Let's talk about this...

I only bothered with the top 50 and needn't investigate further (btw, I love the NAS and Tribe Called Quest albums included + I'm a huge Billie Eilish-fan and What's Going On is a worthy no. 1).

-We hardly need music magazines or music journalists anymore. I know I certainly don't, but I never cared about their correct, boring, uniformed and limited tastes anyway. Look at the top 500 at RYM instead (the biggest "userrun" music site like PA, but every kind of music genre is included). Much more interesting list, and you'll usually find more interesting and informative reviews than in any magazine out there as well. Here's the top 3 with King Crimson's debut at 3rd place (also Red is at 26, Close to the Edge, 49th) based on over 43 000 votes and 855 reviews... Now this is representative for what music lovers from 15 to 75 years actually love:

   

I’m not going to try and justify the list, because there are plenty of things that make it obvious to me that it is flawed, but I do think you’re looking at it from a biased angle. Of the bands you mention you would expect to see, several have no one album I would expect to see in the list. It’s perhaps odd that ItCotCK is not there (and that is the only KC album I would expect to see make the list, if one did at all), but I would never expect to see Marillion, Porcupine Tree, Gong or The Mars Volta. Deep Purple, Jethro Tull and ELP are perhaps more surprising by their absence. (NB this has nothing to do with my personal preference, as I like PT, Gong and TMV, and am not a fan of Marillion, Deep Purple or ELP.)

As for the inclusion of hip hop and r&b (in its modern incarnation, which is markedly different from rhythm and blues as I grew up understanding it), they absolutely have a place in the list. Kanye West, love him or hate him, would be even more inexcusable if he were absent from this list than King Crimson or Yes. I would go so far as to say the list wouldn’t even be credible if Kanye West was not included in it. Again, I think the problem many on this forum will have with either inclusion or exclusion from the list, will come down to personal bias. (NB, again this has nothing to do with my personal preferences, because although I do enjoy some hip hop, I’ve never been a Kanye West fan.)

Part of the problem is the same that was identified in 2003, and again in 2012, in that despite asking hundreds of people for their top 50 lists, those hundreds of people aren’t really drawn from a particularly diverse pool, and though there are some “outliers”, they are certainly outnumbered. To be fair, that even one Miles Davis album appears is pretty impressive, because this is basically a list of the 500 greatest rock and pop albums (and the aforementioned hip hop and r&b are rock and pop), so for any jazz album to appear is almost unexpected.

Regarding compilations, I have no problem at all with that. Queen’s “Greatest Hits” is one of the all-time best selling albums in many countries. No doubt Madonna’s compilation is similarly high selling. I can’t name a Madonna album off the top of my head, but I know her greatest hits was called “The Immaculate Collection”. I don’t know anyone who owns a Madonna album, but I know several who own “The Immaculate Collection”. There are some compilations which rise above any other individual album, and which become almost cult albums. Greatest Hits compilations come and go. It’s rare for one such title to remain the “go to” without being replaced again and again. It is rare for there to be a definitive title that if someone says what’s the name of the greatest hits album of “X”, and the answer will be almost universally known, and still easily purchased.

The biggest problem for me with the Rolling Stones lists is their recency bias. It is very difficult to know whether or not something is as great, or will remain to be seen as great, when it is only recent. In a thread I started elsewhere on the forum ( http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=126239 ), I talk about a list of 150 important and/or influential albums in New Zealand music history. I made that list in May 2019, but stated in a preface to the list that I needed to make a cut off, and I chose that to be 2010. The closer one gets to the present day, the harder it is to know just how important and/or influential an album might be. I used the example of Alien Weaponry’s debut, which had been released the previous year, and which I find it difficult to see how it will not be regarded as an important and influential album in years to come. But it would have been conjecture, and in my opinion, folly to include it just because of how it seemed a year after its release.

A couple of years after compiling my list, I decided to investigate a list of “100 Essential New Zealand Albums”, that I knew had been published as a book, by Nick Bollinger. I don’t have the book, but figured if I googled, I might come up with it. Someone had uploaded his list, and presuming it is accurate (which I have no way of knowing without buying the book), I found it was interesting to see. It’s how similar and how different our lists were. Both our lists were chronological, and the biggest difference was towards the end of the list. Bollinger’s book was published in 2010, and he included albums right up until the year before it was published. I’ve not even heard of some of the albums he presents from the years 2005-2009, and even after looking them up, they seem to have been either flash in the pan, or not really anything I would consider worthy of the list. I feel reasonably confident that if Bollinger were going to make his list again now, some (maybe all) of those albums would no longer feature in it. The same can probably be said for some of the more recent album inclusions in the RS list.

On the other hand, who knows? It could be that we are simply so out the loop that we don’t recognise how important and/or influential some of these albums already are, or might become. I’ve never heard of SZA, and I’m not going to knock Billy Eilish. Do they deserve to be in the list? I would say it’s almost impossible to know, and only time will tell. They are simply too recent, and they might appear important and influential now, but it’s pure conjecture to assume that in fifty years (or whenever) that they will be regarded highly. I would not include them myself, but not because I do t think they deserve it, so much as because of my awareness of recency bias.

I could easily have made my list of NZ albums go right up to 2019 when I made the list, and I am quite confident about some of the albums I would have put there (Lorde, Alien Weaponry, etc.). But it still seems premature to me….

Is the list perfect? Hell, no! Is it biased and subjective. Undoubtedly so, but also reasonably and transparently so.  Ultimately, I don’t think it’s a particularly wonderful list, but it’s definitely not a terrible list. Like any data one comes across, you have to consider who compiled it, how, and for what audience. Taking that into account, the only thing about the list that I think may not stand the test of time, is the inclusion of some of the more recent albums.

The whole idea that such a list could be in any sense "objective" is wrong. What the list shows is that they don't like prog much, we do, and this explains the difference. They are well within their rights to not like it.

Now I'm not saying such lists are totally random and surely most people with some music knowledge agree on something. However I'd think that over all genres one can easily find 2000 albums that have a credible case for inclusion in such a top X list, and which 500 to select from them and how to exactly rank them is an apples and oranges game from beginning to end. Lists are for entertainment only, and if you don't like one go look for another or write it yourself.

It also makes me think of a Dutch national radio program: at the end of each year, since 1999 and thanks to the input from the audience, they compile a Top 2000. There are the usual suspects and the surprises (look at last years' n° 1), with a turnover of, say 5 to 10% (this is a very wild estimate of mine).

Out of dissatisfaction with this list (its predictability, its recency bias, the neglect of many other very good songs...) a group of music lovers started an alternative, which is aired on internet each end of year: The Snob 2000...

I’m not so sure. I decided to look through again, and count how many “recent” releases there were in the list, and there were less than I thought/it appeared to me, when I first perused the list. There are only 36 album from the last ten years in the list (which is arguably 36 too many, but let’s leave that aside), 22 of which appear in the bottom half of the list, and 14 in the top half, so they don’t make too much of an impact. Although I would agree that a fair number of these 36 albums won’t be in the list in a few years time, there are some that I would not be surprised to see, because they have already made an impact that seems likely to be lasting. I would also note that only two albums from the last ten years appear in the top 50, from Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. The latter I would almost certainly expect to see in lists to come in the future. Beyoncé, probably, also.

Leaving those aside, from the remaining 464 albums in the RS list, I was unfamiliar with only seven! I have not listened to every one. Nor even heard every one - but I either knew of the album, and/or it’s artwork, for 98% of the albums in the list, once albums from the last ten years were taken out (due to possible recency bias). I’m not claiming to be a great font of knowledge for music, because I’m not. But the fact I recognise albums I’ve never listened to, often by artists I’ve never knowingly heard a single note from, shows that those albums have had quite an impact over the years.

Ultimately, I do think it comes down exactly to what Lewian has said. All any list can do is pick between apples and oranges, and no matter how great a population of contributors, that doesn’t give any greater objectivity.

The RS list is attempting to cover rock and pop over a period from the 1950s through to the present day. The definition(s) of both rock and pop have changed over and over and over again over that long time span, and include country, folk, gospel, soul, funk, jazz, reggae, ska, rock, r&b, punk, metal, hip hop, etc. etc. Every one of those genres has changed over time, and depending on geography. Even at the time of its first appearance, for example, UK and US punk had very different sounds and styles, and what has been considered punk between then and now sounds very different.

Miles Davis was mentioned early on, and it’s notable that the two Davis albums in the RS list are Bitches Brew and A Kind Of Blue. Hard to argue either, right? John Coltrane has a couple of albums in the list, too. And his wife, Alice. And Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus…. There are not a great deal of more recent jazz albums in the list, but the classics are present.  The same for the classic reggae albums, etc. None of the albums are unexpected, and some might even say predictable. But then again, isn’t that what we should expect when seeing a list of the greatest albums? Surely they should be somewhat predictable - maybe not in where they appear so much as that they do appear. Again, this merely confirms the apples and oranges scenario as described by Lewian. 

Can were mentioned earlier, and they too make the RS list. 

Over time, I suspect that it will more likely be some of the albums in the ‘60s that appear in the bottom half of the RS list are dropped, rather than some of the albums in the list from the 2000s. Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, for example, are likely to remain fixtures of future lists for many years to come, and with good reason. Apples and oranges….

The list isn't of any interest to me because it's based on polling a wide cross section of people, so it's just a popularity contest. The same can be said of any such list including the PA top 100. The only lists which useful to me are those that are more narrowly curated (i.e. reflect the opinion of a single person, or a small group of people, with particular knowledge or interests that are relevant to me - e.g. the annual lists from places like The Quietus, PA collabs list).