label came close to Nuclear Blast's dominance on end of year lists. The next closest label was Southern Lord Recordings at 4.25%, which historically is closer to the performance of a 4th place label than the second most dominant. This is an important point to understand, because from the label perspective this was a very competitive year and had a lower Herfindahl-Hirschman index than 2014-2016 (indicating a more competitive market for critically acclaimed albums).
Methodology:
- Information on genres, whether a band was metal or not, and label data were pulled from the Metal Archives.
- No bands were excluded for not being metal. If a list included a band, we included it. Otherwise we may as well just be posting our own lists.
- Only the top 10 from any list were included. This was done to have some continuity across websites in terms of the weight of their data. We excluded sites with lists of less than 10; this way each website is on equal footing.
- Since different websites can have in-house tastes, websites with multiple lists were selected only once, and at random. This approach is different from a number of list-of-lists that showed up for this year. Doing otherwise turns the data into an aggregated poll, which is interesting but not what were looking at here.
- Other than looking at only the top 10, rankings were not considered or averaged. Rankings like these are what is known as ordinal data and typically cannot be averaged in a meaningful way.
- As a quick example, suppose List 1’s author thinks we had a weak year and would rate their #9 album at 73/100 and their #2 spot only 75/100. We can’t meaningfully compare this with List 2’s author rating their #9 album a 80/100 and their #2 100/100 because we have only rankings, and not ratings.
- No individual website’s list is reproduced here, neither is the entire data-set.
- Label data was gathered only for metal bands. It’s also important to keep in mind that not every label releases music every year.
- Label data shouldn't be viewed as relating to sales or a label's financial strength.
- The list of websites accessed is in the spoiler tag below.
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