Hey you… Guy looking for info on musicians per capita. Just stop a second and take a look at this. Its more interesting.

At the bottom of this page you’re going to find a spreadsheet. HOLD ON, WAIT DON’T GO! I know it’s a hideous mass of numbers, but hey, I colored it for you to help it make sense at least.

In simple terms, this table depicts the popularity of select metal subgenres fir a given country. The more green, the more popular and the redder the less popular.

More specifically, the genres selected here are “tags” for genres as opposed to genre as you may think it. In particular, the “Melodic” column is not just melodic death metal but also includes information from any band with the tag “melodic” in their genre field.

What the hell do the numbers mean?

First off, the “Total” column is the count if bands for a given country. Second, the “World” row shows the total number of bands followed by the percentage of that total for each given tag. The rest of the data shows the percentage difference of the individual country percentage of bands per genre to world percentage of bands per genre. Uh…what? Let’s just call it popularity.

The reason for this complicated number is that I can’t compare band counts per genre per country directly as they all have different total amounts per country. So, I normalize it as a percentage of the total. This percentage isn’t good enough either because it doesn’t give any idea for less popular genres as they are only 1% or so of the total for each country. That is when we look at the trend for the world and compare each country to that. This then shows how much of a specific genre is being created versus the average trend for the world. Or as an equation, (Bands per genre per country / total bands per country) / (total bands per genre / total number of bands) – 1. That’s popularity, right?

Just look at the data. It should make sense. Black metal is popular in Norway, Melodic is popular is Sweden, etc.

Also, I’m sorry the freeze function doesn’t work when embedding a gdoc. Maybe just copy the table and do it yourself. Thanks Google.