The best discography?!

I have been thinking about doing a poll in which I present you with two ficticious bands and something else occoured to me. Imagine you have two bands, A and B, both with 8 albums in their discographies. And imagine that the rating I'll give them are truly fit for the quality of the albums.

Band A has the better discography. Their first 3 albums are veritable masterpieces, true desert island discs. If I had the choice of owning the complete discography of both bands, I'd pick A just for those first 3 or 4 albums. Who cares if they had one or two duds? When I consider two bands I'll usually compare peak to peak. It looks like B has just released 8 lukewarm or good albums, so there's not really much of a peak to look at. 

Edited by Magnum Vaeltaja - May 31 2016 at 18:09

Magnum Vaeltaja wrote: Band A has the better discography. Their first 3 albums are veritable masterpieces, true desert island discs. If I had the choice of owning the complete discography of both bands, I'd pick A just for those first 3 or 4 albums. Who cares if they had one or two duds? When I consider two bands I'll usually compare peak to peak. It looks like B has just released 8 lukewarm or good albums, so there's not really much of a peak to look at.  I suppose that this is a bit like comparing bands a band like Yes to some obscure symphonic prog band that had a string of 5 decent albums. Sure, Yes may have released some really weak material, but I'd still consider their discography to be superior on the merits of Fragile, Close To The Edge, etc.

No because at the end of the day Band B did not have '8 lukewarm or good albums', they had the higher volume per release of quality material.

I'd go with band A and focus my listening on the first 4 albums. I have several bands like that in my collection and typically go with A.

Atavachron had me convinced, then Magnum convinced me otherwise, then Atavachron re-convinced me again.  Am I incapable of independent thought?!?!

I guess on reflection I have to go with "neither band has the better discography."  Both are equally good, one just more consistent than the other.  When I think about two bands I looove love love that fit that type of scenario (Yes - case A, Type O Negative - case B) I would in fact lean toward saying they are equal (even though I think Yes' best is much better than Type's best).  Yes, I know, Type's not prog.  Just seemed to fit the profile for me.

Band A easily for me. They released 3 very highly rated albums which meant they had something truly unique going on along with a high general musical quality. However some artists are one trick pony's and are only good at playing to their unique strengths. Once that well of inspiration runs dry they either run out of ideas completely or they try to go into another genre and fail miserably. 

One could consider taking the median instead of the mean since the distribution doesn't appear to be bell-shaped, in which case Band A has the higher median.

progaardvark wrote: One could consider taking the median instead of the mean since the distribution doesn't appear to be bell-shaped, in which case Band A has the higher median.   Another possibility of determining who was better is rating the individual songs. One could either take a median of those values or which band has the most songs over a certain rating. That's probably a bit time consuming, but it might afford a bit more granularity.   This can get really complicated, if you want it to be.

I'd say that whether the distribution is bell-shaped or not doesn't matter at all; what matters is whether one personally values consistency and an upward trend rather than producing a number of top albums and the waning. The median seems to be quite inappropriate here because it doesn't depend on how good the best albums exactly are (and neither on the worst), it just depends on what goes on in the core of mediocrity.

I'm sorry, but this is silly.  Some questions have absolutely no meaning in the abstract.  What do PA ratings have to do with my personal taste?  They are a useful guide to be sure, but my personal tastes may differ.  Are there not people who enjoy Love Beach? 

Kanye been killin' it for years.