Charts

At the end of the year, countless outlets – both print and digital – put together their own selection of the “best” that the past twelve months have brought to their particular field. Alongside sweets, relatives and gifts of varying degrees of desirability, we've also grown used to a glut of lists covering every conceivable commercial category: films, cars, TV series, restaurants, holiday destinations, video games and tech gadgets, clothing, records (and so on and so forth). Back in 2011, the webzine Drowned In Sound coined the term Listageddon for the sense of overwhelm generated by this deluge of recommendations – paradoxically designed to help us find our way through our era of information overload.

For more than twenty years, OndaRock too has played its part in this Christmas ritual, and our now-traditional year-end “big list” is invariably the most-visited content on the site during the winter months. Readers' enthusiasm for this kind of round-up led the editorial team, throughout December 2023, to put together a survey of the “top 20” lists from the leading international music outlets (Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, Mojo, NME, Rolling Stone Usa, The Wire, PopMatters, Billboard, The Quietus, DIY Magazine, Uncut, Metacritic). Comparing the various selections reveals both similarities and differences, and above all brings to the surface a handful of recurring questions – ones that pretty much all of us have asked ourselves in the face of this kind of exercise, and which keep resurfacing in the comments on social media.

This short guide aims to sketch out some possible answers, limited to the world of music and certainly not the final word on the matter. But hopefully useful for shedding light on a few key aspects of a tool that by now we take for granted, yet is in fact often misunderstood.

1. Why do all these charts look so similar?
2. Why are they so far apart from one another?
3. Why do we even make them?
4. How are they compiled?
5. Why do they always come out earlier?
6. How come that album isn't on there?
7. Do they really represent a cross-section of the current scene?
8. So, in conclusion, what should we make of them?

1. Why do these lists all look so similar?

This is one of the most common observations. Certain names (in 2023, unquestionably Caroline Polachek, Olivia Rodrigo, Mitski, Boygenius, Billy Woods & Kenny Segal, Wednesday, Lankum) tend to crop up in pretty much every selection, at least among the “generalist” outlets that don't focus on a single musical strand (though, looking closer, these often have a clear bias toward the indie/alternative sphere and English-language artists).

Barring any surprises, these artists are simply the hyped names of the moment, and beyond whatever genuine merit their presence across so many lists may reflect, they also benefit from sheer visibility: their albums were among the most talked-about of the preceding months, which drove a huge number of listeners (music critics included) to take an interest in their music, thereby expanding their pool of potential admirers. And of detractors too, of course – but given how these lists are typically put together (see “How are they compiled?”), that tends to have little effect on the outcome.

There are other reasons, too, why – faced with N separate lists – we tend to notice mainly the elements they have in common, especially the ones we already know, and about which we may already hold strong opinions. The so-called frequency illusion is a cognitive bias that makes us notice something repeatedly once we've spotted it for the first time, leading us to believe it's more common than it actually is. It likely stems from a combination of selective attention and confirmation bias, and when applied to the informational avalanche of Listageddon, it can lead us to focus only on what can't really enrich us – since it's already known and digested – while missing out on new and rewarding discoveries. ⬏

2. Why are they so far apart from one another?

This is the opposite reaction, and it's almost as common. It's usually accompanied by negative remarks: “If these are supposedly the best, how come nobody seems to agree?”, “Who on earth are all these names that weren't on any of the other lists I've seen?”. Indeed, among the lists circulating online, no two contain the same names. Even where there is overlap, rankings often vary considerably, adding to the sense of disorientation. Strip away the recurring names, and it seems like the editorial teams of different outlets lived through entirely different musical years – and to a large extent, that may well be true.

The fragmentation of consensus and of music audiences is a phenomenon that's been under way for some time (essentially ever since there was simply too much pop music for any one person to listen to it all), but in recent years it has accelerated dramatically for a number of reasons that can be summed up in a single word: the internet. In his introduction to Consequence of Sound's 2023 list, journalist Wren Graves pointed to the “death of music monoculture” – that is, the fading possibility of identifying certain genres or names as a shared point of reference for everyone, while also being representative of the field's full diversity. Pursuing this line of thought, Graves suggests that “maybe that's not such a bad thing after all”, and that the inevitable incompatibility between the summaries produced by different observers is actually a strength: it makes each individual selection a richer resource, and allows for a more thorough spotlighting of the ever-growing number of great records made by lesser-known artists.

Of course, along with the idea of a single unifying perspective, we also lose the claim to objectivity that some readers hold so dear. That might be a hard pill to swallow, but well: welcome to postmodernity. ⬏

3. Why do people make them?

Here the answer is simple: to boost the numbers. Sales, in the case of print magazines; page views, for online outlets. Either way, these lists are eagerly awaited even by casual readers and reliably generate a spike in traffic. As for web publications, the many links scattered throughout a list page are also an effective way of driving fresh visits to archived content (reviews and artist profiles in particular).

It might sound purely cynical, but it's exactly what readers want: prompts to get interested in musicians, and opportunities to dig deeper into their work. The mechanism benefits the artists too – at least those who make the cut – drawing new listeners to check out their albums thanks to the appealing game of the “best-of list”. ⬏

4. How are they compiled?

To cut a long story short: nobody really knows, at least in the vast majority of cases. Very few outlets explicitly state the method used to compile their list, or the make-up of the "jury" involved. OndaRock is one of them. The UK's The Wire is essentially the only major English-language outlet to have made both elements public: the list of contributors is posted online every year, while the algorithm was described back in 2011 (and, at least up to 2022, still seemed to be in use). Curiously, it's essentially the same method used by OndaRock: a version of the Borda count, whereby each contributor draws up a personal list of N items, and each item on the list is given a descending score (e.g. 20 for the first, 19 for the second, and so on, in the case of N=20 items). The overall ranking is simply obtained by adding up the scores each item receives and sorting them from highest to lowest.

Among the rest, some (e.g. DIY, Stereogum) mention some form of "voting" among contributors, suggesting there's some algorithmic procedure behind the final result. For aggregators like Metacritic, or platforms built on user contributions (e.g. Rateyourmusic), it's clear that the verdict is based on the scores individual members assign to each record. In the case of Paste and Albumism, the model is a hybrid of staff picks and reader picks, but how the two are combined isn't disclosed. Beats Per Minute and Clash mention internal discussions to agree on the ranking put to readers, while non-music outlets such as Esquire and Business Insider hand the job of drawing up the list to a single writer, whose byline appears on the piece.

Such a lack of clarity might come as a surprise, especially given that Anglo-American journalism tends to hold itself to fairly high standards of transparency compared to its Italian counterpart. Perhaps the conclusion is that music journalism (and arts journalism more broadly) is something of a world unto itself. But the lack of clarity in this field might also have the advantage of making final results harder to "steer", keeping interested parties from meddling. ⬏

5. Why do they always come out earlier and earlier?

Undeniably true. Year after year, we've watched the publication of year-end lists creep earlier and earlier. To the point that some outlets (like Pitchfork this year) have gone as far as including albums released in December of the previous year in their lists — a surreal but "necessary" move, so as not to penalise titles that came out after the chart had already gone live.

The phenomenon has some simple explanations: outlets are trying to beat the competition, lists get used for giving (and asking for) gifts and so are handy right around the holiday shopping season, and December tends to be a quiet month for major releases. That last point, though, isn't unrelated to the ever-earlier publication dates of these lists: for an album to have any hope of making the coveted year-end lists, it needs to already be out by the time those lists are being drawn up. It's therefore, at least in part, a vicious circle, and at the moment neither music journalists nor record labels (nor, in the end, readers) seem particularly interested in breaking it. ⬏

6. How come that album isn't on there?

We've all thought it, let's be honest. Looking at a list of titles, we measure it against our own expectations, and where we spot a glaring discrepancy we can be seized by something bordering on outrage: "Wait, my favourite record isn't even on here?". Depending on the case, accusations of snobbery, ignorance or sloppiness tend to follow.

These are understandable reactions, and sometimes, of course, reasonable ones too. But often the absence of a specific title has more to do with the structure of the music market and the mechanics behind how the list is compiled than with the will of individual contributors.

As already noted: far from crowning the "best" in any objective sense, year-end lists are a measure of how widely appreciated an album is within a community — that of the list's own contributors. Global and local hype — or hyper-local hype, tied to a very specific community — starts out in pole position, and generally speaking, the titles with the best odds are those that, stylistically, sit in territory shared by many people's tastes. "Genre" releases (that is, tied to strands considered "peripheral" to the community's main focus) and "fan" records (like yet another solid album by an artist who isn't currently in the spotlight) have a much harder time breaking through.

This doesn't stop individual contributors from making their own recommendations, of course: they will almost certainly have expressed a preference for artists of very different levels of fame, including plenty of "outsiders" and "cult" names known only within their own specific niches. It's simply that, at the point of aggregation — whether algorithmic or the result of discussion — the most widely shared names tend to win out. The many "outlier" picks left out of the final list remain available to browse, in cases — like OndaRock's — where individual contributions are given their own dedicated space in the feature. ⬏

7. Do they really offer a snapshot of the current landscape?

Here the key word is the indefinite article, "a". Each list represents one perspective — not the only possible one, not the best one — on that vast and essentially ungraspable entity that is today's musical landscape. A hydra made up of tens of thousands of releases a year, spread across countless languages and genres, which cannot be faithfully captured by a single snapshot, however composite and carefully weighed it might be. A list is, in its own way, a map that helps whoever consults it find their bearings, but it does so from a specific and inherently limiting point of view: that of whoever compiled it. It will therefore reflect the priorities, strengths and biases of the vision behind it, as well as — in the case of multi-contributor lists — the inevitable "artefacts" of the method used to aggregate individual contributions into a single ranking.

Perhaps, in fact, even more than as a portrait of a given year's musical face, a list is useful as a mirror of the outlet putting it forward. It's an effective tool for forming an idea — or updating one you already have — of what its key areas of focus are, its favourite artists, its attention to specific geographic regions and communities. In short, for getting a snapshot of its editorial identity. Useful for judging how closely it aligns with your own tastes, or simply for becoming more aware of your own sources of information. And for building your own mental map of which sites or magazines to consult for tips of a particular kind (the webzine that's your best bet for discovering everything worth knowing in contemporary metal won't necessarily be the same one that gives you a satisfying overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the domestic mainstream). ⬏

8. So, in conclusion, what should we make of all this?

Any use is legitimate, from cathartic insults to comparative analysis. The key suggestion, though, is to take these lists cum grano salis and in good sport: they're games, not competitions, and they're worth exactly what they're worth, with no pretence of objectivity. Dwelling only on how far they diverge from your own point of view isn't very rewarding: it's better to pick out one or more lists that seem interesting and let yourself be intrigued by titles you don't yet know (or give a second chance to ones that, heard before, didn't leave a mark). An effective strategy is to start from lists where you sense a good overlap with your own taste: the names on them are more likely to be rewarding. But the opposite approach, especially for the more daring, can also bring surprises: picking out a list full of unfamiliar names or artists far outside your usual wheelhouse can open a window onto a corner of the musical landscape you'd never engaged with, leading to discoveries you'd hardly stumble on from within your own comfort zone.

Lists compiled by a single contributor have the advantage of expressing a personal vision more clearly, one that's easier to click with. That's why OndaRock always publishes the individual lists too, which serve as the ingredients of its own "master chart," and why we'd recommend that anyone unwilling to settle for a passing glance scroll through the individual contributions in search of picks that spark their curiosity. (By the way: did you know that clicking the triangle at the bottom of each personal list lets you read the entries beyond the top ten?) ⬏

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