A Genre Classification Scheme for Metal-Music Corpus Studies: An Eleven-Bucket and Seventeen-Category Encoding of Encyclopaedia Metallum Genre Strings

This data descriptor documents a two-level genre classification scheme for metal-music corpus studies derived from Encyclopaedia Metallum’s multi-label genre strings. The scheme assigns each band to one of eleven mutually exclusive primary buckets and, alternatively, to one of seventeen finer-grained sub-categories that separate closely related sub-styles. Classification is implemented by keyword priority on the lower-cased genre string and is fully deterministic given the published keyword table. The scheme was developed and tested on a corpus of 560 metal bands from Southern Chile (1988–2024), which serves as the development corpus throughout. On a stratified 60-band subset of this corpus, automatic assignments agreed with independent expert human coding at 81.7% (Cohen’s κ = 0.78, 95% bootstrap CI [0.66, 0.88]); an out-of-sample application to a 60-band Norwegian sample, with the keyword tables left unchanged, retained the scheme’s core logic at a 5.0% residual rate. The encoding rules, the keyword tables, and the mapping CSVs are released under CC-BY 4.0 to enable replication and adaptation across other metal-scene corpora.