Hi everyone

2010 is a good year for the forum : a lot of polls, a lot of newcomers, so I think it's time for a new demoraphic thread.

I'm breaking the forum's rules here and post a thread that isn't exactly about music, but I want to make sure that every one reads this.

Please feel free to tell us who you are, where you come from, your age, how you came to know the site, and everything you want.

That would make this forum a little less anonymous.

And for those who don't know me, I'm 39 and I live in Chatillon, just outside of Paris, with my wife, my 5 year old daughter and 2 year old son.

I'm a writer/editor for a publishing company (our main publication being the French Who's Who), and I am an amateur critic and blogger. I've got 2 blogs, one in English about old-time roots music and another in French. I also post in collective blogs.

I'm also an amateur singer and guitar player (not much of a guitar player, but I mostly play along when I'm singing).

And yes, that's me in the photo

I'm Michael, I'm 18 and from Redondo Beach, California but I know go to school in New York City where I think I'll be double majoring in Philosophy and Music. I play guitar and sing (poorly but i'm getting better).

Name: Spencer
Age: 18
Location: New Jersey
Music talent: None to speak of

Name: Nick (did I even need to write this?)
Location: New York (no not the city, a small town in the upstate)
Age: 18
Musical Talent: I was the chief songwriter for my friends "musical collective", other than that I have no musical talent whatsoever. (Though I do a mean Bob Dylan impersonation.)
Personal life in a nutshell: Freshman in college, architecture major, I think a philosophy minor would be cool.

Name: Jackson
Age: 18
Location: Athens, Ga.
Musical 'Talent': Chief songwriter for this completely non-serious music group with my friends. I want to learn to play piano this summer, but previous efforts to learn an instrument have failed.
Other: I'm a freshmen at the University of Georgia. I'm an economics major and member of the wrestling team.

Thanks guys...

Now there is more than a 30 year old gap between the youngest and the oldest of us. That's good !!

Not a lot of newcomers... Maybe they prefer to stay in the shadows, that's their choice and we respect that.

Name : Nassim
Age : 25
Location : Paris
Musical talents : I learnt drums by myself, so well, I'm far from being Dave Grohl but I can play rather simple songs with 99% of the people don't noticing the difference. I also can rap through Clint Eastwood, Intergalactic and I hope B.O.B one day ^^
Other : I work on supply chain for Pepsico, on the Nuts and Cereals markets (I mostly do Sales Forecasts and Production Plan), I would like to work in an English-speaking country before the end of the year so if you have contact on human resources, supply chain or production in an international company (food-processing, consumer goods, culture products...) , I would be more than interested !

Name: Kai
Age: 20
Location: Berlin, Germany
Musical talent: I'm originally a piano player, started about twelve years ago. I also play the guitar, the bass and sing. About two or three years ago I played the bass in this instrumental jazz outfit. Currently I'm the bass player, as well as a singer and songwriter in this rock band.
Personal life: Officially I currently study laws in Berlin, but hopefully I'll be able to start studying musical teaching in Potsdam this autumn.

Name: Nianyi (Asian descent and Romanization of names really doesn't work well...)
Age: 19
Location: Hanover, NH, United States
Musical 'Talent': 10 years of piano, 4 of sax and a bit of guitar work, but really I'm miserable at this, haha
Other: I'm a college freshman at Dartmouth College, probably Economics major going pre-med. I'm gonna hate the next 4 years of my life a bit, haha.

Name is Zorg, though not really :D
I'm 15 and I live in London. Only really found this site a couple of weeks ago, and have been lurking since then. Thought now was a good time to step out of the shadows. Main reason was because all of you seem like music connoiseurs and my taste is shamefully immature in comparison, but that will change!
Oh yeah, of course I don't have a job, I'm still in school

Name: Stephan
Age: 21
Location: Lisbon, Portugal (studying here for 5 months), but usually Groningen, the Netherlands.
Musical talent: I play a pretty mean air guitar and my air piano skills are world renowned.
Personal life: Studying International Business & Management, hopefully going for my masters next year.

Name: Henry

Age: 53

Location: Santa Clara, CA

Son - 21
Daughter - 22

Musical Talent - in the past, I played the violin, bass, guitar and a bit of piano, and could sing a little bit. I played violin in the school and all-county (Westchester, NY) orchestras, and played the bass and sang in a pretty tight folk mass group and a very lousy rock band. My acoustic guitar playing was exclusively for family and friends.

I work as a patent licensing manager for a fabless semiconductor company.

Other than music, I am very interested in philosophy (epistemology), politics, world affairs, history, justice, science, literature, art, restaurants, basketball, baseball (including an fantasy league with only American League players), movies, and theater. I also enjoy playing racquetball.

Welcome to the site, Zorg! I think you will discover a lot of new songs with the results of the all-time songs poll.

Henry, I'm a fantasy baseball nut too. I don't do AL-only, though. Never gotten the appeal. But if there's demand beyond us two, I'd love to start an AM fantasy baseball league.

AL only appeal is that you can have a smaller league and challenge folks to include players that aren't all top notch. It was a lot of fun last year with 8 teams in the league.

Name: Alex D

Age: 17

Location: Bethlehem, PA (home of Musikfest!) but intermittently Uppsala, Sweden (home of Uppsala Reggae Festival!)

Occupation: School

Musical talent: I have played the bass for 5 years now, dabbled in piano and guitar, and recently (as in the past month or two) have started branching out into hip-hop production. (I'm no Dr. Dre, at least not yet.)

Count me in for an AMF fantasy baseball league! Given our passion for statistics, and baseball's abundance of them, I think we could definitely get a league together.

Name: Romain
Age: 33
Location: Lyon, France
Musical talent: none, I played violin 5 years, too bad for continue.
Personal life: I work at an electricity producer. I love...my wife, but I also like cooking.
I came to the "pop" music late, in the last 10 years after eating classical music for years.
Favorite artists : Gainsbourg, Prince, Bowie, Brassens

Hey Europeans on this site, I think we should spurn the Americans by doing some fantasy Champions League or something :D

Age: 37
Location: Huntsville, AL
Occupation: Engineer
Musical talent: none, just a fan

Favorite music decade: the 80s (hey, it's when I grew up!)

married with 3.5 kids (one on the way!)

I found this site through a Google search for something, and I was immediately drawn to the all-time great lists. I've been a fan of music lists since I was in middle school, listening religiously to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 on the weekend.

I'm also a huge baseball fan, but alas, I won't have time this season to play Fantasy Baseball. Maybe next year. :)

I thought of doing a Premier League, but i thought that continental countries (France, Germany, Spain, Italy etc) wouldn't know enough players to do it.

And what about a fantasy World Cup ?
That would be more appropriate with WC coming in 3 months now
And of course, there would be France AND Ireland

Name : Doug
Age : 38
Location : Schaumburg, IL (30 mins outside Chicago)
Musical talents : Piano as a kid, learned drums, played them in a band for about 7 years (college and a couple years after)
Other: Married with 2 kids (7 & 4). Work as an IT Systems Analyst in insurance, mainly with Business Intelligence data analytics and reporting software. Very very very busy with that. Besides music, I too am a bit of a sports junkie, particularly baseball and basketball. Track was what I was decent at, though.

Name: Matt Schroeder
Age: 28
Location: Spokane, WA
Musical talents: I've played the piano since I was about 6 years old. Was in my high school's marching band as a xylophone/marimba player.
Personal Info: Currently a student at a local community college, hopefully will be at a local 4-year school in the fall. Have had numerous bouts with depression over the last nine years, which led in no small part to my recent withdrawal from Washington State University.
Interests: Movie junkie. I own close to 500 DVDs ranging in styles from Kurosawa and Bergman to "Mean Girls" and "The Sandlot" (though my tastes tend to run closer to the artsier side of film).
How I found this site: A friend of mine told me about it. He knew I loved "best-of" lists, and showed me this one.

Yo.

I'm Gabriel Szatan, 18. I live in London but am currently on a gap year so I've been moving around a lot. Lived/worked in Nottingham (where I'll be going to university to do American Studies & Politics) for the first seven weeks of the year. My job entails club promotions - it's fun, albeit relatively soulless, but I've been schooling my housemates on stuff like The Knife, Panda Bear, Beach House etc on the sly.

Currently in Malawi teaching at an upstart school for orphans. Rewarding stuff.

I've never been overly proficent at playing instruments (my co-ordination leaves something to be desired I guess) but I'm passable on drums.

I cut my teeth on mid-decade indie-pop and I still can't shake my love for a lot of that stuff. I always used to use AM in the past to see how well certain releases were doing - and I guess because I'm a total sucker for lists - and it was a combination of digging deeper into the past influences through the main site's listings that got me here, where I naturally wanted to get stuck in. It's a strange place to be in a sense: loving the records that some find totally average, and yet not being able to place some masterpieces of bygone eras purely because, y'know, I fell in love with Maximo Park first so what good'll This Heat do me? But I'm seeking to rectify it, or at least find a good balance.

Anyway. Too much for now. The photo is me, fyi.

I finally got around to making that fantasy league we discussed on this page. I created a thread for it here in the off-topic section.

Real name : Jean-Marie
Age : 33
Location : Isles-les-Villenoy (a quiet village near Paris, France)
No wife, no children
Work : Accountant at the SACEM, the french society of authors and composers rights (the french equivalent to ASCAP in the USA, MCPS in Great Britain, GEMA in Germany, SGAE in Spain,...)
I became a regular visitor of Acclaimed Music site around 2003, being a fan of music lists since more than 10 years (before being an AM site fan, I visited a lot the Jumping Fences site and the Julian White rocklist site).
I have no musical talent, I just love music, especially power-pop, pure-pop or melodic-rock (call it as you want).
As a music lover, I'm an "old school" guy : I'm not really into MP3 and all these kind of modern things. I love records as a physical object, I love vynil records. For me, a record is an artistic whole : the cover, the object and the music inside.
I'm a huge record consumer, I purchase from 10 to 15 cds or vynils each month.
Other interests : I play tennis and I love hiking in the mountains :)

Name: Klaus-Peter (Charlie Driggs refers to the main character in Jonathan Demmes eighties film "Something Wild")
Age: 45
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Musical experience: School choir, karaoke expert for Juliane Werdings "Am Tag als Conny Kramer starb", the German version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"
Occupation: journalist (not music)

Hello!

I'm Fredrik from Stockholm, Sweden, 42 years old. For the last five years I've been studying to become a psychologist. I graduated in january. My final exam (paper, thesis) was about emotional (what else) experiences from listening to music, accidentally rock music. My musical journey reminds of the inner journey you might undertake during a psychotherapy.

Somehow I like music that doesn't sound like anything else. Steely Dan, Pixies and Llaura Nyro etc.

Other interrests are NHL hockey (good things are happening in Colorado) and chess.

See you around!

Name: Same as my forum name. I'm not big on "usernames" (to me it's just a way to hide online).

Age: 24

Location: San Francisco, USA

Musical talent: Guitar, since high school. I've always wanted to play piano but I've got clumsy hands.

Personal life: I'm studying psychology at UC San Francisco but I really don't know what to do with myself. My main goal is to make it in the music world (or some type of art; I make amateur films too), but all of my ideas are just that, ideas. I don't have the funds to turn them into anything more. So... student life it is, then maybe just an office job.

I'm Listyguy (most of you know me already). I'm 14, I live near the Big Apple, I Play guitar in a band and play the baritone horn. I also have experince bloggin on rolling stone.

My name is Blair Rose which resulted in me using this unoriginal username.
I am 20 years old and in university in Waterloo, Canada studying math.
I am severely lacking in musical talent.

Name: John
Location: Minnesota
Schooling and occupation: Political Science and Radio Broadcasting degrees currently being put to great use as a telephone operator.
Interests: Sports and fantasy sports... I've played in fantasy sports leagues for almost 20 years now and baseball is my expertise, technology and finding low budget ways to making my music and movies look and sound better. Tinkering I guess whether that be picking up speakers at a garage sale, buying headphones, adjusting TV settings or just moving stuff around the room. My wife thinks I'm insane but I think it's kind of fun.
Musical talent: I like to play guitar but I've never taught myself anything more than how to play most any song with chords and different variations. I never really had the desire to learn scales or anything. I made a cd about 10 years ago that I still keep around but all of the songs I wrote were played at least a key too high. But, I;m glad I recorded it because I lost a folder years ago with all of the songs I've ever written and I don't remember hardly any of them. My mom told me when I was a kid that I would regret quitting piano lessons and she was right.

Name : Domingo
Age : 24
Location : Nijmegen, The Netherlands (Always funny to see Americans just put the abbreviations of their states and assume everybody around the world will know them.)
Musical talents : None, unfortunately.
Other : I am a student, doing a masters of Politics & Parliament. Except for lurking, I'm new here.

Name: Daniel

Age: 30

Location: Been living in London for the last ten years but grew up in Cape Town

Musical talents: Play the piano

Why this site?: Been visiting the AM site and forum regularly for the last 7 years but only post once in a while. Should really start participating in more polls. Like how people can voice their opinions in the forum without being wankers about it. And I know it sounds cheesy, but I'm grateful for all the excellent music I have discovered through this site.

Wow, there's a surprising amount of politic students/graduates here/any kinda social science. I would bet that most of us are left on the politics scale, though I won't speculate why...

I put the abbreviation for my state too. I'm from Athens, Georgia, USA, which is a pretty normal middle-sized American college town with one exception: it has a randomly incredible music scene. R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel, The B-52's, Of Montreal and others all hail from Athens, making it one of the best American cities in terms of music per capita.

and you forgot about the Drive-by Truckers, the best traditional rock group alive