The Best Albums of 2009: a pre-amble

Is it hypocritical to write an end-of-year list comprising ranked opinions gathered and analysed from a large pool of writers if you’re a website sat so staunchly against ratings-out-of-whatever? Or is it more a case of prized reflections, paeans to our favourite albums – the chance to step back from just how much music is at our disposal and do a critical evaluation, if you will, of what we’ve been listening to this year?

Perhaps arbitrarily, it seems fairer to rank them now as they’re being approached at the same time. Perhaps, even more arbitarily, it seems less so; the albums after all are being ranked separately by people with different experiences of them, different amounts of time with them, different personalities. But that we’ve come up with a top 50 receiving multiply high-placed rankings from our pool of writers means that our point of intersection has finally hit the spot.

See, I can’t just look back at the albums that got 9s – there are no 9s, there are no scores! But this is a great thing, as lists require this distance. And so to re-start by asking the writers to send me their top 20s…

Now how did we get to the stage of holding in our precious hands The List? Was it via a magical formula, albums pulled out of a massive hat, did they come from above? Let me hand you over to our very own Excel Guru, a mysterious character who lurks behind spreadsheets in a mysterious way:

“We asked all of our writers for their top 20 albums of 2009. Their number one got 20 points. Using the formula (Max*(1+(NB/Max)))/(Pos+(NB/Max)) where NB is number of ballots (38), Pos is the place from 1-20 in the list and Max is the largest possible list-size (20), the points were assigned. The more points you got, the higher up the final list you finished.

Essentially it’s a more refined version of 1st =20 points, 2nd =19…. 20th =1, which is too clunky because the difference between 19 and 20 is as heavily weighted as the top two.”

There’s more? Why, yes…

“With all the formula in place the points distribution worked as -

1       20.00
2       14.87
3       11.84
4       9.83
5       8.41
6       7.34
7       6.52
8       5.86
9       5.32
10      4.87
11      4.50
12      4.17
13      3.89
14      3.65
15      3.43
16      3.24
17      3.07
18      2.91
19      2.78
20      2.65

- with a few more numbers after the dp in each case of course. 1st place got 20 points and the number of points awarded to 2,3… 20 was in ratio to the descending position and the number of ballots cast.”

We’re Musos alright! And here’s a fact: some 277 albums received nominations! We’re a knowledgeable bunch.

50-41 revealed…