Let me be the first to say that this post is just chart porn and contains no real science.

Hypothesis

Metallica has become less relevant over the last twenty-five years, which will be evidenced through declining search engine ranking for their song titles.

Methodology

Metallica has opinions about the Internet. They famously spoke out against Napster back in 2000. In 2006, they begrudgingly joined iTunes. They once leaked new songs to bloggers but sent cease & desist letters when they were reviewed. It is fitting that the Internet, in all its raw democratic ability, should serve as their jury.

Each song on each album will be scored from 0 to 10, with 10 signifying a #1 result from a Google search referencing the band and a 0 signifying an absence of the band’s name from the first page of search results. The song’s album will then receive a composite score as an average of the song scores.

Results

“Kill ‘Em All” – Metallica, 1983

Yes, they make the first page for “whiplash”. Upsetting lots of lawyers.

“Ride the Lightning” – Metallica, 1984

“Master of Puppets” – Metallica, 1986

“…And Justice for All” – Metallica, 1988

“Metallica” – Metallica, 1991

“Load” – Metallica, 1996

I’m shocked they made the first page for “2 x 4″.

“Reload” – Metallica, 1997

Seriously, first page for “fuel”?

“St. Anger” – Metallica, 2003

The Harrison Ford movie just barely wins for “Frantic”.

“Death Magnetic” – Metallica, 2008

The final single, “My Apocalypse” is the only result that links explicitly to Metallica.com.

Analysis

First, it should be noted that Metallica took a few albums to get started. Here are the Billboard peaks for each album in the year it was released. Their first #1 record was the eponymous “black album”, no doubt propelled by their single “Enter Sandman”, and they have been able to reach that position for each new release since.

Rising throughout the 1980s, the search engine visibilty of Metallica’s song titles did indeed wane in the late 90s. Although it has recovered again with the notoriety of Metallica’s 2004 documentary “Some Kind of Monster” and the release of their latest album, “Death Magnetic”.

In fact, if we remove the albums “Load”, “Reload”, and “St. Anger” from the data, we see the trendline of the band’s early rise closely predicts the relevance of “Death Magnetic”. While many reviews claim that “Death Magnetic” is a return to form for the band, recapturing the glory of pre-”Metallica” albums, we now have the unassailable scientific evidence.

Think I’ll go torrent that now.

Quoth Howard Beale:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad… everybody knows things are bad… it’s a depression… everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job… the dollar buys a nickel’s worth… banks are going bust… shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter…

It’s hard to listen to the radio or watch television or whatever verb it is you do to blogs without noticing that several important systems are all falling apart. It’s equally hard to maintain a cheery attitude without being accused of either having buried your head in the sand or being callous to the woes so real for so many people. If you’d like to be happy, and who wouldn’t, I might suggest you embrace the concept of a market correction.

Financially speaking, a market correction is the sudden drop in a stock when a bunch of people simultaneously realize that it’s overpriced. All those tips that had seemed really good as your brother-in-law was pitching you over beers wither to dust in your hands as people come to their senses and realizes that everyone was excited only because everyone else was excited, when there was no reason to get excited in the first place.

Getting more metaphorical, it’s a way to maintain hope that an established system will ultimately regulate itself and that a short-term disaster doesn’t threaten the underlying paradigm. It’s a way to say, “Hey man, I know things seem pretty fucked up right now, but the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Despite any sarcastic tone, I think they’re great.

Forests fires are market corrections, trading decaying oaks for nutrient-rich soil, thus ensuring the long-term life of the forest. Earthquakes are market corrections, drifting tectonic plates stuttering to catch up with one another to avoid gaping trenches of magma. When this planet finally kills off the humans to prevent more carbon from spilling into the atmosphere, it will be a market correction.

I can’t help but feel optimistic, even giddy.

Perhaps you’ve sensed that something like this was coming for a while. Admit it, things have felt a little “wrong” lately. Your intuitive self sensed a deep cancer within the body of buying houses on interest-only loans and flipping them onto the next guy who does the same like a game of musical chairs. Well, now the music has stopped and we have a quiet moment of lucidity, when the lights have come on and—although startled at first—we look around and find joy in the way things could be, should be, and will be again.

If you’ve been frustrated about the “childbirth bubble” where expectant mothers are first given pain medication and then labor inducers, and then pain medication, and then labor inducers, until finally their’s no choice but to perform a Caeserian, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a market correction going on.

If you’ve been irked by the “global food market bubble” making your food tasting bland, unsatisfying, and full of ingredients you can’t pronounce, you’ll be happy to know that eating local and urban farms are forcing a market correction.

If you think that the “partisan politics bubble” has made the national discourse too divisive, despite your sharing more and more values with your neighbors and that, “the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.” You probably already know that there’s some markets getting corrected lately.

And if you think the “lists of links to lists of links bubble” has left the blogosphere a wasteland of search-engine optimized lists, Digg-bait headlines, and lifehacks distracting you from the life you’re supposed to be hacking, you’ll be pleased to find out that the Internet is receiving a long awaited market correction.

Yes, there are growing pains. Yes, the coming world will destroy the current one in its wake. But I have confidence that the turmoil we’re seeing on the world stage is merely a generation of chickens coming home to roost, breaking some eggs, and tomorrow we’ll all be eating some mighty tasty omelettes.