Graphing the PA Top 250

Back in March, I recorded the top 250 albums on Progarchives in Google Sheets to mess about with various graphs. I stumbled across my spreadsheet earlier this week and figured some of you might be interested. For full sized images, the album is here: https://imgur.com/a/z0GXj
Raw data (as comma-separated values) is here: http:///pastebin.com/kVczKXaN

First: A line graph of each year compared to both number of albums for that year and number of ratings for that year. The red line represents the top 25 albums, the blue line represents the top 250 albums.


As I'm sure everyone here could guess, there's a large spike in the early seventies. The spike is even larger when measured by number ratings instead of album count. The earliest album is Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), the latest is Mike Oldfield's Return to Ommadawn (2017) – which is now no longer in the top 250.

Second: A stacked area chart of country representation.

As you can see, the first non-British album to show up is Canadian (Rush's Moving Pictures). The United States has a slow start, but grows to be almost as large as the UK. Italy, of course, maintains a respectable size throughout.

Third: QWR rating, compared to both album rank and by number of ratings



There's a pretty large divide between the top 5-10 albums and everything afterwards. As the first graph shows, QWR rating starts to level out a bit more after the top 50. As the second graph shows, the highest rated albums tend to also have more ratings. Lower dots show albums that are rated higher than their number of ratings would imply, higher dots show the opposite. I annotated the graph with some album covers to demonstrate:


Fourth: A world map, colored by density of albums in the top 250 (darker color = more albums):


Finally: A genre pie chart, measured by both number of albums and number of ratings.


The more popular genres have larger slices in the second graph than in the first. For example, Symphonic prog goes from 15.6% of the number of albums in the top 250 to 24.1% of the number of ratings of top 250 albums. RIO/Avant, Zeuhl, and Fusion both drop in half.

That's all – nothing too surprising, but I figured there are some other data nerds on this forum who'd appreciate this.

Edited by Zugzwang - October 27 2017 at 12:45

Great job and fun to read.  Looks like '82, '86, '90 & 2010 were pretty slow years

Wonderful stuff! The kind of thing I loved doing when I was in Research and Development, but now I'm a Physics teacher - I don't have the time!

What stands out for me is - what a great decade the 70s was for our music! Also what a dark age period the 90s were for us, and how nice to see the prog resurgence from the start of the Millennium onwards.

Were we all young and vibrant in the 70s, got married with kids and got a mortgage in the 90s and did we refind our mojo with prog again in the last decade or so? .... or did the new breed of musicians revitalise us! Hopefully the latter.

Edited by Squonk19 - October 27 2017 at 17:28

I'm interested to see what graphing individual PA members' favorite album lists would look like. Maybe even do a regression analysis to determine the signficance of average rating and # of ratings on list placement, although obviously it'd differ with each individual. Besides, it'd be interesting to see the distribution of years and nationalities on a given list, including my own. I'd probably use RateYourMusic over Progarchives though.

Very cool.

Edited by moshkito - January 02 2018 at 21:48

omphaloskepsis wrote: I found the ratings per year chart disturbing as it pertains to Prog Archives.   Downhill from 2013, even though the last few years have been banner years for prog albums. Could it be that the " ratings per year" chart suggests Prog Archives is dying?    Before anyone assumes I jumped to an insane conclusion ,  I did say "suggests".

This is indeed a disturbing observation, now that I look closely at the end of the graphs. There is also this 'I am not a robot' thing that probably reduces participation...