Spotify released a study last month showing which fan bases had the most loyal music fans. Worldwide, metalheads took an overwhelming majority as the most loyal of fan bases. This doesn’t mean metal is listened to the most. This study is saying people who listen to metal, pretty much only listen to metal and very loyally come back over and over again.
From Spotify: First identified the “core” artists that, according to The Echo Nest (a part of Spotify), are most central to each genre, starting with the big ones, on a global level. Then we did the same thing with local genres in various countries around the world. To create a measure of genre loyalty, we divided the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners. All of the charts are normalized against the genre with the loyalest fans. The first thing we noticed: Metal fans are the world’s loyalest listeners.
World Wide Chart.
The legitimacy of the study can be debated of course. Even Spotify says to take this with a grain of salt:
It’s worth remembering our methodology here: We looked for repeated listens to the core artists from each genre — the ones sitting right at the “center” of the genres, as it were. So one could also reasonably conclude that Jazz, EDM, Classical, and Blues listeners play more fringe artists from those genres.
US Chart
This chart had a very unexpected top 10. Native American music hits number three and at number 10 are Juggalos. Looks like ICP fans still haven’t gone away.
