Welcome to the Acclaimed Music Forum Underrated Albums Poll, in which we will highlight those albums that are universally underrated. To make sure we really get a list of only totally underrated albums, we’ve come up with the following rules in this topic. The rules are slightly complicated, and will require some honesty on the part of the voter, but I hope that by comparing our personal rankings to the rankings on both AM and RYM we can get an accurate list. The maximum ranking on AM/RYM (AND, not OR) as related to your personal rankings:

Personal rank / AM/RYM rank:
1-10 / Lower than 250
11-50 / Lower than 500
51-100 / Lower than 1,000
101-200 / Lower than 2,000
201-???? / Lower than 3,000

Remember that this poll is about finding the most underrated albums, which means that simply filtering your top 1000 albums for albums matching the criteria above might not be the most accurate course of action. Your #23 album which is outside of the top 3000 on both sites might be more underrated than your #9 album which is at #260 on AM and #280 on RYM, after all.

Due to the changing nature of the RYM list and a seeming inability to easily save a complete top 3000, there could be some albums that are within a certain limit this week but outside of it in a month. There’s not really anything I can do about that, and I won’t be able to check every album for its ranking anyway. This fact, plus the fact that personal lists are just that, personal, means that I’ll have to take your word for your lists, but I don’t think that should be a problem.

2010 and 2011 albums are excluded from this vote for the obvious reason that they’re not included in the AM list.

You can submit a list of between 10 and 100 albums, and because personal lists can form suggestions for others I think it’s best if everyone just posts their lists in this topic. You are of course free to change your list if you discover something new from one of the other lists. Because of this the poll will be open at least two months, and possibly even 3 if many people feel they need more time. For now I will set the deadline to June 30th.

Please use the following format for posting, using a simple first name last name format for the artist (i.e. no Dylan, Bob):
x. Artist - Album

I hope that covers everything, but since this is kind of an experimental poll I'm still open to changes in the format. I could also use suggestions on the scoring system from the more statistically oriented AMFers. Let me know what you think!

I guess I'm still a bit confused.

1. Does "maximum ranking" mean the best or worst position at AM/RYM? For example, would Never Mind the Bollocks be counted as #10 at AM or #1204 at RYM?

2. Does "lower" mean a worse position? For example, is Rock Bottom not eligible (even if it is in someone's personal top 10) because it is within the top 250 at both AM and RYM?

Me again.

I compared my personal list with AM and RYM and realized that I have to leave out albums like The Blue Nile's "Hats" (AM #861, my #51) and instead fill up my top 100 with a lot of lesser-known albums that I'm only a medium-fan of. Is that the intent of this game?

Edit: I also have to leave out Jan Johansson's "Jazz på svenska" and Bohren & der Club of Gore's "Black Earth" because they are within RYM's top 1000. How many people here have heard those albums?

Lower than is indeed a poor choice of words, worse would have been better.

With regards to the cutoff criteria.. I suppose you do have a point. My main concern was with making sure everything is really underrated but maybe we went a little bit overboard with the criteria. I still think the first 250 on both AM and RYM should be excluded, but what about this:

1-10 / Worse than 250
11-50 / Worse than 500
51-100 / Worse than 750
101-200 / Worse than 1,000
201-???? / Worse than 1,500

That would be a little more inclusive, and depending on your personal list at least include Hats and probably "Black Earth" and "Jazz på svenska".

Another solution would be to somehow take into account the number of votes on RYM, for example giving every album with less than 500 votes an exception from the rules.

I had a problem considering some 00s albums like Ys or xx as underrated only because they didn't make the top 250. I decided to, personally, exclude every 00s album inside the top 600 of all time since, i believe, it is an impressive feat by them. Other decades had more titles that justify the underrated term and fame.

As Henrik, RYM has pretty much screwed with some of my picks since the users managed to place them inside the top 250. After noticing that, i felt that this poll is really going to define THE underrated albums of all time: ignored by critics AND general music lovers. Harder to find a consensus without the likes of Pink Moon and many punk and jazz albums, but pretty damn exciting for it.

Perfect From Now On #233 on RYM.... aaaaaaaargh...

Are we including EPs?

Since they are not included on AM or in the RYM album list it would make things even more complicated, so I would say no. No bootlegs either.

My #1 is going to be really predictable.

I like the looser standards. I wonder if there's an easy way to make an alphabetized list that includes all albums invalid at a certain level.

That is, one alphabetical list of all albums 1-250 on AM or RYM, one of all albums 251-500, etc.

Maybe I'll do it if I can find a clever way to do it instantly in Excel.

Can you edit other people's posts Henrik? If you can, could you edit mine to reflect the new criteria as well as the exception for albums with less than 1000 votes? I had a look through the list and it seems that there are a few relatively unknown albums ranked pretty highly on RYM most of which have between 500-1000 votes so I think 1000 is probably a fairer number.

No, we wouldn't. I'll make another topic as soon as we figure out what I reckon is the last remaining issue: the scoring system. Could I simply use the 2100/position+20 formula that's also used for the final part of the decade polls?

I was browsing the forum a little bit and I saw that at one point we've also used 4200/position+20, giving the higher positions more of a contribution. Since people are most likely going to have several favorites they think are particularly underrated, maybe this would be better for this poll.

Yes, I should have used brackets but I actually meant the exact opposite: giving albums ranked highly more points, not albums further down the list. However, as I'm having a look at what will end up on my list right now I'm finding I still want to give quite a lot of points to my #50, so right now I don't know what's better..

I would use a similar formula, but it might be worth discussing whether we want the points to slope down faster or slower.

Henrik argues slower, I might argue slightly faster, just because the difference between my #1 film of a decade and my #10 is a lot smaller than the difference between my #1 underrated album and my #10.

In general though, (X + 1) * 100 / (position + X)

Agreed on the last part. In any case, there's no real need to decide on the scoring right this moment so I'll make a new post and we can continue our actual suggestions there.

Please post in the other topic.