Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication, Stefan.

Excellent work my friend, we all appreciate it!

Thanks Stefan for all your hard work. Since I found your list it is my go-to for discovering new music, and now I feel like a traveler in this music world without a guide. I hope whatever takes you away from the list makes you happy, as happy as you've made us by compiling this for so long. Thanks man

Thanks Stefan for all the great work. The Mega-Critic chart will be missed. Massive thanks for the prizes over the years too.

This was an amazing feature of the forum. Thank you so much for it, Stefan, and good luck with your personal endeavors!

I didn't realise this would be the last time fot the chart. I'm really sorry it has to stop, but it was a great feature here on AMF. I liked both the chart as a compass for discovering new music and the guessing every month.

Great that I managed to guess my first right position, especcialy because this was the last opportunity.

Thanks a lot Stefan!

No problem. By the way, what do I do know exactly?

Stefan:
Could you tell me a little about how much work you had to put into assembling the data each month? I am trying to figure out whether I would have the time to volunteer for that work. BillAdama has already volunteered for the data processing.

I think it would be a great thing if the megacritic chart could be continued.

You mail me your wish and home adress to my e-mail.

I checked all the daily sources every day for all the new reviews , and assembled them alphabetically by artist . If a CD reached 3 reviews in one region and a certain average rating , it was transferred to the Mega-Critic-List .
Daily work : about 45 minutes .

The weekly sources ´NME´, ´Fly´, ´SVD´, ´Spiegel´ and ´Plattentests´ I added once a week .
Weekly work : about 45 minutes .

My subscribed monthly mags , ´Q´, ´Uncut´ and ´Musik Express´ and ´Rock and Folk´I added on a monthly base .
Monthly work : about 90 minutes .

The monthly competitions took about 60 minutes to do and the end of the month Mega-Critic-Chart with all the extras about 150 minutes .

Thanks, I will.

Thanks for those hours of hard work STEFAN (and for those 4 or 5 CDs I have won thanks to you).

It's cool that you are thinking about taking over.
And to Stefan, good luck for your new life
New job ?
Married ?
Children ?
Prison ? (which after all boils down to the same thing )

Everything's already been said, but I just wanted to chime in with my thanks. Thanks especially for sending out cds over the past couple years... very generous on such a little forum and I think we all thank you for bringing that competition and fun to the forums.

Hmmm, sorry that would require more time than I have available - even without the monthly competitions.

But maybe we can find a way to continue the most valuable parts of Stefan's work. www.metacritic.com already exists and does a pretty good job for British and American sources. Maybe we can find a way to assemble the scores for the most important releases from other sources? And even if we only did this once a year (in the summer to complement the EOY-lists) I would still find it very useful info.

My suggestion, if anybody is inclined to spend the time:

Once a month, near the end of the month, go through Metacritic albums rated 75 or higher with 15 or more reviews. Pop the specific numbers on a spreadsheet and send them my way, and I will produce a list.

Does anybody have a strong opinion about the way I would calculate the results? I would rather do a wins-losses based method to make it so single very bad reviews don't have inordinate impact on the final score, but I can use a formula more similar to Stefan's if people would prefer.

It was a wonderful job. I'll miss this

I never got many of the clues, though. But that's my fault and was part of the fun. Finding out who was who.

Good luck to Stefan ... and whoever takes over.

How about a collective effort?

We could create "users" on Rate Your Music for different magazines that rate 1-5. A meta-user "Acclaimed Music" is also created and it befriends the magazine "users".

Then the custom charts of the "user" Acclaimed Music can easily be used to see which albums receive the most acclaim around the world.

With as little as 10 non-american and non-british magazines I think this would supplement metacritic very well. If magazines from those countries were included, it would of course be even better.

Sounds like a brilliant idea, but I don't know if the RYM moderators would allow critics' accounts. Maybe someone here is a moderator?

They probably wouldn't like it for copyright reasons, but we wouldn't have to advertise it. The magazine
"users" could be called Acclaimed Music 1, 2, 3, etc.

Oh, I meant that they wouldn't like it because the ratings wouldn't be personal.

We could, however, do something like that on a website. I might be able to set up a PHP script where anybody can go to the website, enter a review source, an album, and a score, and have it saved to a central database, which one can then just run an algorithm on.

For the past 3.5 years this has been a very welcome source for finding good new music. Would be great if it could continue in some kind of fashion. The RYM construction sounds good to me, if that's allowed to do so.

As an early winner of one of the CDs (TVOTR's Dear Science) I give special thanks to you, Stefan. Wishing you all the best!


Edit: Just saw BillAdama's post crossing mine. Collecting the data on a separate AM webserver would also be great.

If someone knows how to set this up, I think it is the better solution. The best solution would be if it could be integrated with AM I suppose. But I think we should get i started sooner rather than later so that we don't fall behind from the start.

While we're waiting to see what happens concerning the above discussion, I've created a list that I think could be of interest to visitors of Acclaimed Music. It's a list of the most acclaimed albums according to Swedish media so far 2011. It is based on more than 30 media outlets.

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dr_Robert/most_acclaimed_albums_in_swedish_media_2011/

Hopefully, a few others could do the same for their countries.

Cool! Have you done anything else than taken the results from kritiker.se and removed the albums with less than 10 ratings? Since you're taking into account the number of ratings anyway, you might want to use an adjusted score like Stefan did. However, it seems like the number of sources has increased rapidly during the year (or is there another explanation to why Anna Järvinen has got 11 more ratings than PJ Harvey?) and then the adjusted score will not work so well.

Anyway, the formula is
Adjusted Score = (N×R + D×M) ÷ (N+D) where:
R = Average rating for the album
N = Number of ratings for the album
M = mid-range value (this could also be the average across all albums, but presumably this is unknown). kritiker.se says that "Recensionsbetyg räknas om till en gemensam skala och ett medelvärde mellan ett och fem beräknas" so the mid-range value seems to be 3.
D = Degree of disbelief. A higher number means less belief in each rating, albums will then get an adjusted score closer to M (particularly albums with few ratings). You have to decide the value of D. In your case it should probably be somewhere between 5 and 10.

Looking a bit more at kritiker.se and the number of sources for other albums that has come out during 2010-2011, it seems that the number of sources is not increasing so fast and that the adjusted score should perform well. But, if you don't want/have time to use the formula that's fine. It's only a suggestion.

If I'm going to do something along these lines I'm going to need a server which can run PHP scripts and SQL.

I wanted to "publish" a result fast so I took the easiest route. I might use your formula in the future since most of the work with creating a list has now been done, but it depends a little bit on how time-consuming the calculations are. I don't think using the formula will affect the list MUCH and the interest in the list seems to be limited.