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2020 ALBUM STATS!

I know it’s a good week into 2021 now, but I had too much fun on Excel to not post these STATS!

2020 was a wild year for everyone, and I had plenty of life changes going on amidst the pandemic, the economic collapse, the social unrest to make it an even crazier year. Despite being busier than ever, 2020 (potentially due to shelter in in place) ended up being my most prolific year ever, reviewing 301 METAL ALBUMS that came out just this past year.

And that’s not counting the 10 non-metal albums I also reviewed, the albums from 2019 that I had missed that I went back to shout out, or the other 55 non-metal albums I enjoyed and various metal albums I heard but didn’t get around to reviewing. It felt apt to put a few graphs together, which are below.

The resolution is high enough on my end, so I think they should be nice and discernible. But I graphed the genres I listened to and the ratings I gave.

I’ll make sure to explain the process well enough to make the numbers make sense.

First up are these genre tables which should be viewable. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but I did also account for albums that extended into multiple genres. In the “Subgenres & Blended Genres” graph are genres like blackened death metal, ambient black metal, deathgrind, etc. Each of those I factored in to parent genres proportionally (i.e., 1 blackened death metal = 0.5 death metal & 0.5 black metal). Its not perfect, given that those proportions aren’t the same for every blackened death metal album, but it worked well enough. Naturally this got pretty tricky with albums that combined several genres or just ran the gamut of genres like Greg Puciato’s solo album. So I went through ALL 301 ALBUMS THAT I REVIEWED, and added up their proportional genre components. It was messy and I did end up with a lot of decimals, so I smoothed it out a bit by doing some rounding that I don’t think affected the data all too significantly, which is why there are all whole numbers of albums per each genre.

The results really weren’t too surprising; death metal and black metal at the top, with a good focus on progressive metal, metalcore, doom, sludge, and thrash. If anything, it shows me where I can turn some more of my my focus: folk metal, power metal, industrial metal, etc.

In a world where I had time, I might see about doing separate charts to see where I rated albums of a certain genre, but I don’t have that time and I think this overall rating histogram is pretty good on its own.

The right skew was not surprising, with most of the albums I reviewed being positively so. 7 was the mode, with 8 being pretty close. Naturally, I wasn’t looking for shit music, but if I was, maybe this graph would shape up a little more normally. Even so, the right skew is probably also indicative of just how much I naturally gravitate to and enjoy metal music as a whole.

Well, cheers to 2020, good riddance to all of it except for the music, and here’s to 2021, which will come with some changes that I’ll make a different post about.