Along with death and taxes, slightly spurious research into the world's best cities for rock and metal music has become one of life's inevitabilities.
The latest batch of research into this subject has today been released by ticketing search engine TickX, who have put data from 300,000 UK music events through a massive calculator and crowned Blackpool – yes, that Blackpool – the UK's best town for metalheads. Blackpool also comes up trumps for jazz and blues music, while Manchester is apparently the best city for rock and indie fans.
The research was compiled by taking data from the 300,000 events and comparing how many genre-specific gigs a city held relative to their population size. So this isn't to say Blackpool has the most or best metal gigs, simply that it has a lot considering not many people live there (139,720 at last count).
The research alleges that hard rock and metal are especially popular in ex-industrial regions of the UK, including South Wales and the North East, but a lot less popular in the South. London got a shoeing – failing to make the rankings at all, for any genre they profiled – holding only one rock event per 100,000 people, compared to Manchester's one per 1,000.
Smaller towns and cities in the UK are amply represented in both the rock and metal top 10 lists, which could suggest the UK's small town scenes are in rude health across the country. Or, it just hints at a slightly flawed methodology where compiling this research is concerned. We'll leave that up to you to decide.
Those surprised at Blackpool's high placings perhaps shouldn't be, given our own report into the seaside town's alternative credentials back in 2016.
The full top 10 town lists for both genres can be found below. The complete research can be accessed on TickX's site.
Hard rock and metal:
1. Blackpool
2. Rugeley
3. Manchester
4. Newport
5. Brighton
6. Bath
7. Cardiff
8. Darlington
9. Newcastle
10. Lincoln
Rock and indie:
1. Manchester
2. Peterborough
3. Perth
4. Liverpool
5. Sheffield
6. Bristol
7. Cardiff
8. Frome
9. Blackpool
10. Brighton
