The reason for all this list-hate is, slightly paradoxically I guess, a big-ass list that has taken up a lot of my time for the past month.
You may have seen from my previous 2 posts that I compiled a list of my top 50 albums as part of a "thing" that a bunch of my "friends" on Twitter were doing.
There was only one rule for those compiling lists, and that was that a maximum of 3 albums per artist were allowed in your list. Pretty much anything else was fair game - live albums, compilations (although the majority of people shied away from best-ofs). Some people took it upon themselves to limit themselves further to the extent that they only allowed themselves 1 album per act. I did this myself and found that it made for a more varied list - you would have had more Mountain Goats, Pixies, Pavement, Prince, Teenage Fanclub etc otherwise.
So fool that I am, I went and volunteered to compile everyone's lists into one big list and post the results. Now, I did this last summer on a much smaller scale for a few people's lists of favourite songs. It was during the time when MrsJ was working 4 nights a week so I had a lot more time to myself of an evening. This time it got a bit out of hand.
We ended up with 40 people submitting lists, and by that stage I was ruing the fact that my spreadsheet skills aren't on a par with my nun-chuck skills. I gave points to each album/artist depending on their position in people's lists - 50pts for first place down to 1pt for 50th place.
And, after much hard work, I did it. It hurt a lot, but I did it. I'm going to post a link to it in a minute so you can see it in all its glory, but here's a quick preview.
The most popular artists ended up looking like this...
...and the top 30 albums were...
I had 6 of those artists & 3 of the albums in my list, so maybe I'm not as mainstream as I tend to think I am.
Anyway, here's the link to the big spreadsheet for you peruse at your leisure. Just don't ask me to do it again.
