The N&G Top 500 Albums of All Time!!!

MikeH said:
And there's no way that people won't be influenced, even unconsciously, about what they put once people start posting their personal top 50s. As you said, people will start thinking "oh i hadn't thought of that album!" and it will make its way into their lists instead of peoples' gut reactions to favorites. I'd rather see peoples' unfettered ballots later on then see people's lists trickle in over the next month or so. I think we will see much more interesting results that way. My personal interest in this will be to see where peoples' tastes organically lie and also to learn about albums I may have overlooked or haven't revisited in awhile.
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I don't really see how that's a bad thing, though. It would be basically impossible to do a top 50 or 100 albums off the top of our heads when most of us here have probably listened to several thousands of albums over the course of our lifetimes. Especially nowadays, where people have record collections, hard drives full of mp3s, streams they've saved, CDs in their parents' basement, etc., it can be really easy to overlook things. Taking a while to do it and seeing what other people are talking about may jog our memories to make our lists more accurate.
MikeH said:
If we have already seen everyone's ballots, then what's the point? Tabulating scores at that point is moot and it's going to be hard work for @Woob_woob to put all the scores together. The only downside, as I see it, to not releasing ballots earlier is that we just have to wait longer to see results. I'm okay with that because I think it will lead to more interesting discussion later.
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Not sure if you were active in the AOTY thread that @Woob_woob ran but there were usually far fewer people posting lists in that thread and it was still fun and usually surprising to see the final tallied lists.
 
BjorgenFjorgen said:
I don't really see how that's a bad thing, though. It would be basically impossible to do a top 50 or 100 albums off the top of our heads when most of us here have probably listened to several thousands of albums over the course of our lifetimes. Especially nowadays, where people have record collections, hard drives full of mp3s, streams they've saved, CDs in their parents' basement, etc., it can be really easy to overlook things. Taking a while to do it and seeing what other people are talking about may jog our memories to make our lists more accurate.

Not sure if you were active in the AOTY thread that @Woob_woob ran but there were usually far fewer people posting lists in that thread and it was still fun and usually surprising to see the final tallied lists.
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Agree with everything you say. Makes much more sense to me! I just don’t understand the opposite point of view at all myself...
 
Thackeraye said:
My only fear with a list of 100. Might put a few folk off. I’m happy to do it as it’s something to do during lockdown, but it could be faff for some...
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The thing is, with the way we're talking about doing the point system, people who only want to do 50 could just do 50 and have those albums weighted the same as others who are doing 100. It just means the person who does 100 albums brings attention to/gets points assigned to more albums.
 
RowBearToe said:
The thing is, with the way we're talking about doing the point system, people who only want to do 50 could just do 50 and have those albums weighted the same as others who are doing 100. It just means the person who does 100 albums brings attention to/gets points assigned to more albums.
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That’s a great point.

As for the 50-or-100 debate, y’all will be surprised with how fast you can fill up 100 slots if you just sit down for half hour scrolling through your collection/Discogs and frantically typing down your favorites. The winnowing down and ordering will of course take longer.
 
bettim84 said:
That’s a great point.

As for the 50-or-100 debate, y’all will be surprised with how fast you can fill up 100 slots if you just sit down for half hour scrolling through your collection/Discogs and frantically typing down your favorites. The winnowing down and ordering will of course take longer.
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But the whittling down is the point of it. Anyone can bang off a huge list and stick a form of order on it. The whittling down is where the consideration comes in and that’s what makes the exercise worthwhile. Team 50 over here.
 
BjorgenFjorgen said:
I don't really see how that's a bad thing, though. It would be basically impossible to do a top 50 or 100 albums off the top of our heads when most of us here have probably listened to several thousands of albums over the course of our lifetimes. Especially nowadays, where people have record collections, hard drives full of mp3s, streams they've saved, CDs in their parents' basement, etc., it can be really easy to overlook things. Taking a while to do it and seeing what other people are talking about may jog our memories to make our lists more accurate.
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You'll have a good chunk of time to make a top 50 list. Nobody is asking for you to come up with a top 50 list in the next 2 hours. I don't think coming up with a top 50 without seeing other peoples' lists is a monumental task at all for anybody here. Will you forget things? Sure! But I think that's part of the fun of it. Seeing things later and thinking "how did I forget that one!" versus seeing things now before you make your list and thinking "oh I forgot that one. Let me put it on my list now too!" I don't think peoples' rankings will be affected much by seeing other peoples' lists, but I think the overall N&G album list will get more homogenous simply from being reminded of albums from other people. I find it more interesting to see peoples' raw lists and not their manicured ones.

Going through your music library (records + streaming) and rediscovering albums that are important to you as you make your list and then trying to rank those in order of importance is a fun task. I guess I see the personal top 50s as more of an individual task that would be fun for me. Then the N&G top list reveal stirs discussion (How did that get ranked so high??) and people's individual lists bring on more discussion as well as music discovery. I'd get the most fun out of it and learn the most that way. I fully understand that not everyone will agree with that though. And it seems to me that some people would rather have the discussion started ASAP instead of waiting a bit while people compile lists.

I was not in the AOTY threads but I also think that's a bit different for me in terms of what I would want to get out of that thread vs what this thread would do for me. I'd participate in the AOTY thread to learn about new music and the rankings would be secondary to me. This thread would be more interesting to me if we have to wait to see the final results and see them in a slow reveal instead of people listing their rankings right now.

I think a lot of the same discussions will be had either way we do it but it's just a matter of when they happen. I'm fine waiting and taking time to make my own list in the meantime.
 
Joe Mac said:
But the whittling down is the point of it. Anyone can bang off a huge list and stick a form of order on it. The whittling down is where the consideration comes in and that’s what makes the exercise worthwhile. Team 50 over here.
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Well we DO agree on this part of it haha. I think personal 50 and, if the results warrant it, a N&G top 100 based on the full results would be rad. Once we get past personal 50, I'll definitely tune out and just start chucking things on and doing more arbitrary ranking in the back half.
 
MikeH said:
Well we DO agree on this part of it haha. I think personal 50 and, if the results warrant it, a N&G top 100 based on the full results would be rad. Once we get past personal 50, I'll definitely tune out and just start chucking things on and doing more arbitrary ranking in the back half.
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The plan is a top 500 though (clues in the title) and there are more than enough of us to get at least 500 individual albums from that (Rolling Stone managed it from contributors doing the same sized list, 50). We get way over 100 usually in the AoTY list off what are usually smaller submission sizes.
 
We’re a bunch of music forum people right? I think our ability to find stuff to talk, laugh, and argue over will exceed even our own expectations despite personal lists being kept private until after the deadline.

In the same way that I can see it being fun to persuade others to change their ranking and exchange friendly banter, I can see it being not only more representative of our own tastes but even more fun to build all that suspense up for a big reveal and lots of surprises and lots of people being both overly joyed and outraged that particular albums did or did not make the cut.
 
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Joe Mac said:
The plan is a top 500 though (clues in the title) and there are more than enough of us to get at least 500 individual albums from that (Rolling Stone managed it from contributors doing the same sized list, 50). We get way over 100 usually in the AoTY list off what are usually smaller submission sizes.
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Right, but Rolling Stone also had 300 people submitting lists of 50 so they had 15,000 possible unique choices. If 20 or 30 people here do it, there's a very high probability that the last 200+ will only have 1 vote. I don't feel strongly about that either way though. A top 500 would still be cool to have from a music discovery point of view! From a data/ranking point of view, once we get past 100 it doesn't mean much but that's cool too haha.
 
MikeH said:
Right, but Rolling Stone also had 300 people submitting lists of 50 so they had 15,000 possible unique choices. If 20 or 30 people here do it, there's a very high probability that the last 200+ will only have 1 vote. I don't feel strongly about that either way though. A top 500 would still be cool to have from a music discovery point of view! From a data/ranking point of view, once we get past 100 it doesn't mean much but that's cool too haha.
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The hope is that we can drag in more of the forum than that, but yeah there is usually a hardcore element that contributes to these things.
 
MikeH said:
Right, but Rolling Stone also had 300 people submitting lists of 50 so they had 15,000 possible unique choices. If 20 or 30 people here do it, there's a very high probability that the last 200+ will only have 1 vote. I don't feel strongly about that either way though. A top 500 would still be cool to have from a music discovery point of view! From a data/ranking point of view, once we get past 100 it doesn't mean much but that's cool too haha.
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I trust @Woob_woob on this - let’s set a limit on each list, and based on how many we get in they can use that to set the size of the chart? Feels like the most important limit at the moment is the personal list, then we flow off the number of submissions.
 
Joe Mac said:
The hope is that we can drag in more of the forum than that, but yeah there is usually a hardcore element that contributes to these things.
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Happy to help spread the word on that front. I would absolutely LOVE to get 100+ people participating in this. No matter how we end up doing things, I think it'll be fun.

Tys1 said:
We’re a bunch of music forum people right? I think our ability to find stuff to talk, laugh, and argue over will not be severely hindered just because personal lists are kept private until after the deadline.
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I just like the idea of the end results being as unique as possible. But I think that just comes from me spending too much time in college analyzing data sets and doing focus groups and boring stuff like that 🤓 haha.
 
Joe Mac said:
But the whittling down is the point of it. Anyone can bang off a huge list and stick a form of order on it. The whittling down is where the consideration comes in and that’s what makes the exercise worthwhile. Team 50 over here.
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I’m team 100 for the exact same reason. Imagine the horror of looking at an album you have strong feelings for and then realizing it’s not even one of your top 100! That’s what I’m here for.
 
MikeH said:
I just don't want you to see how highly I rank every Father John Misty album!! (jk he wouldn't make a top 500 list for me...)
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FJM is definitely in my top 100, currently low-50s but he may drop further.

I’ve always kept a top 40-50 list around but my latest version was limited to one album per artist. I’m looking forward to not having such a (self-imposed) limitation, because I’ll probably end up learning that I like my fourth-favorite Belle & Sebastian more than any Pink Floyd album, for example.
 
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