Wilco’s rejected ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ found an audience online, making the alt-country group unlikely internet superstars well before MySpace was even invented. The early 2000s saw the last big wave of rock bands hit – Queens of the Stone Age crushed all opposition in ’02 with ‘Songs for the Deaf’, getting Nirvana’s Dave Grohl in to play drums and obliterating anything the Foo Fighters were working on in their wilderness years. One I think will do better in 100 years, when everyone who was alive when ‘Sgt Pepper’s’ came out is dead. It really wasn’t the end of the world – though it might have felt like it to anyone listening to the radio. Most of its points came from the presence of a few good singles – Skeeter Davis’ ‘The End Of The World’ the best, with the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ and the Beatles’ debut ‘Love Me Do’ among them – but without any albums of great significance, there’s not a lot to say really, except that things would soon get a whole lot better. The year before Beatlemania broke is, by my calculations, the worst year in music. Right- that out of the way, let’s start with the worst year in musical history since the dawn of the rock’n’roll era. The top-scoring year got 3891, the worst only 19. Lastly, I gave 2019 a 50 percent bonus to its score, considering we’re only two-thirds of the way through it.Īll up, 93,100 points were allocated. I also used 15 years of my own listening data from last.fm to allocate points in a similar way, and lastly added one point for each song in my own 15,000-strong song collection – this way years that had a lot of great records which didn’t crop up in the critics’ and public’s lists got recognised. The points from these made up the bulk of the scoring. I also did the same for a few greatest singles of all-time lists.

If a list was compiled prior to 2019, the years not included got compensated the average the number of points available for each year the list covered. Whenever ‘The Wall’ appeared second, it scored 99 points for 1979, and so on down to a single point for albums ranked 100th. I looked at several top 100 albums of all-time lists – some compiled by critics, others by public voting or based on sales data – and allocated points based on each album’s position on the list.įor example, every time ‘Revolver’ topped a list, it earned 100 points for 1966. METHODOLOGYīefore we get into the fun stuff, here’s how I did it. Yes, it’s incredibly nerdy – but it had to be done.

I’ve calculated once-and-for-all which year truly was the greatest of all-time.

Rank the deftones albums