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Towards the end of 2014, like every blog / website / music fan that likes to make sense of the musical year and document things for future reference, we published our end of year album list. It’s what Bob Stanley in his epic tome The History of Modern Pop would describe as ‘competition, excitement in league table form, pop music as a sport’. As Bob suggests, charts are very British thing, ‘fuel for a nation obsessed with train numbers and cricket statistics’.
However, our end of year list wasn’t just one short rushed blog post decided on the spur of the moment but a reasonably weighty series of posts (see here). The positions of each album was simply but carefully calculated based on the number of times we’d played the album that year, the results being modified to account for the number of months since the album first reached our ears. The idea was simple - our favourite must be the one we had played the most.
Yes, we were sad and geeky enough to record our listening history over 365 days, with all the complications that brings; multiple listens to one CD on a car journey and forgetting how many times we played it, part plays of albums etc.
We’ll be doing something similar at the end of 2015, but quite clearly our end of year list is an ongoing project. So what does it look like after nearly one month? The graph above shows the results. As you can see we’ve listened to Charli XCX’s Sucker a lot. Full disclosure: Charli’s album isn’t released in the UK yet but we imported it from the U.S via Amazon where it’s already out. Also The Staves and The Shires records are advance copies from their respective labels, they're not due for public consumption for a few more weeks.
So there you have it, our Albums of 2015 list (work in progress). Will any of those make it through to December? Time will tell.
This is our last post on Breaking More Waves for a week whilst we take a short break. Normal posting will resume sometime around the
5 comments:
So, how do you deal with partial plays?
Over halfway you round up? Under halfway = no play?
Simple. I record it is a decimal point. So a twelve song album where I play 3 songs and then stop counts as 0.25
However I don't count single songs, it has to be 2 songs (not on shuffle) minimum to count.
The biggest problem with all of this is the end of year adjustment and how to do that.
SUCKER !!!!! Yes!
The Quietus also make a point of saying that their end of year list is voted for on the basis of albums they've played the most.
Big project this!
I certainly can't fault your list of 2015 so far. As you say it is still early days. It will indeed be interesting to see makes the cut come the end of 2015.
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