The three worlds of heavy metal: Inequality and the political economy of metal music

Heavy metal music production is organized globally into three distinct ‘worlds of heavy metal’. These ‘worlds’ are groups of countries that share similar characteristics associated with higher or lower extents of metal music production, corroborating existing evidence that certain socio-economic and political conditions are conducive to greater or lesser metal output. This article details the results of a secondary quantitative analysis through which these worlds were derived. In doing so, it offers several contributions to the quantitative study of heavy metal in particular, and to theory linking structural variables to cultural output in general. First, given existing findings showing that heavy metal music thrives in wealthy, politically open, secular countries, it clarifies the causal mechanisms linking these variables to metal music output. In doing so, it argues inequality plays a key role in determining the extent of metal production, drawing on the sociologies of class and inequality. Second, in order to further examine the causal complexities that may exist within current quantitative models of metal music production, it applies hierarchical cluster analysis to a secondary set of country-level data to produce a global typology of countries. The typology consists of three distinct clusters of countries, which are used to sharpen our theories of how heavy metal music production is associated with national extents of inequality, income, democracy, secularism and male demography. Finally, this article clarifies the empirical characteristics of these distinct worlds by mapping and explaining the membership of each world and interpreting them in the context of existing theory.