4 ms·

or they can just leave it upto the judgement of masses and just rank on album sales(probably streams now). You are right and that it is hard for any ranking li

or they can just leave it upto the judgement of masses and just rank on album sales(probably streams now). You are right and that it is hard for any ranking like this to be objective. If I remove my bias for old albums and just look at two of the more accessible new entrants in the list, Taylor Swift's Red and Arctic Monkey's AM. AM was generally rated much better and even I would have personally rated it higher.

CydeWeys 6y ago
There are lots of lists out there by total album sales, as that's a simple methodology, but personally I don't find those lists useful for discovering good music or guiding me towards music I may already know about but haven't listened to in depth. Pretty much everything in at least the top 100 I'll already know about (because it's literally the bestselling music of all time), and to the extent I'm not listening to it already, it's because I know it's not my cup of tea. E.g. I know Michael Jackson has gotta be in the top 3, if not #1, but I also already know exactly my opinion on his music. So best album lists, while of course not objective, are actually useful to me in a way that sales rankings aren't, so long as I find myself roughly in accordance with the editorial judgment of the list makers. And that is very much the case with the Rolling Stone lists, though not the recent list as much as the previous lists. Meanwhile, I wouldn't get much use out of a ranking of modern country / rap (either best-selling or "best") simply because I tend not to like those genres generally. Rock (particularly classic/hard/blues/prog/experimental) is my favorite genre, and Rolling Stone is more a rock music magazine than anything else, although based on the way these lists are going that seems to be less so over time.
Apocryphon 6y ago
As far as that era of music goes, I would think Franz Ferdinand, Hot Fuss by the Killers, or Silent Alarm by Bloc Party would be more deserving than AM. Why does Arctic Monkey need to have two albums on this list? Edit: never mind, guess their debut was on the 2012 list and then removed in favor of AM on the latest list.

CydeWeys 6y ago

There are lots of lists out there by total album sales, as that's a simple methodology, but personally I don't find those lists useful for discovering good music or guiding me towards music I may already know about but haven't listened to in depth. Pretty much everything in at least the top 100 I'll already know about (because it's literally the bestselling music of all time), and to the extent I'm not listening to it already, it's because I know it's not my cup of tea. E.g. I know Michael Jackson has gotta be in the top 3, if not #1, but I also already know exactly my opinion on his music. So best album lists, while of course not objective, are actually useful to me in a way that sales rankings aren't, so long as I find myself roughly in accordance with the editorial judgment of the list makers. And that is very much the case with the Rolling Stone lists, though not the recent list as much as the previous lists. Meanwhile, I wouldn't get much use out of a ranking of modern country / rap (either best-selling or "best") simply because I tend not to like those genres generally. Rock (particularly classic/hard/blues/prog/experimental) is my favorite genre, and Rolling Stone is more a rock music magazine than anything else, although based on the way these lists are going that seems to be less so over time.

Apocryphon 6y ago

As far as that era of music goes, I would think Franz Ferdinand, Hot Fuss by the Killers, or Silent Alarm by Bloc Party would be more deserving than AM. Why does Arctic Monkey need to have two albums on this list? Edit: never mind, guess their debut was on the 2012 list and then removed in favor of AM on the latest list.