Put a Pin on the Map View my Forum Guestmap
Free Guestmaps by Bravenet.com

The Old Acclaimed Music Forum

Go to the NEW FORUM

Music, music, music...
Start a New Topic 
Author
Comment
Year rank

This might have been asked before, turning this into a topic repost, but I was just wondering which years are to be considered 'strong' and which 'weaker', based on the critics lists from AM.

Henrik, similar to determining an artist rank, technically it should be possible to rank the years, right? Would it be easy to determine this (maybe you even already did this)? If so, could you let us know some numbers here? If it's to much trouble, then just forget about it. Maybe there is no real demand for it anyway and am I the only one nerd interested in this year ranking.

My guess would be that '65 - '67 are particularly strong, end of the 80's perhaps not so strong ...

Re: Year rank

I think 1971 is the best year. I had a quick look at how many albums from each year are in the all-time top 100, and 1971 wins. 1966-68 are all very good too.

Re: Year rank

1971 has 9 in the top 100, which is incredible.
1966 has only 3, but all are in the top 10!

actually, 66-72 are all very good. I don't know which is the worst (I imagine 50s or early 60s), or which is the best of the last 10-20 years or so. With recent albums you might need to take a more complicated formula, because so few are in the top 100 - perhaps 1997 'wins' just by virtue of OK Computer?

thats enough time wasted on that for me!

Re: Year rank

1991 actually (if that counts as recent). Nevermind plus four more in the top 100.

BACK TO WORK!

Re: Year rank

Could well be, a visitor.

But since Henrik's sophisticated formulas also consider the songs, I would still tip 1965, holding both #1 and #2 spot there.

Re: Year rank

I'm thinking 1965 as well, it has the most songs out of all the years (87), it has the #1, the #2 and the #3000. Albumwise it's beaten in pretty much every year after that, but I'm a song person.

Re: Year rank

1972 and 1973 both have 86 albums in the top 3000. I think that's the most. 73 should have 87 though as it's a scandal Kool & The Gang's "Wild and Peaceful" is only bubbling under


So song-wise 1965 looks like the winner.
Album-wise, 1971-73 seems to be the peak.

Re: Year rank

Good topic, Dre. Actually, I tried to come up with an answer to that question, using Henrik’s lists, a few months ago. My system started by adding up all the albums and songs from a given year and assigning greater weights to higher-ranked albums/songs.Then I played around with the numbers to identify a series of cycles in acclaimed music. Yes, I’m a big geek.

I found seven years that are peak years of a cycle of highly-acclaimed music. This means that not only do they have high rankings, but the years around them tend to as well:

1928 (early country and jazz)
1939 (blues, big band, standards)
1956 (early rock and roll, modern jazz)
1969 (peak of a very highly-acclaimed era from ’67 to ‘73)
1978 (punk, disco; this one really runs from ’77 to ‘79)
1987
1994

Obviously, these years should be compared to their era; if you chart out the numbers, the ’28 and ’39 peaks are tiny little pimples compared to the Matterhorn-like towers of 1969 and 1978.

I was surprised to see 1987 there, too, but it features strong work by Prince, U2, GnR, R.E.M., Public Enemy, Sonic Youth—sort of a full cross-section of the 80s.

And why is 1994 a peak, rather than 1991? Well, I gave credit for every record from #1 to #3000, and ’94 is just stronger top to bottom. If you just go by top ten albums, ’91 is stronger than ’94, although not by much—I think people just tend to remember Nirvana, U2, Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Chili Peppers (’91) more than Portishead, Blur, Jeff Buckley, NIN and Pavement (’94).

The last 10 years or so have been pretty flat—no peaks, but no valleys, either.

Re: Year rank

Wow, pretty interesting, schleuse! Did not expect most of these peaks.

Let's hope, the next peak's gonna be 2008.

Actually, I'm also hoping Henrik "only" needs to push a button to run some (database) queries that 'automatically' determine the artist ranking. A slight change in the query (filter on year instead of artist) would then already do the trick ... nèèh, that's probably too simply thinking from my side ...