You can view the final interactive Flash version here:
http://lab.zoho.co.uk/lab/end-of-year-top-albums/
My obsession with End of Year Best Album Charts continues!
I have adapted the NME’s Top Albums 1974 to 2010 interactive I did previously so that it now works with lots of different charts (listed below) to provide not only a break down of music genres for each chart but it also aggregates the results and gives you the End of Year Top Albums of 2010 chart:
Artist | Album | Score* | ||
1: | ![]() |
Arcade Fire | The Suburbs | 3432 |
2: | ![]() |
LCD Soundsystem | This Is Happening | 2913 |
3: | ![]() |
The National | High Violet | 2788 |
4: | ![]() |
Beach House | Teen Dream | 2581 |
5: | ![]() |
Deerhunter | Halcyon Digest | 2438 |
6: | ![]() |
Kanye West | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | 2366 |
7: | ![]() |
Vampire Weekend | Contra | 2015 |
8: | ![]() |
Caribou | Swim | 1933 |
9: | ![]() |
Big Boi | Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty | 1920 |
10: | ![]() |
Janelle Monae | The ArchAndroid | 1829 |
11: | ![]() |
Sleigh Bells | Treats | 1813 |
12: | ![]() |
Yeasayer | Odd Blood | 1780 |
13: | ![]() |
The Black Keys | Brothers | 1709 |
14: | ![]() |
Joanna Newsom | Have One on Me | 1614 |
15: | ![]() |
Gorillaz | Plastic Beach | 1596 |
16: | ![]() |
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti | Before Today | 1551 |
17: | ![]() |
Foals | Total Life Forever | 1415 |
18: | ![]() |
Flying Lotus | Cosmogramma | 1284 |
19: | ![]() |
Robyn | Body Talk Pt. 1 | 1271 |
20: | ![]() |
Sufjan Stevens | The Age of Adz | 1238 |
21: | ![]() |
Titus Andronicus | The Monitor | 1160 |
22: | These New Puritans | Hidden | 1143 | |
23: | ![]() |
Grinderman | Grinderman 2 | 1141 |
24: | ![]() |
Best Coast | Crazy for You | 1050 |
25: | ![]() |
Gil Scott-Heron | I’m New Here | 1040 |
26: | ![]() |
MGMT | Congratulations | 1027 |
27: | ![]() |
Warpaint | The Fool | 1026 |
28: | ![]() |
Laura Marling | I Speak Because I Can | 1026 |
29: | ![]() |
Avi Buffalo | Avi Buffalo | 895 |
30: | ![]() |
Liars | Sisterworld | 856 |
31: | ![]() |
No Age | Everything in Between | 831 |
32: | ![]() |
Four Tet | There Is Love in You | 825 |
33: | ![]() |
The Roots | How I Got Over | 823 |
34: | ![]() |
Surfer Blood | Astro Coast | 793 |
35: | ![]() |
John Grant | Queen of Denmark | 764 |
36: | ![]() |
Crystal Castles | Crystal Castles | 708 |
37: | ![]() |
Swans | My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky | 688 |
38: | ![]() |
Villagers | Becoming a Jackal | 671 |
39: | ![]() |
Hot Chip | One Life Stand | 655 |
40: | ![]() |
Wavves | King of the Beach | 651 |
41: | ![]() |
Twin Shadow | Forget | 630 |
42: | ![]() |
Neil Young | Le Noise | 621 |
43: | ![]() |
Marnie Stern | Marnie Stern | 620 |
44: | ![]() |
Spoon | Transference | 602 |
45: | ![]() |
The Walkmen | Lisbon | 600 |
46: | ![]() |
Drake | Thank Me Later | 593 |
47: | ![]() |
Pantha Du Prince | Black Noise | 579 |
48: | ![]() |
Mumford & Sons | Sigh No More | 571 |
49: | ![]() |
Phosphorescent | Here’s to Taking It Easy | 567 |
50: | ![]() |
Oneohtrix Point Never | Returnal | 561 |
*The score is the sum of 100 – chart position for each chart appearance. 100 was used as it was the largest chart. i.e. Rough Trade’s Top 100.
I have also added a table view that lets you see all the albums overall ranking, genres and chart appearances.
http://lab.zoho.co.uk/lab/end-of-year-top-albums/#/?showSearch=true
You can also filter/sort this view which is kind of cool because it lets you create “charts” for specific genres. So for example if you wanted to see the top Electronic albums of the year than simply go here:
Here are the charts used to create the Best Album of 2010 chart:
A.V. Club, Amazon, American Songwriter, Billboard, Bowlegs, Clash, Consequence of Sound, Daily Telegraph, Drowned in Sound, Faster Louder, Gorilla vs. Bear, Mojo, MusicOMH, NME, No Ripcord, Paste, Pitchfork, PopMatters, Prefix, Q Magazine, Rave Magazine, Rhapsody SoundBoard, Rolling Stone, Rough Trade, Slant Magazine, Spin, Spinner, State, Stereogum, The Fly, The Guardian, The Line Of Best Fit, The Quietus, The Skinny, The Tidal Wave of Indifference, The Times, Tiny Mix Tapes and Uncut.
If anyone knows any “End of Year” best album charts that should be included than let me know and I will plug them in.
11 Comments
Very cool overall, but it sounds like your stated scoring mechanism would give more weight to albums in the longer charts. Is this the case?
Hi Jeremy
The weighting for albums is based on the sum of (100 – the position in each chart)
So an album with a No 1 position in a chart would get +99 to it’s score regardless of the size of the chart.
As I thought. I’ve been working in a not entirely dissimilar ranking space for much of the last year so your scoring mechanism jumped out at me as being subject to a few issues.
To provide a simple example, imagine for a moment that the largest chart has five entries in it and that a shorter chart has two. The five-entry chart will contribute 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 0 points to the results, for a total of ten. The two entry chart will contribute 4 + 3, for a total of seven.
This has a number of side effects, the most obvious of which is that the two-entry chart ends up providing a smaller contribution to the final scores than the larger chart.
Another side effect is that once you include a number of additional longer charts in the data set, albums appearing on them but further down them can effectively gang up and outweigh the contributed albums of smaller charts, even ones ranking much higher within them.
There are a range of options available but as always they each have their pros and cons. Without making this comment much longer (or having to invoice you ;) ) there are a few brief suggestions I can make:
Whatever you do, strive to keep the scoring mechanism operating on a single dimension of information if at all possible. I doubt you would do this but mention it because it is always tempting, always looks like it will create better results, and almost always makes a difficult scoring mechanism even harder to get under control.
The most obvious (but likely the most problematic in its own ways) option is to restrict each chart to the length of the shortest chart. This is by far the simplest but is highly sensitive on the length of the shortest chart.
As the next most obvious alternative that is still based on your current scoring mechanism, consider determining the total contribution of each chart using your current scoring mechanism and then weight the charts (and in turn, their contributed scores) so that the charts all contribute equally.
There are an infinite number of further options, of course, but this comment is long enough already so I’ll leave it as one of those “exercises for the reader” :).
re: “Whatever you do, strive to keep the scoring mechanism operating on a single dimension of information if at all possible. I doubt you would do this”
When I wrote “I doubt you would do this” I meant to write “I doubt you would deviate from this”.
Hi Jeremy
Thanks for your feed back, all very valid and interesting points. I did go through some of these thought processes when i was working out how best to aggregate the Top Album Charts and “score” each album. As you have suggested, I did consider only including the first 20 albums from each chart but than this would not really work with the Top Ten Charts which would possibly need to be excluded as a result. I think in the end my decision to include all the albums from each chart was based on the motivation behind why I love End of Year charts and that is primarily to discover new music! So the more albums included the more there was for me and other people to discover! Also some of the more interesting discoverers can often be buried down the bottom of these charts, especially with the larger ones.
I did think about different approaches to scoring each album that would try to incorporate it’s proportion of the chart it was placed in but in the end I decided to try and keep it as simple as possible. So effectively a no 1 in each chart scores the same regardless. It is true that this means the larger charts have more of an influences over the final result and also that some albums can “gang up” but in same ways I kind of like that. I like bigger charts as they give us more information so I guess in some ways I am happy for the bigger charts, which are contributing more, to therefore influences the results more.
However, you have given me some ideas. As the whole thing is interactive and all the scores, counts, rankings etc are actually calculated on the fly in the Flash front end I see no reason why I cannot give the user the option to play around with how these are calculated for example limit the results to just the Top 10 albums from each chart.
One thing to point out is that the genre “ranking” which determines the genre bubbles’ proximity to the centre of the circle does take into account the different chart sizes. As this ranking is trying to reflect the composition/nature of each chart, an indie album appearing once in a chart of 100 has less weight than if it appears in a chart of 10. The genre ranking also takes into account the position of that indie album in the chart. This was important because the position of the bubble need to be able to distinguish between a chart with an indie album ranked at 1 and a chart with an indie album ranked at number 10. i.e. this chart is more indie than overs because it has more albums ranked higher proportionally.
PS Yes, please do not invoice me! :-)
Your point scheme produces results that are only very minorly different from simply counting the polls, and simple poll counts have the distinct advantage of being easily understood, so I encourage you to consider dropping the points entirely!
Any chance you could provide the data in downloadable form, too?
Hi Glenn
No worries, I have added links to CSV exports of the three original source tables here:
http://lab.zoho.co.uk/2011/01/11/end-of-year-top-albums-2010-raw-data/
Let me know if you need anything else and can’t wait to see what you do with it.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Taking a mass of data and making it’s simple, accessible and interactive. I love it! Can’t wait to listen to those I haven’t heard so far. Firing up Spotify now … Thanks!!!
I have added functionality that lets me limit the number of albums aggregated from the source charts.
So if you want to see what this visual looks look just using the Top 10 albums from each chart than here it is:
http://lab.zoho.co.uk/lab/end-of-year-top-albums/index-limit.php
For the moment the limit number is passed in via the HTML page and there is no user interface to change this but if I get time I will add the ability for the user to set the limit from within the visualization.
A Needle version of the underlying data is now up, too: Album of the Year. Visually this is the antithesis of a Flash visualization, but because Needle is data-agnostic, you get more flexibility in querying and analysis. I added various rankings of genres by poll, polls by genre, albums by genre, poll similarity by album overlap, and some other things. Any view in Needle can be exported in text, CSV or JSON, too, so that should save you the work of adding dynamic exports to your visualization!
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[...] End of Year Top Albums 2010 [zoho.co.uk] provides a visual summary of the most successful music albums in 2010, based on the aggregation of a large variety of music rankings and charts, ranging from Amazon.com‘s list, over the Daily Telegraph to Rolling Stone and The Times). [...]
[...] End of Year Top Albums 2010 [zoho.co.uk] provides a visual summary of the most successful music albums in 2010, based on the aggregation of a large variety of music rankings and charts, ranging from Amazon.com‘s list, over the Daily Telegraph to Rolling Stone and The Times). [...]
[...] End of Year Top Albums 2010 [zoho.co.uk] provides a visual summary of the most successful music albums in 2010, based on the aggregation of a large variety of music rankings and charts, ranging from Amazon.com‘s list, over the Daily Telegraph to Rolling Stone and The Times). [...]
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[...] End of Year Top Albums 2010 [zoho.co.uk] provides a visual summary of the most successful music albums in 2010, based on the aggregation of a large variety of music rankings and charts, ranging from Amazon.com‘s list, over the Daily Telegraph to Rolling Stone and The Times). [...]
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