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Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically 251

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-sorta-i-guess dept.
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."
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Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically More

Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically

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  • I think (Score:4, Insightful)

    by panxerox ( 575545 ) * on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:12PM (#7853505)
    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.

    • Re:I think (Score:4, Informative)

      by fastidious edward ( 728351 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:16PM (#7853533)
      Looking at their 'scientific' analysis and method, perhaps "most critically acclaimed albums of 2003" would be a better.

      Critical acclamation may be a proxy for what the critics think is best, but beauty, including musical beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

      • Re:I think (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Seth Finklestein ( 582901 )

        No. Musical beauty was sold to Clear Channel Worldwide [clearchannel.com] in a $500 million stock swap. You can now buy "musical beauty" as part of the promotional package for your newest pre-fabricated top 40 hit. Once you've paid Clear Channel your $100,000 to package up your "song" (you do have $100,000, right?) then the musical beauty comes along for free!

        I strongly recommend that you boycott Clear Channel. Thank you for your time.

        Sincerely,
        Seth Finklestein
        Music Pundit 2000

      • Even that is suspect, because they have no list of publications or charts. If it's billboard, spin, and rolling stone, then you have a rating that has some value, but it could just as easily be based on bob's magazine, music chart, and barbeque.

        Just my opinion.

      • Re:I think (Score:5, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @04:15PM (#7854358)
        . . . musical beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

        Dude,I think you're wearing your headphones wrong.

        KFG

    • Recipe music (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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, an

    • More "scientific" than you think ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by gradji ( 188612 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @06:27PM (#7855153)
      While I think the original post makes a good point, it should be noted that other traditionally "scientific" studies also use fairly arbitrary measures.

      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" ... all the tools are there to adopt different choices and see how the results change.

      [ That said, I wish the researchers had spent a bit more time explaining the motivation underlying some of their "arbitrary" choices. ]

  • Lies (Score:2, Funny)

    by asobala ( 563713 )
    Lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics.

    • Re:Lies (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MikeXpop ( 614167 )
      True that. The whole list seems to be devised of how many times an album was mentioned. Let's put it this way (with no offense to the WS):

      "Elephant from the White Stripes was horrible."
      "The new White Strips album, Elephant, came in, and man is it bad.
      "Elephant seems to be the weak link in the otherwise strong chain of White Stripes albums"

      Etc, etc. Even though all of those are bad, sinse it's mentioned so much the list catagorizes it as good.

      • Re:Lies (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) * on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:51PM (#7853798) Homepage
        It's like the TV commercials for bad movies. Across the whole screen it says "AMAZING". The original quote is "It's amazing this film was actually given a theatrical release."

        -B
        • I remember one of the newspaper ads for one of the Naked Gun movies...they were actually quoting the negative reviews their film had gotten..."Terrible" --Gene Shalit, "I hated this" --Siskel & Ebert

          I actually wish they'd do this more often...if a movie critic likes a movie, that means it probably sucks and is a piece of insular crap that was intended for a movie critic audience.

      • But since it's all about PR that would still be benefitting them. *sigh*

        How comes that this band is so totally overrated? I mean they are ok and all. I would maybe even enjoy them if they played in a local pub but all this hype around them is so totally not up to par with their music that it hurts!

        Lispy
    • 'There are lies, damn lies and statistics'

      ;)

    • Re:Lies (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sirch ( 82595 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @03:47PM (#7854196) Homepage
      Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they hide is vital.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:15PM (#7853530)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Are you 'Ughing' because you dislike the music or you dislike the fact that these are popular artists and the music must therefore automatically be crap, right?

      • Re:Ugh. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Popularity has nothing to do with talent.

        Stallone was a popular actor but couldnt act at all.

        Pop music has proven again with acts like Spice Girls, Britney, New Kids, N'Sync and so on that you can 'produce' a hit with minimal musical or vocal talent. I think the ad for the New Kids audition probably said best when it asked for certain things and finished with singing experience NOT necessary.

        All you have to do is run a bio on most of the acts and see all their work experience.
        Most companies hire people w

  • You can't measure a foot by averaging guesses (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If the data that they start with is subjective than no amount of averaging will give objective results, just an average of subjective opinions.

  • I prefer the quote (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fidget42 ( 538823 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:17PM (#7853553)
    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."

  • Best, Popular, Whatevah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by STrinity ( 723872 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:18PM (#7853556) Homepage
    So when they say "best albums of the year" they actually mean "most admired by critics." Gotcha.

  • Latest music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:20PM (#7853570)
    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 :)
    • Instead, people who listen to what's on the radio now are merely guinea pigs for deciding what will become classic music If any of today's music becomes classic music I'm gonna shoot myself. Please don't make me listen to Britney for the rest of my life...
    • What does radio have to do with the best music? Working in radio, for me the very definition of hell is hearing the same Stones, Zep or Geils tune for the millionth time. No pop song - forever frozen in a single performance and interpretation - no matter how good, bears that level of repetition. There's plenty of excellent unheard music out there.
    • 'Pop' isn't just 'what's in the charts'. Believe it or not, there's a lot of unpopular pop music. Music doesn't have to be popular to be pop music, it just has to be in the popular style. There's a lot of good 'pop' music, that isn't bubble-gum pop, twee over-produced crap, or Britney Spears diva-esque stuff. It's sad to see people throw out whole genres because of the stigma they attach to them.

      There are so many people who'll say 'I love all music, except country', or 'I love all music, except pop', and t
      • I will EASILY throw out an entire genre of music if I hate 99.9 percent of the songs that I've heard in that genre. Sure, there may be a few songs from that genre/style that didn't suck, but they usually find their way to me through friends. Why the hell would I sit through nine thousand crappy sounds to get to the 50 I might like? That would be work. I can remember trying to explain this to a friends once and coming up with this analogy:

        "If I never liked Less Than Jake, why the hell would I like 5000 band
        • Fair enough, if you're not an active music aficionado, then that's all well and good. The only problem is if everyone took the same opinion, and then your friends wouldn't have heard anything to bother recommending ;-)

          On the flip side, I'm listening to music sixteen hours a day, much of it new or alien to me, simply because that's what I like to do. I guess I should take into account that not everyone else is a music nut. Some of those 'friends' you mention are probably music nuts themselves, and I guess y
    • I'm sorry but the "all music sucks today" argument is really total non-sense. I do agree that most of the commercial radio compete hard on the same level of lameness, but this does not mean there is no radio worth listening to. Here in Switzerland, we have a national radio [couleur3.ch] that sounds really independent (trashy, fun, weird) and plays quite listenable songs.

      This being said, radio is not the only way to listen to music, and hearing crappy music on the radio doesn't mean that all contemporary music sucks. Dow

    • Re:Latest music (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by jkauzlar ( 596349 ) *
      I beg to differ. 2003 has been an INCREDIBLE year for original and innovative music (mostly on indie or foreign labels) no matter what style you prefer. Keep in mind that almost every album on this list will never get air-time outside of the college radio channels. Also keep in mind that Clear Channel determines most of what you hear on the radio and they pander to the lowest common denominator. Radio is almost dead, so use these 'best of' lists as a guide for buying the 'good' music. Look them up on amazon

    • Re:Latest music (Score:3, Informative)

      by poptones ( 653660 )
      ...if you think about it, the latest music they play on the radio isn't necessarily good anyways. Fate will decide that.

      Methinks you are another of those aging denim rockers who has confused popularity with quality. Listen to a "classic top 40" station and you'll hear plenty of old Michael Jackson; listen to a "classic rock" station and you'll get plenty of Foreigner and Journey and Kansas and Styx and Boston... all formulaic bands that sucked twenty years ago when I was a kid, and still suck today. The

  • 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?

  • Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by James A. C. Joyce ( 733782 )
    "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.
    • Most popular with editors and critics, yes. That doesn't translate to most popular among the people or best selling. The White Stripes' Elephant has only sold a little over a million copies, which would put it nowhere near the top in a Top 20 chart.
  • Let's see if I can find a way to summarize the year's best music to my ears...

    #1 : Do Make Say Think's Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn [everything2.com]. 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 [almostcool.org] - 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

  • Hold on (Score:5, Funny)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:31PM (#7853645) Homepage Journal
    I then created an arbitrary confidence rating (number of mentions in lists divided by nine) and then created an arbitrary number, with 66% of the number coming from the mean rating, and 33% of the number coming from the confidence rating.

    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 ;^)

  • Great list (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jared_hanson ( 514797 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:32PM (#7853650) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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 :)
    • Please please don't refer to the music in DDR as 'trance'. It is 'eurobeat', which is created and listened to primarily in Japan. Real European music usually sounds a lot better... :D

      (Though you could potentially argue that Ultramix has some trance, as 'Ready Steady Go' probably qualifies. But the musicians at Konami simply don't create trance music of any sort, AFAIK.)

  • A better way (Score:5, Informative)

    by domodude ( 613072 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:38PM (#7853705)
    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.
    • I've found metacritic to be a better barometer than gamerankings.com, because metacritic is far more selective with its sources. In fact, as far as I can tell, gamerankings takes every score it can get its hands on, from the mom-and-pop indie shop to the major sites and magazines. No offense to the indie shops, but you can get some very uninformed and often gushing evaluations that skew the overall rating several points.

      Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89 [metacritic.com], while gamerankings has i

    • As rated by "nearly everybody" ? 21 ratings and 6 of those from The Onion ?
  • ...SCO is the most important company in the world, releasing the highest # of press releases. You'd think they have nothing better to do.

    The next "popularity" measurement, will that be getting the most crappy pages indexed by google? Just for the numbers I mean, 1 of 294,242,345,353 hits... oh this band must be really good and popular, right?

    Kjella

  • 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.

  • popularity != quality (Score:2, Interesting)

    by k-zed ( 92087 )
    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.
  • "All this excellent music and yet low sales? You must be downloading it. Raise that levy!"

  • Yeah, top What? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Almost-Retired ( 637760 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @03:06PM (#7853884) Homepage
    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

  • BEST ALBUM IN 2003 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @03:14PM (#7853953)
    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.
    • You are so right. I use filesharing mostly for digging for older stuff and collectors live bootlegs. everything is better than what's on MTV.
      How many tits and Porsches does it take to cover the lack of talent? I haven't bought a CD in store now for quite some time. I rather pick something after a great liveshow directly from the artist if I can get vinyl even better. ;-)

  • Well, at least every bit as scientifically as the poll linked in the header.

    View the proof right here. [cnn.com]

    At best, The White Stripes deserve the Most Overhyped Band award for this year, and nothing more.

  • DAMN I'm old (Score:4, Funny)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @03:56PM (#7854255) Homepage Journal
    I've only heard of four of them

    (and appreciate one of them)

  • Everyone knows (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stalyn ( 662 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @04:15PM (#7854360) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Everyone knows (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chris Johnson ( 580 )
      Actually, it's number 2 :)
      If you take all multiplatinum albums ever, by number of platinums, and weight them by the number of years they've been out (sales has increased over the years and you want to reward continued sales and re-sales of the same album in your figures) you get:

      675 Eagles, Eagles Greatest Hits
      660 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
      594 The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album)
      506 Pink Floyd, The Wall
      494 Michael Jackson, Thriller
      432 Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
      420 The Beatles, The Beatles 1967-1970
      420 Pin
  • 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...
  • just goes to show how innacurate this "survey" is... best album of the year isn't even listed.

  • ouch (Score:2)

    by dema ( 103780 )
    R. Kelly - Chocolate Factory

    I guess it was calculating child molesting :|
  • No, not really. All musical tastes are 100% subjective. By definition, it's not even possible for there to be objective criteria for the quality of music. It pisses me off when stupid mother fuckers claim that music A is "better" than music B, when what they *mean* is that they like music A better than music B.

    I understand that the story referenced in the article is just someone's little joke. Reading it shows that he's not taking it seriously, so don't think I'm attacking him. Who I'm attacking are t
    • And no matter how thoroughly you PROVE to them that the ratio of good music to shit music released has been constant forever (this is true for all artistic endeavours: movies, music, books, art, video games, etc.), they always insist that everything was better back in the day. They'll just ignore you when you show them all the absolute crap that was released back at the same time as their favorite stuff.

      I don't agree.

      It's a lot easier today to get something published. It's harder to get into the elite pu

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