Welcome, one and all, to bracketology!

WHAT IS THIS? Bracketology is a tournament of the 256 most acclaimed songs in music history, as ranked on this here website. Songs are seeded by their Acclaimed Music rank and placed in groups of four. In the first round, the winner of each group advances to the second round of 64 teams; winners from that round move on to the Sweet 16. In the end, we’ll have a Final Four to figure out the overall winner.

HOW DOES IT WORK? That’s where you come in—you vote! In the first round, we’re doing four brackets (16 songs) every week. To find the brackets, either click on the current week below (it'll be the latest one shown), or find it on the AM forum. In each bracket, you must rank the four listed songs from #1 to #4; #1 gets 4 points, #2 gets 3, and so on. At the end of the week, I add up all the points received by each song, and the song in each bracket with the most points moves on to the next round--so, in the first round, there are four winning songs (out of 16) every week.

(Voting on each group is open for about 8 days, and all ballots are due on midnight Saturday, U.S. Central time, or about 6 a.m. Sunday GMT.)

SO THAT’S IT? Not quite. Although anyone can vote, for a ballot to be eligible you must briefly explain your choices. This is important!...Ballots with no explanations won’t count toward the results.

SO WHO’S WINNING? Well, we’ve been at it since June 9, 2007, and we’ll finish around the New Year. You can find out which songs have already advanced here:

Results

WHAT DO THE BALLOTS LOOK LIKE? For the gory details, this thread will (eventually) link to all previous ballot threads. Links to threads for the first four weeks are shown below, and I’ll link to future ballot threads as they open.

Week 1 (including the bracketology rules)
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4

FINAL NOTE: A special thank you to Henrik for creating this site, for being a friend to bracketology, and generally for being a standup guy!

That’s about it. Have fun!

schleuse - This idea is great and I plan to use it on the IMDb for movies. Don't worry, I'll give you all of the credit!

Thanks! I'm flattered...and I'd love to participate.

I don't know how you plan to seed the movies, although I know IMDb has user rankings--you might want to check out They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? It's a website which ranks critically-acclaimed films, similar to what Henrik does here (in fact, they link to Acclaimed Music, which is how I found this site in the first place). Well worth a look.

Great idea, love the bracketology!

Any thoughts of doing one for the albums list?

Thanks, Schwah. I decided to do songs rather than albums just because I'm more of a singles guy than an albums guy.

But, yeah, it has occurred to me that an album tournament would seem to be the logical next step; my only concern is that, while a lot of people have heard most of the top 256 songs, I'm not sure how many people, even here, have heard the top 256 albums. (As a check, I just looked at albums #191-200, and I've only heard three of them.)

If enough people want to do it, I can probably be persuaded to do album bracketology--but, for the sake of my sanity, not until after song bracketology is over.

I really appreciate the comments from Mediocre_Saint and Schwah, but it occurs to me that I'd like to keep this thread comment-free if possible so it's easier to use as a kind of link database.

So I've started a General Comments thread for bracketology; if you've got any feedback/suggestions/hate mail--anything not related to the current week of voting, please post it there. Thanks a lot.