Once again, thank you for the update. I'm sure that it's absolutely time consuming and I'm grateful that you can spend your time doing this.

I think I like the ones that fell out of the top 500 better than the ones that came in.

American Idiot, for instance, I liked when it first came out, but I don't think it aged well at all. Now it just kind of comes off as gimmicky and marketing-oriented.

Whereas the two Joni Mitchells and Chairs Missing, those are in my AT top 200.

Is it just me, or did jazz albums not fare particularly well on this update? It seems like nearly every jazz album I've looked at has dropped a few places.

Henrik, how would that work, with albums below the top 50 (say, 51-100) on Pazz-N-Jop producing a popularity ranking? I mean, even within the top 50, you're going to have albums with fewer top 10 citations than others around it, but rank as high as it does because of high placements on some lists.

I have no issue with your thinking, but would like to understand better. Thanks. :)

Country still remains the most overlooked genre on acclaimed. Kind of sad that some people can't get past the stigma to see that ultimately, without Country there'd be no rock.

There's not a single country album in the top 100.

Henrik, I have a question about a ranking:

Amy Winehouse's Back to Black outranks Jay-Z's Blueprint, yet on both the end of the decade lists and the last update, The Blueprint was well ahead of it. How did Back to Black jump ahead?

Henrik's formula when adding the decade-end lists to the site differs from the ranking on the 2000s spreadsheet? Just a theory.

I'm not talking about in the past 25 years. I'm talking about period. Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson don't come off nearly as well as they should given their cultural importance.

I would agree R&B and Jazz deserve more too; if anything Rock as a whole gets kind of overrated. There are sub-genres of sub-genres of rock that get more acclaim than entire other genres of music (For example, I bet 90s brit pop gets more acclaim than the entirety of country music.)

It's funny...if a rock album is ranked 1500th of all-time, it's probably decent to good. If a jazz, r&b or country album is ranked that low, it's probably still pretty damn good, maybe even a masterpiece.

I guess that's just how the cookie crumbles.

I've found some major gems from rock albums lower down on the AM chart. They're just more eclectic (Or less English) than the equally good ones higher up.

I think one problem Johnny Cash and Hank Williams have with climbing up the charts is that they were single artists, rather than album artists. Modern country that's worthy of inclusion at the top (Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Miranda Lambert) gets excluded because it's lumped in with the Toby Keiths and Garth Brookses of the world.

Just noticed - Illmatic is up to 275. (If I recall that's about a 200-spot jump.) I think that it's probably the most underperforming album on the whole list. It seems to get more acclaim than it actually does.

Hi Henrik, I'm relatively new to the forum, but I have used your brilliant lists for several years now. Thanks for a great job, this is the best resource of its type out there. And imho your algorithm is spot-on as well, as an IT type I appreciate what is involved here.

Thanks again, and now you can have a holiday?

John

Yeah, jazz and country will always get the short end of the stick in a general overview of best-of lists such as this one. In the same way that comedies, cartoons, and science fiction movies do on a site like They Shoot Pictures. This makes me particularly sad because jazz is my favorite genre. Luckily, this problem is remedied by the Jazz 100 site, which Henrik very helpfully provides a link to. That's what I use for jazz, not AM. And as others have pointed out, classic country acts were most often singles based. The country "albums" I listen to now (from the golden era) are nearly all compilations, and you won't see them on many lists.

Sites like this one will always favor the more popular and canonized, instead of the more deserving. It's not the fault of the site, but of the list-makers. And this is the reason why I do most of my exploring not in the top 500, but in 501-2500. TONS of lesser known masterpieces there. Shellac's At Action Park. Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun. Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day. As for country, Michael Hurley's Have Moicy!. All albums that are as indispensable for me as Revolver.

Eh, 'More canonized', I wouldn't say 'More popular'.

Here's the secret about lists like this and They Shoot Pictures. Not a lot of people, if you ask them, will say Citizen Kane is their favorite movie of all time. But, if you ask them to make a list of their favorite 100 movies, more lists will have Citizen Kane than any other movie. So what these lists are really measuring is an album's hit/miss ratio among people who listen to a large variety of music.

That's also why genre films hit lower on critic lists. If you like the science fiction formula, you'll like science fiction films as much as drama films. If you don't, you won't like any science fiction. So, if you poll people with widely varying tastes in films, a lower percentage will include them.

It's not fair to chalk it up to some kind of elitist bias. It's just a matter of a formula that rewards the size of the niche more than popularity within that niche.

I'm sorry BillAdama but what is BMAA and TSPDT ?

T'as tout compris !
Tu dois nominer 10 albums soit "bubbling under" soit classés en dessous de la 500ème place, et les 128 qui étaient qualifiés la dernière fois sont exclus. Pas de points à donner mais un ordre de préférence.
Bill prendra le n°1 de tout le monde, puis le n°2, puis le N°3 etc. jusqu'à avoir 128 albums, sachant qu'il y a quelques contraintes (par exemple il ne retiendra pas plus de 25 albums classés au-dessus de la 1000ème position je crois) donc tu peux "stratégiser" un peu ta liste (faire remonter un album classé autour de la 700ème place pour augmenter ses chances de se qualifier par exemple), mais une liste avec tes 10 albums préférés dans l'ordre suffira je pense ! Et apparemment, on compte sur toi pour mettre des albums français (parce que perso, j'ai mis 10 albums anglophones).

I have a small side note to the animation bias.

Most of the famous animes are from the 90s or 00s, with a handful from the 80s. Pixar didn't really get started until the 00s. And that list is far more biased against newness than any genre.

The list actually has Spirited Away second highest from 2001, behind only Mulholland Drive. And the older Disney classics like Snow White and Bambi are on the list, just down in the 300-600 range.

And if you look at the 21st century list, they've got Fantastic Mr Fox, Up, and Coraline as their #3, #4 and #10 of 2009, and Wall-E and Waltz With Bashir as their #2 and #7 of 2008.

I take this as a sign that animation is becoming critically viable as of just a few years ago, thanks to Pixar. And I think if it weren't for Social Network, Toy Story 3 would win Best Picture. The real problem is, among a lot of serious cinephiles, animation is still mostly delineated as something for kids.

No, but I think success at the AAs represents a sort of cultural acceptance as a serious genre. Far more so than the grammies, at least. Maybe the success of animation on the sight & sound polls are a better example?

Alright, I'll be the first to say it.

When's the next update?

at least the majority of Oscar nominees indeed were notable critical hits. Look at the history of the Grammys and that is far from the case. But, the Oscar awards are the major category is "Best Picture,' whereas for the Grammys it's Album of the Year," "Record of the Year," etc.- "Best" is not part of the title. So, other factors come into play.

It seems most of you don't agree with me, but I do think that the Academy Awards aren't much better than the grammys.

In the 2000's we had Crash in 2006, Chicago in 2003 and A Beautiful Mind in 2002. The 90's were worse with Shakespeare in Love in '98 (what?), Titanic in '97, Braveheart in '95 and then Driving Miss Daisy (right) in '89. Then again, the 70's were much better, mostly because of the overall quality of popular Holywood films.

The Best Foreign film category is quite rediculous anyway.

Moreover, the campaigns of big studio's for certain films seem to be more important for the voters (who are not necessarliy films experts or lovers and most of the time don't watch half of the films) than the quality of films. The year Crash won is a very good example of that.

A Beautiful Mind was easily the best film of 2002. I do agree that the winners aren't always the most deserving films, but the nominations for the Oscars definitely correlate more with critical acclaim than the Grammy nominations.

The critics don't agree. A Beautiful Mind isn't even found in the Top 250 of films of the 21 Century, on the TSPDT list.

But maybe you're right and the grammys are even worse. Although before the 90s, the grammys didn't seem to be THAT bad (especially the 70s).

The winner of BP isn't usually the one that deserves it, but if you look at the full list of nominations it usually contains decent to great, accessible, American films. Which I think is the most you can expect from a mainstream award show. Crash may not be a very good film, but it's less ridiculous a choice than over half the Best Album nominees.

A Beautful Mind was just that, a decent and accessible movie. It just, like many Ron Howard films, skews reality toward the sentimental. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the book.)

before the 90s did have some deserving nominees (and winners)- i.e. Thriller. But, it had PLENTY of middle-of-the-road, safe, commercial nominees. Things have progressed some since the late 90s, but we still see those head-scratchers annually. There's so much baggage from the past to overcome that it's never going to be as in line with what critics regard as the best in a given year as the Oscars are.

The Grammys didn't earn nicknames like "Shammys" and "Grannies" for nothing.

I concur with many of the posts above. Nobody is saying that the Oscars are perfect, indeed they often make suspect choices. The Grammys, on the other hand, have been laughably awful for longer than I care to remember. I would never look at Grammy nominees to figure out what music to listen to, but I would look at Best Picture nominees to get ideas on what to watch.

I have a question for Henrik or any of the more statistically minded posters; what is the point differential between 400 and 600? It seems like every update, some album makes a massive leap on the third page of the all time list, and an equal amount drop. Am i correct in saying those albums are all fairly close together point wise?

Henrik, DO you know when we can enjoy the update of the top 3000 songs?

Ok. Thanks