It was mentioned in another thread that it's a problem for albums outside AM (or even outside the top of AM) to make an appearance in the forum poll, since generally only one or two voters know about them.

I replied that the only way I could think of to treat every album the same way would be if all voters would nominate a given number of albums, and then all voters had to listen to ALL nominated albums (which would be a lot of fun in a world where time and money is never a problem)!

Now I've had a look at all the 50 individual lists (the 47 included and the 3 late posts) and here are the number of new albums I would have to listen to if 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 albums had been nominated by each voter.

1 nomination per voter => Henrik have not heard 3 albums
2 nominations per voter => Henrik have not heard 7 albums
3 nominations per voter => Henrik have not heard 12 albums
4 nominations per voter => Henrik have not heard 19 albums
5 nominations per voter => Henrik have not heard 24 albums

Hence, for me, a poll using a concept along these lines would be doable and surely a lot of fun too. Right now I think we have enough of polls, but maybe this could be a future project. Anyone else who likes the idea?

Hey Henrik,

I really like your idea a lot! As you already mentioned, there are two logistic barrieres to overcome:

i) Time - I don't think this is really a problem. We need clear time schedules for 3 independent process parts: 1) the nominating process, 2) the album distribution process and 3) the listening and voting process. Since we are doing quite some other polls right now, I would suggest to plan this soon, but execute it later, like e.g after Survivor has finished sometime summer this year).

ii) Money - This could become quite complicated. Once the albums are nominated, how do we get all albums to the poll participants? Here are only a few first questions that pop up: When we want to do the distribution in digital form, how can we ensure that we do it legally? And how to handle vinyl albums? Do participants have to digitize those? Etcetera, etc.

Now to why I like your idea. This is a great way to further exchange and broaden our musical interests. Maybe in this way we get to know more unconventional music forms (like e.g. the 'world' music you mentioned in another thread the other day), or just to hear what other forum members like to listen to.

To be honest, I think the outcome in the form of a top 100 or so would not interest me so much, meaning, the whole exchanging and listening part is more important and fun to me than the final votes collection.

I am not sure I understood very well your proposition.
Do you mean that every voter should nominate a given number of albums OUTSIDE the AM list ?
That would make things a little more fair, but what I also like in the poll we made is this mixed between acclaimed albums and lesser known works.
But the poll you mention would be interesting and correlations would be possible among the voters.
Why not ?

In addition to my comments under ii) Money, some further thoughts:

- The easiest and most legal way would be to just buy the nominated albums. But since about 5 years, I stopped buying CD's without knowing if I would really like them. Nowadays, I first download music (somehow, somewhere, by any means) and only buy it if it is precious to me.

- Another option might be to listen to the nominated albums via last.fm. But I'm not sure how exhaustive their collection is ...

I meant nominations of albums inside and outside AM. In other words: all albums.

Yes DrDre, a convenient solution to make nominated albums is needed. At last.fm I think you can only listen to 30 sec samples, right?

Right, some tracks can be heard completely, but I think the main bulk is only 30 seconds. Not convenient.

I might stick my late list on the end then..

Correct. Save a few exceptions you can only listen to 30 second samples, and not even that for some less popular songs.

I think it's a great idea, and after July or something we only have the 80s polls scheduled so I assume most of us will have some time to spare. I will anyway.

And how would we nominate the albums ?
If we take the top 5 of everybody's list, we would have many album coming several times (and many some albums that would deserve the spot but are in no top 5).
On the other hand we could make 5 propositions (or less) one after the other but it would mean that some participants would have to devote themselves to elect Pet Sounds, OK computer and the other most acclaimed album and would not have the possibility to choose "coups de coeur", since if they do we would take the risk to not have those albums in the list, which would be quite strange and would make the list less relevant.

I suggest that everyone nominates x albums outside the top 100 from our poll.

Then I see two alternatives:
1. The top 100 is included in the new poll, together with the new nominations
2. The top 100 is considered written in stone, and the new poll would be the "forum's esoteric top 100".

These are just a suggestions. I really haven't thought much about this.

Another thing that I don't know how to deal with:
I'd like to make sure somehow that nominations are only valid from people that are committed to the whole project.

I can easily imagine how everyone wants to nominate their favorite albums, but only a few take the time to listen to everybody else's nominations (which we will only find out at the end...)

Anyway it might be a good idea to make the nominations quite soon since I think it will take time to listen to all the albums (Might be quick for some people with impressive culture such as nicolas, but for me it might take time, especially since I'm a young graduate and that my searches for my next job is taking much time !)

I know that for the 80s poll I am seriously thinking of investing in Rhapsody so I can hear at least five albums from each year over the course of a month. I’m pretty sure most of the essential albums from that decade are on that service.

This isn’t a list-based thing, but I was seriously thinking of ‘adopting’ an AMer and over the course of the next few months and listening to their top 10, sharing my thoughts along the way. It’s more of an informal thing, but a few of us could pair up if interested. I would choose some poster that had a top 10 I wanted to hear anyway, making the investment in time money to find the albums a little more worthwhile.

Except for the extremely rare albums, I think between Rhapsody, iTunes, and mp3 blogs finding most music you want to hear won’t be too bad. The cheapest route would obviously be mp3 blogs, and gathering all the mp3s in sequential album order could be a big pain.

I just started a personal project using that program I wrote to re-do my top 100 and do my top of the decade list at the same time. Right now I'm up to almost 300 albums I'm considering for it, because I wanted to include anything I thought had even an outside chance.

This project will last gradually over the next three or four years, so I don't know if I'd have time to just buy and listen to hundreds of random albums people suggest.

I do like the idea though of, everybody submit say a top five albums not in the AM top 100, then next time we do a top 100 we do some sort of fair ways to match the eclectic ones against the well known ones.

I wish Itunes would just sack up and start letting people rent music. That way anybody in the world would be able to have the option to rent.

Maybe we should just limit choices to the AM top 3000. I think that would sufficiently limit obscurities. It's not like there's a chance of anything outside the top 3000 ever making our top 100 poll anyways.

I think the idea of this post though is to give less well known albums a fair shot at making the list.

And the question is whether it's possible to do that without everybody spending huge amounts of money on albums.

The only way I can think to do it is break it down somehow. Maybe have everyone pick one album not on the top 100, then go to second places if anyone picks the same thing, etc. Then break the albums into groups, people into groups, and have each group of people hear each album from a group, and then rank the albums in that group. Then the top ones can go into a final group that everybody votes on.

(At least, I'd go for something like that.)

Well, the idea behind limiting a poll to the top 3000 is that the obscurities get consolidated. Rather than having 50 people each pick 50 albums that no one's heard of, their less obvious picks can have a chance of being on more than just one ballot.

True, but I think that might have the side effect of alienating new people from coming to the forum. It'll make it look like we're slavishly following the critics.