When I was an intern, I made lots of copies. Really, that’s pretty much all I remember about my internship. Also, when I interned at WMMR’s metal show (R.I.P. Rockers!), I once had the honor of making coffee for King Diamond. At any rate, an intern at music service Last.fm did a project during his internship where he did gender plot graphs of who was listening to what at Last.fm according to their age and gender. And guess what dudes in their 20s are listening to? Plenty of metal, apparently. Artists like Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer are up there, but so are acts that wouldn’t be as obvious, such as Periphery, Soilwork, and High On Fire. As the typical male listener gets older, there’s still some metal-leaning artists in there, most notably Kings X.
The intern also did one for genres of music. While almost an equal amount of males and females listen to Metal, it’s unsurprising that the listenership gets more male as the subgenres (math metal, death metal, mathcore) get more specific. And Joe Satriani gets his own category! As everyone across the board gets older, metal drops off, as do pretty much any recognizable artists, as does the frequency of listenership. It should be noted that this is a British study, which might account for something or other, but I’m not quite sure what.
