Ratings of Bruce Springsteen & Radiohead albums

It's not like one plans all this out. Discussion, be it face-to-face or at the forum, takes twists and turns. Or hopefully does, really narrow topics tend not to be of much interest to me, and as you know, the polls in and of themselves often are not that important or interesting to me, and I treat them more as accessories to discussion. This poll directly grew out of my discussion with Lorenzo in Is Italian Prog epigonic? thread, but also from older topics where I have discussed charts with Lorenzo and others. Here is one where I got into this with Lorenzo a few years ago. 25 Unpopular Albums. I do rather wish all these issues could somehow be tied together into one place though. For instance, I know there was a much heavier discussion we had, but it would take me a while to search for it. It is interesting to see if one's opinions have shifted over the years.

By the way, I spoke of the validity of the results if they are an adequate translation and representation of the input, but I would think that there would be a very significant bandwagon effect. Not only does popularity breed popularity so as an album rises through the charts it gains steam with new people discovering it thanks to its position and so they also rank it highly, but this can and surely must to some extent lead to people rating those highlyu based on how others perceive those albums and how they think others will perceive them based on their ratings. It's all well and good provided that people are actually listening to those albums properly and rating them based on their honest appreciation rather than on how they think others perceive the album and how they think they will be perceived based on their ratings. This is always (never say always) a potential problem, with pro critics too who just regurgitate the expectations of canons of greats/ rate those very highly that they think should be rated highly based on how others rated them and how they will be perceived.

Lewian wrote: Shouldn't we have done all this in a dedicated thread about ranking and measuring/scoring quality in music in general? This is a topic that interests me enough, apart from the RYM vs. curated expert ranking thing (let alone Springsteen vs. Radiohead, Radiohead now in the lead for quite some time btw). Of course I could do it, and I may, let's see. There are a few more things I may have to say but they really don't fit here (neither does 85% of what is already here actually). Or maybe for another time. Anyway, just to tease Lorenzo: If you've read all the posts in this thread, including Saperlipopette's, you should have realised that he and I (and I think Logan and Lewian too) believe that NOT everything is subjective in the same way, and that not all music listeners' judgements are on the same level The thing about this statement is that it is very weak. I could sign up to it, but it doesn't say that much. I am very far away from the idea that there is some kind of most correct or best ranking we should strive for. There is very much space between "everything is subjective" and that idea. Music is not made for ranking in the first place. (In fact some music is, like for winning the Grand Prix Eurovision, but this music does not normally deserve to be ranked high compared to properly good music that isn't. ) an experienced music connoisseur will give more valuable judgements ON EVERYTHING than a RYM forumist who only listens to rap or hip-hop or death metal I don't sign up to "valuable" without qualifications. "Valuable" will be relative to specific aims that would have to be specified. Also, universal music connoisseurs will be very hard to find, and even if you find some, they may not be the best when it comes to the kind of specialist knowledge that is needed to rank within certain specialist genres. In fact, in many places and for quite some time there was/is a culture of highly educated music connoisseurship that would pride itself for ignoring certain "lower" forms of music. I don't think that using an algorithm will lead to good results. Any ranking is based on comparison, and as I said before the reviewers must have listened to all kinds of music to be qualified. So I believe it's much better to produce a hierarchical list of songs, from 1 to 20 (or 50 or 100), which then has to be listened to by each member of the team. In this way, you get to listen to all the songs that are candidates to enter the ranking, and once you have listened to all of them you give them a weighted, hierarchical score. The ranking will be obtained with the songs that get the highest score. That, technically, is an algorithm.

And this is Youngstown (from the Ghost of Tom Joad), live in NY again.