Slashdot Mirror
Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically
thdexter writes "Two guys statistically analyzed the best albums of 2003, from some thirty top-10 lists, giving value to how often an album was mentioned by editors and recording its mean place. White Stripes came out on top, with Outkast below. Full results are available on the site."
that the use of the word arbitrary twice in the article and the description of the "method" - "Not-Very-Scientific" which was also used as the article title (basically picking stuff at random) sheds a "few" question on this "survey" (don't think I could have used any more quotes). I would rather have another article on SCO or the RIAA.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics.
By looking at the list of results, I can tell you right away that by "best album" they don't necessarily mean "best music".
If the data that they start with is subjective than no amount of averaging will give objective results, just an average of subjective opinions.
that was used as a part of my technical writing class (under the heading "How to lie with statistics"). "Some people use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post. For support rather the illumination."
The dogcow says "Moof!"
So when they say "best albums of the year" they actually mean "most admired by critics." Gotcha.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Who listens to the latest music anyways? It all sucks. I gave up on pop in 1995 and have never looked back. Besides, if you think about it, the latest music they play on the radio isn't necessarily good anyways. Fate will decide that. If you listen to classic rock and oldies, you are guaranteed the best music from that era. Instead, people who listen to what's on the radio now are merely guinea pigs for deciding what will become classic music. I have no patience for this and prefer to wait for this all to get sorted out. I guess that's why this list could be useful, but I think I'll wait for it all to get consolidated into a best of 2003 CD for 10 bucks :)
Watched a movie with no sound-track?
Went to a strip club with no music?
All would be pretty lame without tunes....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
One week of the year? Every week of the year? Which chart? Not exactly what Id call a proper survey although the basic idea is a good one.
I do have to wonder though, surely with the charts being based on airplay and sales they must get mentioned every time they are played soo I would expect high listed songs to be mentioned more hence increase their mean? Does this survey seem a little biased to anyone else?
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
"giving value to how often an album was mentioned by editors and recording its mean place."
So, it's not the best albums of 2003, but the most popular. Isn't the article title pretty misleading in that case? The linked page doesn't even say it's the "best" albums, it just says "top". So, really, this is just a statistically accurate Top 20 chart.
Slashdot: when news breaks, we give you the pieces.
Early on in their FAQ they claim:
...
Historically, what is pleasing to the human ear has not changed since man began writing music. What has changed are styles, performances, the instruments used and the way music is produced and recorded, but a compelling melody is still compelling
Okay, so far, so good; it sounds like they're saying "good music is good music, and here's a tool for telling whether something is good or not." I'm still skeptical at this point, but it's certainly an interesting idea, and one worthy of study.
But then they completely lose me with this one:
A high score means that a song is mathematically similar to recent hit songs and a low score means it is dissimilar. These scores have meaning when it comes to success potential in today's market but is not meant to mean a song is good or bad. For example, when tested for today's market some really great classic hits from the 60's 70's and 80's score very low and would most likely not become hits today with their original production or chord progression. That does not mean that they are not good songs and it is quite possible that if produced more in line with today's sounds they could score much higher.
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
They make a high-flown reference to the 36 Plots and other serious attempts at artistic analysis, but that's not what they're actually doing. I do believe that good music is good music, good stories are good stories, etc. I can at least consider seriously the hypothesis that all good art has certain qualities in common, and that by analyzing those qualities we can evaluate a new work's chance of lasting success. But the idea that musicians (or writers, or whatever) can keep pumping out stuff exactly like What's Hot Now and be guaranteed a blockbuster is just stupid.
I know! Those cords are the same ones God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.
'There are lies, damn lies and statistics'
;)
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Let's see if I can find a way to summarize the year's best music to my ears...
:: this is by far the best soundtrack ever produced for this film. Mixing jazz, pure psychedelia, and even throwing in a Art Ensemble of Chicago cover, this album ties everything that is meaningful about the psychedelic experience into a beautiful package. A must listen.
#1 : Do Make Say Think's Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn. Amazing production, and a very contemporary look on the merging between what dark jazz promised with a certain hopefulness that lingers long after the album is over.
#2 : Howard Hello's Don't Drink His Blood - Deceptive in its pop simplicity, but with this dark streak. Again, mostly instrumental but with highly processed singing in places that borders on sinister. A real sleeper on the radar.
#3 : The Cinematic Orchestra's Man With a Movie Camera
#4 The Microphones' Mount Eerie -- In addition to the wonderful vinyl pressing, with hand-stitched sewn sleeve, this album is a complete trip through the forces of nature and man's place within it. Deep and meditative, good for listening once every two months or so when you are ready to confront your closet.
There were dozens of other great releases this year, but those were the ones I was most thankful for.
On the reprint front, we were given a brilliant repackaging of the Soft Machine's BBC Radio Volume 1. Fantastic music from this forgotten band, at their very best.
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
So these guys basically admit just everything is arbitrary with numbers pulled out of their asses, and still manage to get on the front page of /.
Genius. Pure f'ing genius ;^)
That list looks pretty good. Mabey I didn't read enough into the links on the site, but I wonder where they got those list that they analyzed. It doesn't look like your usual, pop-music pushing fare. There are some good, and - gasp - original artists on there.
The White Stripes and The Strokes deserve their accolades, what with being the poster boys for the garage sound. Radiohead is, of course, always welcome in a top albums list. Blur was a welcome surprise, as I never heard much attention given to the album. Mabey I was asleep.
The real original artists on the list, however, are The Rapture and The Postal Service. Both have this techno rock blend going on that is great to hear in an era where most music sounds good. Definately buy both albums if you haven't. The Postal Service was a collaberation between two guys who sent tapes back and forth in the mail to create the album. One of them was the singer in Death Cab for Cutie. From what I heard, it was just sort of a fun side project never inteded for release, but they ended up liking the sound so they put out the record.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
They simply quantified references to certain artists/titles within a small batch of source material and then declared it to be a top-10 list. What would be a more accurate description of their list would be "most often referenced albums in music editorials". Trying to quantitatively rate music based upon the analysed opinions of the music press is pointless. Music itself is a very intimate and personal medium, experienced differently by all listeners. Trying to rate a particular albums's ability to reach its listeners requires a much deeper understanding of psychology than is currently possible. That being said, the top-10 list has value in that it's quite good at showing what is en-vogue at present. Atleast, in the opinion of the music media. Then again, my favorite music is sugary JPOP and trance as found in Dance Dance Revolution, so I won't venture an opinion as to the music selected by the list :)
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Metacritic.com compiles up to 30 reviews for a particular video game / movie / CD and averages the review score. Here are to true top albums of 2003 as rated by nearly everybody: http://metacritic.com/music/bests/2003.shtml
Note that the list does change as more reviews come in. This list actually has good music like The Shins or The Notwist.
It least from my perspective, it shows that there is an inverse relationship between quality of an album and the quantity that sells (or is downloaded). F'rinstance, the only album on the list I remotely liked was Damien Rice's O, which was near to the bottom. The rest was largely crap.
waming: wandering off topic
Back in the old days when a disk drive could tip over and kill somebody, music was actually good. This was because record companies took a fundamentally different strategy to marketing. It used to be that they would hire a talented artist, and give them total creative control. This was particularly true w/ the Warner-Reprise label. Often, an artist would just develop a cult following, or they wouldn't become huge until their second or third album, after they've matured and produced something of real quality. This way, good artists managed to have long distiguished careers and produced truly good music. This is why many popular bands from the 60s, 70s had such long careers and produced hits over spans of 10+ years (e.g. Rolling Stones, Springsteen, etc.).
Today, however, the business model for the record industry is to find some no-talent but good looking putzes and hype them to death on their first album so that they make money before they get older and unattractive and people stop buying their album. There is no long term revenue in this plan, but it doesn't matter, because they can always hire younger artists and repeat as necessary to keep up their cash flow. When that doesn't work, they can start suing people for downloading songs.
That's just my 4/25 of a bit.
"You put 'em on stage and you have 'em undress
Some angel whore who can learn a guitar lick
Hey hey, that's what I call music."
-- Thomas Petty
Unknown host pong.
Using a method like this, you can't possibly divine the quality of a product (an album in this case). You might be able to obtain some information on popularity, but as we know, nothing is more unrelated than how much the public likes a thing and how good the thing really is.
we discovered a new way to think.
~jeff
No mention of the musical genra that was in the competition. To me, its obvious anything that won an award on a tv program covering anyplace in popular music field was excluded.
In other words, the basic premise of the list is flawed and therefore useless.
--
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, if you applied the same algorithm to, say, technology companies mentioned on Slashdot, I'd think you'd find that SCO is #1...
True story.
Best album in 2003 was my family photo album.
I am sorry, but the music industry is beyond rescue. When there are songs people don't even bother kazaa-ing for free, you know the industry is dissolving to hell.
Statistics are only truly useful in quantum physics and propaganda.
fire
(and appreciate one of them)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I wish there was some way to draw some attention to Blind Guardian's music.
So much better, in my view, than the plethora of common market-as-you-go albums out there.
that scientifically Led Zeppelin 4 is the best album of all time. Therefore the best album every year. But White Stripes are pretty good. Even Jimmy Page likes them.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
It was a great year for my music collection too. I purchased the back catalog of a bunch of artists and now I have an amazing 200 albums (note that I had a total of fifteen albums in October 2002).
My favorite releases this year were:
And my favorites that I purchased this year (but are not from this year) are:
And, naturally, my favorite albums overrall (at least until I get more albums). This list is unordered because it is really hard for me to rank any of these above the others, they are just my ten favorite albums.
Aside from Dream Theater and Iron Maiden I bet that no one else knows who any of those bands are. It sucks being a metal head in todays pop punk and fake metal world. I'm so lonely.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
No, as your link explains the average of indpendant measurements produces a more precise empirical result.
.
The old fashioned carpenter understands this inately. "Measure twice, cut once."
All engineering factors, such as Young's Modulus, are such averages, a fact the new fangled engineer seems to have no feel for.
Yes, the method can be used in some instances where people who have a good deal of experience in making certain kinds of measurements "guess" at something. Ask ten carpenters to mark off eight feet of a ten foot 2x4 and the average of their guesses is for more likely to be eight feet than any one of their guesses was.
This presupposes that an empirical measurment could actually be made and the people "guessing" are actually making a measurment of low precision, not actually guessing, and the precision of the average is dependant of the margin of error of that measurment. The smaller the margin, the greater the precision of the average.
In this particular case the margin of error is infinite. When you start using arbitrary factors to manipulate subjective data the results aren't simply inaccurate. .
They're meaningless.
And thus of no interest to nerds other than to point and giggle at them.
KFG
Now come on the RIAA put out way more crap than that this year!
True, but these were the cream of the crap.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Using the same techniques, I could claim that Windows ME is the best operating system, based on the number of mentions it recieved around the web. Then again all of the mentions would be from tech support forums...
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and when the oil age ends it will not be for lack of oil. --Bjorn Lomberg
While I think the original post makes a good point, it should be noted that other traditionally "scientific" studies also use fairly arbitrary measures.
... all the tools are there to adopt different choices and see how the results change.
Take the case of (new) drug-testing: the statistical tests used are often arbitrary, both in the chosen significance level and the statistic itself. The former is well discussed (why is 5% or 1% necessarily the proper cut-off point for rejecting a null hypothesis) but the latter receives much less attention. Many of these statistics have known distributional properties only under assumptions that are either unverfiable or, worse, not bothered to be verfied by the researcher. I have seen statistics conducted on results from experiments where the underlying phenomena can only take positive values yet the researcher assumes it is governed by a Normal distribution (whose support is the entire real line)
Lastly, I think the researchers on the top 2004 recordings should be commended for following the spirit of science. They clearly explain their objective, the data they used, and their chosen method of analysis. Their work can be replicated from what they publish on their website. This is something that cannot be said of many experiments conducted in the finest university/industry labs by Ph.D. researchers! Truly in the spirit of scientific discovery, if one has problems with their "arbitrary choice"
[ That said, I wish the researchers had spent a bit more time explaining the motivation underlying some of their "arbitrary" choices. ]
I have all of Iced Earth's albums as well as the Dark Genesis boxed set. The three disc version of Alive in Athens is awesome. The album is worth it if only for the versions of the pre-Barlow songs because the versions on Days of Purgatory kind of ... suck. Maybe they would sound better if I hadn't owned the originals first, but the Stormrider stuff (except for Stormrider itself because Schaeffer re-recorded the vocals for that, just like on the original album) didn't sound right. But the live versions of the songs sound amazing .
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
2002 was truly awesome. Opeth in particular is interesting; I had never heard a band that could go from Death Metal to Prog Rock in the same song and do it well until I heard them.
Opeth is even kind of mainstream nowadays; my friend Ryan's 16 year old sister listens to them (hmmm...a 16 year old girl with good musical taste but related to my best friend). I don't think the stupid hot topic nu metal kids like them much because they aren't "heavy" enough because they've only ever heard stuff from Damnation (at least the ones that I know around here).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
The Almighty Punchdrunk is Gene Hoglan's one off project. One listen and you'll fall in love with it; it's like Strapping Young Lad only heavier. The album can be had from Hevy Devy Records and I highly recommend it.
Zao is a Hardcore band turned Metalcore turned Crap. There is one original member left: Jesse Smith. A few of my friends knew him and the reason they started to suck at the end was because he hated the band. They kept breaking up after every album only to finish up whatever tour they were obligated to do and then have half the band leave and three new guys show up to fill their places because Jesse Smith decided not to call it quits. The vocalist from the third album onward, Dan Weydant, had a problem with never showing up for shows so they had a backup that toured with them and that eventually replaced Dan Weydant when he quit until he decided to unquit and record one more album...and then the whole band decided to call it quits...and then magically they recorded a really crappy final album (Parade of Chaos) and a re-recording of their first album to fufill their recording contract (along with a recently released "Greatist Hits" compilation for a band with six albums and three split sevens). And now, out of nowhere, they decided to unbreakup and then go on tour. And Dan Weydant left again, but it seems like he really did this time. The new stuff sounds better than their last album did at least, maybe Jesse Smith decided to like the band again. Bleed Zao the only site on the net with any current news on Zao.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
The Darkness are taking the piss.
They're treading a fine line between taking the piss, paying tribute, and just playing a style of music they genuinely love.
Fair play to them. I find it hard to begrudge them their success, even if Spinal Tap did the same thing, better, years ago.
Their cover of Radiohead's "Street Spirit" is absolute genius however. I've only heard it live and in radio sessions. If anyone knows how I can buy it, mail me please!