New Data Study Shows Who Should’ve Won This Year’s Bulls*** Metal Grammy

This weekend, we reported that Dream Theater had won this year’s bullshit ‘Best Metal Performance’ Grammy award. Some fans lauded the choice as honoring a revolutionary who finally got the acclaim they deserved, while others (this author included) thought that Gojira got robbed. Now, a new study has been run which determines which band should have technically — very technically, as in through data analysis — won the Best Metal Performance Grammy.

The study comes from Viberate, an online service dedicated to data analysis in the music industry (SEXY). As reported by Ultimate Guitar, the study pulled data from combined streams, social media and radio plays, playlist inclusions, and Shazam searches, in order to see who the people voted for with their clicks rather than who the Recording Academy voted for.

And the winner? You guessed it:

“Gojira’s track scored the highest among all the ‘Best Metal Performance’ nominees according to its combined streaming, social media and radio airplay numbers. It was streamed 12 million times, Shazamed 25 thousand times, got 6.9 million YouTube views with its official video, and still has the highest Spotify playlist reach (705.000).”

Here’s how the other tracks broke down, in order of aggregated info:

• Deftones, “Genesis”
• Rob Zombie, “The Triumph of King Freak (A Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)”
• Dream Theater, “The Alien”
• Mastodon, “Pushing the Tides”

Now, look, we’ve received some backlash due to our dismissal of Dream Theater winning this year’s metal Grammy, and that kind of fandom has its place in metal (yeah, in the FUCKING PORT-O-JOHN, AHAHAHAHAHAHAH ahhh…). But the argument we hear time and time again about the Metal Grammy is that it’s all about the industry, and has no basis in what actual metalheads are listening to. And according to this study, what actual metalheads are listening to is Gojira. You can be totally happy for Dream Theater winning their first Grammy, but if there was a track that best represented metal over the past year, it was “Amazonia.” It’s fucking science, apparently.

Check out a graphic of the data below: