Gentrifying Metal? The Evolving Gender and Social Class Characteristics of Metal Festival Audiences: A Statistical Study of the Hellfest Festival (France)

The generic term “public metal” encompasses a diversity of listeners passionate about metal music, with varying degrees of involvement in a variety of subscenes. The question of social class as a dimension of the musical tastes and modes of belonging of audiences posed by this volume therefore needs to take into account the complex modes and degrees of identification both to the genre as a whole and to its to specific subgenres. It also needs to be placed in historical perspective, because the genre, and its associated subculture(s), has been continuously evolving since its very early manifestations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continues to do so in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In particular, we devote significant attention to the question of gender to a key dimension of the discussion, because the rise of female attendance in the most recent decades, while not particularly spectacular, is nonetheless a key aspect of the general evolution of metal scenes (at least some of them). This is why we present and analyze here the results of some of the most ambitious quantitative surveys on the evolution of one of the largest metal music festivals in Western Europe, the Hellfest festival in France.