Tagged: yearendanalysis

Twangy spitfire Neko Case's Middle Cyclone was selected by Amazon.com's editors as the best of 2009, while U2's No Line On The Horizon was the online retailer's best-selling album this year. That's according to a just-released year-end package that jumps the "happy new year" gun by quite a few days. Sure, boosting these albums now will probably be great for the holiday sales, but it's too bad that publishing the list now means that the likes of R. Kelly's Untitled and Shakira's She Wolf didn't get their critical due. Oh [...]

Coldplay's Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends was the top-selling album of 2008 worldwide, selling 6.8 million copies, according to data released today by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents some 1,400 record companies around the globe. Coming in behind Coldplay were AC/DC's Black Ice ; the soundtrack to the movie version of Mamma Mia! ; Duffy's Rockferry ; and Metallica's Death Magnetic . The top 20 albums and top 10 digital songs after the jump. (I swear this is going to be the last 2008 wrapup we [...]

Well, the Village Voice 's annual music-critics poll is here, and... it's about what you would have suspected. In an oddly Grammy-like move, the top single , M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," is actually from 2007, and benefits from 50 carryover votes. And following the paper's arguably racist cover from its 2006 P&J issue, TV on the Radio took the top album slot in what can only be described as a landslide, beating No. 2 Vampire Weekend by 669 points and 49 mentions. Consensus! The rest [...]

Nielsen SoundScan has released its year-end numbers for music sales, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they aren't all that great—no albums cracked the three-million-sold mark this year, with Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III almost getting there (2.874 million) and every other album in the top 10, um, not. Thanks to SoundScan's Dec. 31-to-Dec. 28 chart year, the top single was Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," which shifted 3.42 million digital singles and bested Wayne's "Lollipop" by some 260,000 units. Top 10s after the jump. THE GOOD: Perhaps most intriguing to me was the number of [...]

When 2008 started, I was sure it was going to be awesome. "It's going to be two-thousand- great ," I told anyone who would listen, ignoring the various signs (MTV ringing in the New Year with Tila Tequila, hints of economic collapse , etc.) that things wouldn't exactly go as planned. Or even be much good at all. But at least there was music to help the seemingly endless parade of bad news plod along a bit more jauntily, right? THE GOOD: Getting back into R & B full-throttle thanks to Ne-Yo, Erykah Badu, [...]

I like You & Me , by the Walkmen, but seeing it on so many year-end lists made me a little suspicious. After all, it seems almost designed to appeal to anyone listening to it in November or December. It's not only a wintry album, warm and soft and a little bit logy, like you've just eaten a big turkey dinner—but there are even explicit references to the holiday season in there, including a whole song about New Year's. Since year-end lists get made in precisely this period, and the album does sound uniquely good on [...]

Earlier this month, we took a look at Christianity Today 's best-of list, which seemed to judge records on an "is this Christian enough?" scale as much as it did musical merit. To balance that out, the online music mag Patrol serves up a list that looks at vaguer connections between faith and music. Patrol started off analyzing the fringes of the Christian music biz (it was called CCM Patrol then), but now it has a broader aim, tackling New York City from a faith-based perspective. Their list's intro shows their disdain [...]

This is what you've all been waiting for, right? THE GOOD: Nos. 50-41 would have made an awesome alternate-universe top 10, what with Marnie Stern, Ponytail, High Places, and Beach House all being within. Alas. THE BAD: I will not quibble with the No. 1 choice and the reasons for its placement being wholly attributed to its comforting throwback nature ("The threads of Brian Wilson's intricate coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams, and other influences are masterfully synthesized in the band's harmonies and simply orchestrated but constantly [...]

Music coverage has been rather light in the post-David Browne era at Entertainment Weekly , to say the least. To be frank, their non-celebrity music coverage is moribund at best, usually gathering as much print space as the stage section does. It almost feels like an afterthought. Heck, I wasn't even sure who they'd tap to come up with the mag's 2008 year-end lists, but Leah Greenblatt and Chris Willman answered the call with Ten Best Albums and Five Worst Albums lists, and the mag threw in a list of singles for good measure. (I've [...]

Here are some top 10 lists I can get behind, if only because they are based on something slightly empirical: AOL has posted its lists of 2008's most-searched-for musicians, songs, and music videos. The results are not completely surprising, with the Jonas Brothers taking the top slot and American Idol -bolstered David Cook coming in at No. 2. I imagine that Jonas Brothers fans are the types who comb the internet for any new morsel of information. I know I do! The top 10: 1. Jonas Brothers 2. David [...]

The music video channel that could Fuse had been running its "Top 40 of 2008" special over the last few days, but I just couldn't bring myself to watch—Katy Perry wasn't just performing two songs, she was co-hosting the whole thing. The premise was amusing, matching the year's "best" videos against each other head-to-head, tournament style, but in the end, it just turned into a battle of who could mobilize their fan club to the greatest effect. Guess what? Even through it all, the followers of Britney can come through in the clutch. [...]

Pitchfork's big pile of lists continues to grow with today's unveiling of how its readers poll turned out. While there was some grumbling about the site limiting the number of options for each category (largely to Pitchforky type acts and albums, understandably), in the end, things likely would have come out the same way. The biggish indie-type albums in a year without a agreed-upon album of the year—TV On The Radio, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Deerhunter—rose to the top. I imagine the lists assembled by the staff will be a little more surprising in their [...]

Indie digital music vendor eMusic has released its year-end list , and I gotta say...wow! This is the deepest and most balanced list I've seen so far, and it throws consensus out the window for a broad analysis of the year in music. Sure, there are a Santogold and Deerhunter and She & Him here and there, but I don't recognize half the stuff on here, and that's a good thing. There are tens of thousands of records released every year, so I find attempts to quantify the best of anything—and the ensuing "this list sucks" arguments—downright [...]

Rolling Stone 's year-end lists went online today, and its album rundown is topped by a relatively new band! The No. 1 record of the year in the boomer bible's estimation is TV On The Radio's Dear Science —although order is restored at No. 2, which is given over to the latest edition of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series collection. (Whew!) The full 50 after the jump, but first, a few thoughts. THE GOOD: Santogold at No. 6; Ne-Yo at No. 33; The Academy Is... at No. 46. There are [...]

Today sees the release of year-end lists from Time , New York magazine, and the Guardian . Instead of our usual single-list appraisal, these three seem to offer an opportunity to try and locate some sort of consensus, since they represent (respectively) the mainstream, the middlebrow, and the muso. Compare and contrast: THE CONSENSUS: Everybody loves Weezy! After weighting and combining the three publications' rankings of any album mentioned more than once, the overall top 7 would run like so: Lil Wayne just edging out TV On The [...]

Today sees the release of year-end lists from Time , New York magazine, and the Observer Music Monthly . Instead of our usual single-list appraisal, these three seem to offer an opportunity to try and locate some sort of consensus, since they represent (respectively) the mainstream, the middlebrow, and the muso. Compare and contrast: THE CONSENSUS: Everybody loves Weezy! After weighting and combining the three publications' rankings of any album mentioned more than once, the overall top 7 would run like so: Lil Wayne just edging out TV [...]

The social-music site Last.fm—which allows users to track the music they listen to on their computers via a process called "scrobbling," and also has full-song streaming capabilities for certain tracks—released its "most listened to" list earlier this week. The artists list was topped by MGMT; the most-listened-to album was Coldplay's Viva La Vida ; and perhaps owing directly to the previous two factors, the "best tracks" list had one surprise on it, and that was the fact that Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" snuck in between repeated spins of "Electric Feel," "Viva La Vida," and other MGMT and [...]

London's Fact Magazine —which runs one of the sharpest-witted, up-to-the-minute music blogs around—has been doling out year-end lists for a few weeks now, the newest of which is its Top 20 albums, preceded in recent weeks by Top 20s of reissues and DJ mixes. These lists are thankfully different than the ones you'll find in the big U.K. mags , which we're thankful for even when their logic escapes us. The albums, reissues, and mixes lists are after the jump, but first, a few impressions. THE GOOD: Sorry, Fleet Foxes: [...]

Yesterday the iTunes Store released its year-end lists, and while its "best of" lists are somewhat intriguing (the albums rundown is topped by Raphael Saadiq, while the "Best Songs" list has both Motley Crue's "Saints Of Los Angeles" and Hercules & Love Affair's "Blind" in its top 10), it's the sales charts, of course, that allow us to place our collective finger somewhere near the pulse of those people who buy albums from the comfort of their cubicles/drunken late-night outings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Coldplay's Viva La Vida —which was promoted heavily by an ad for the iTunes Store —is [...]

As has been mentioned in several recent year-end wrapup posts , the merits of putting together arbitrary listings of the year's "best" musical phenomena are somewhat negligible beyond their ability to create some controversy among music nerd types. For me, the ideal when I'm filling out one of the ballots proffered to me is that someone out there might check out one of the albums listed that the world at large hasn't shared my particular enthusiasm for up to that point (The Myriad's You Can't Trust A Ladder , now in stores!). What I'm wondering is this: Has [...]