Forget hoards of screaming teens brandishing One Direction merchandise and Taylor Swift fans breaking down in tears at the mention of her name, Spotify has found that it is not pop, but heavy metal fans who are the most loyal in music.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I wonder how many Taylor Swift fans are willing to burn her name into their skin – something that many heavy metal fans are often more than happy to oblige to. (Also T-Swizzle’s music isn’t on Spotify anymore.)
Spotify crunched the data, and found that metal fans are most likely to come back to the genre, followed by pop, folk, country and rock listeners. To generate these results, they identified the most central artists to the genre on a global and local level, before dividing the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners. For metal, these included core bands such as Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Judas Priest, Sepultura, Pantera, Cradle of Filth and Anthrax.
While metal fans clearly proved themselves globally, the study also showed how loyal countries are to home grown music. In Australia, Australian country fans are the most loyal, and Australian indie the third most loyal.
However, as the Spotify study is only measured by the core artists, it is also likely that genres scoring low on the study such as classical and blues diversify themselves more and listen to fringe artists more often.
Meanwhile heavy metal fans are happy right where they are; buying shirts, memorabilia and perhaps even a tattoo or two.