The Pitchfork People's List - top albums 1996-2012

Amount not number obv.

if that were how it works then some records on the men's distinction list would be over 88% ?

I think the percentage is the number of votes for that album which were from people in the particular demographic.

I think that's the same as how da croupier is reading it.

xpost yeah that throws me off - how many votes did an album need to qualify for the index? because there has to be albums where only one dude bothered to vote for it

J0rdan S, idk, quantity has rarely been synonymous with quality, but okie.

― some white dude (Turangalila), Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:52 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark

right... but quantity is often synonymous with... depth

guys you are saying 'the gender distribution for ween is the same as that as total votes cast in the poll. for every other record, a given female voter is more likely to vote for it than a given male voter'

or not, i have an arts degree and i'm drunk

Incidentally, some stuff I've written about for p4k: lots of female fronted r&b, dancehall, minimal techno, OG disco, funk carioca... And I'm nowhere near the most adventurous staff writer taste wise.

i mean there were still 30 thousand ballots for this thing, i think anything in any of the sublists must've been on a decent number of ballots

xpost

30,000?? jfc

Jaymc: yeah, my phone doesn't warn me about xposts.

oh wait. points v votes!

30,000 people provided free labor so pitchfork could sell a platform to converse

Incidentally, some stuff I've written about for p4k: lots of female fronted r&b, dancehall, minimal techno, OG disco, funk carioca... And I'm nowhere near the most adventurous staff writer taste wise.

yes you are very representative and prolific on the site of course

Have you read any joe tangari? Oh wait silly question.

lol

guys you are saying 'the gender distribution for ween is the same as that as total votes cast in the poll. for every other record, a given female voter is more likely to vote for it than a given male voter'

I'm not entirely clear on this, either, but the 88%/12% gender distribution overall is for voters, not votes.

yeah re-reading the distinction index description, it's definitely something vaguer than literally 36% of the votes for a regina spektor album were female, but that women were 36% more likely to vote for Regina Spektor's Far? in that case yeah i dunno how they worked that up.

i guess if converse is happy that's all that matters

tbh i feel like they should've just left out those percentages, even if we knew exactly what they meant i kinda doubt they'd add any real shade of meaning to the rankings

30,000 people provided free labor so pitchfork could sell a platform to converse

...

it's possible they left those percentages to generate think pieces across the interwebs

if people are sick of white people lists maybe they should read rap lists? merengue lists? don't read bluegrass lists though. or metal lists. i mean indie rock is uh traditionally and historically whiter than white. indie rock fans listen to indie rock. it ain't rocket science. and indie rockers like rap that reminds them of indie rock. they want everything to sound like indie rock. that's why they play wilco records instead of country records.

The distinction index list for USA in general is rather interesting, only for the fact that it's probably one of the few times that Third Eye Blind or Sublime will ever be mentioned on the site:

1.94.93% My Morning Jacket Okonokos
2.93.25% Dr. Dog Fate
3.93.21% The Avett Brothers Emotionalism
4.92.9% Ted Leo and the Pharmacists Shake the Sheets
5.92.9% Beulah The Coast is Never Clear
6.91.17% Third Eye Blind Third Eye Blind
7.90.91% Sublime Sublime
8.90.88% Ted Leo and the Pharmacists Hearts of Oak
9.90.81% Dr. Dog Shame, Shame
10.90.78% Matt & Kim Grand
11.90.72% Hum Downward Is Heavenward
12.90.32% Dr. Dog We All Belong
13.90.03% Ted Leo and the Pharmacists The Tyranny of Distance
14.89.64% Ra Ra Riot The Rhumb Line
15.88.96% Fountains of Wayne Welcome Interstate Managers
16.88.56% Enon Believo!
17.88.12% Lucinda Williams Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
18.88.04% Crooked Fingers Crooked Fingers
19.87.85% Minus the Bear Highly Refined Pirates
20.87.54% Minus the Bear Menos el Oso

sorry that was dumb and obvious. just keep seeing this on facebook with people lamenting what pitchfork people don't listen to.

think the wider problem remains gender roles throughout industry (why so few female duos/trios/quartets/producers/engineers etc.) nor as many m/f combos as there ought to be really.

rosen's quote lists 'solo' figurehead women as some sort of equivalent to bands like the national, which just highlights further the playing field is not so much uneven as severely fragmented and divided unevenly across a much wider area. it's quite a clunky comparison on that basis, regardless of how many people try to appreciate both archetypes.

the dearth of successful bands while solo acts increase generally obstructs this further (even tho the latter has ended up seemingly leading to more solo women than men in the bestsellers list).

man ted leo does not have international appeal at all huh (xpost)

or maybe i'm the only person who thinks of pitchfork music as being an actual genre. which is why i don't get the hate. people don't get mad at rap listmakers for ignoring kate bush or whatever. its a genre thing!

well that's because they asked big boi

argh beaten to the punch

I'd think if the distinction index means the percent someone in a subset's more likely to vote for something that someone who isn't, there'd be some albums where men are more than 100% more likely to vote for it then women are. The idea that it's literally the percent of people in the subset who voted for the album makes more sense - only 6% of Love And Theft's voters were over 51, more than half the people who voted for Danse Macabre were age 26-30, etc - but that's definitely not how it's described.

man ted leo does not have international appeal at all huh (xpost)

Yeah, I was chatting about the list with a coworker earlier today, and he was disappointed/surprised that Ted Leo didn't show up. I forwarded him that USA Distribution Index, and he said "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that his style is extremely American. But, shit, he sings about Europe and socialism all the time!"

In-depth = quality, insightful, incisive.

The idea that it's literally the percent of people in the subset who voted for the album makes more sense - only 6% of Love And Theft's voters were over 51, more than half the people who voted for Danse Macabre were age 26-30, etc - but that's definitely not how it's described.

haha i'm pretty sure i don't trust that either?

In-depth = quality, insightful, incisive.

― some white dude (Turangalila), Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:17 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark

well that's a personal opinion that i have zero interest in arguing with you about -- but for the record i obviously disagree

The idea that it's literally the percent of people in the subset who voted for the album makes more sense - only 6% of Love And Theft's voters were over 51, more than half the people who voted for Danse Macabre were age 26-30, etc - but that's definitely not how it's described.

haha i'm pretty sure i don't trust that either?

― thomp, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 10:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, plus it would imply that no album was voted for entirely by enthusiasts for a single genre (Mirror Traffic only getting 95% would suggest at least one person who preferred "R&B" or "Americana" as a genre to "rock" voted for it) so I give up.

yeah i hate pulling the "well, who's doing this better than Pitchfork?" thing, but at a certain point your realize that its main competition in a lot of these arguments is some idealized publication that exists only in the head of the person making the argument (xpost)

i really should know better than to try and parse vague marketing stats like than anyway

the number is a straight percentage, which is then multiplied by the size Chuck Taylors the artist wears

btw whiney's protest of this thing is especially amusing since his mag just published a great big feature about the history of converse being worn by musicians

Mirror Traffic only getting 95% would suggest at least one person who preferred "R&B" or "Americana" as a genre to "rock" voted for it)

You can't imagine that someone who prefers "Americana" to "rock" might still drop a Stephen Malkmus solo joint in the back half of his ballot?

just keep seeing this on facebook with people lamenting what pitchfork people don't listen to.

The thing that keeps being overlooked wrt that particular argument is this: I picked 100 favorite albums released between '96 and '11 straight out of Pitchfork's database (which is clearly pretty limited in a lot of ways), and, if even a portion of the tens of thousands of people who participated have anything in common with me, their selections in this poll are (as a result) a super-narrow and in no way accurate picture of their musical tastes or interests. Their ballot might conceivably reveal something about them, but as anything resembling anthropological/sociological data, the results are compromised to the point of being pretty much worthless (i.e. they were engineered to look like the results of a Pitchfork reader's poll).

You can't imagine that someone who prefers "Americana" to "rock" might still drop a Stephen Malkmus solo joint in the back half of his ballot?

Well, if it's the album that came CLOSEST to being purely "loved by Rock enthusiasts"

what do all these poll-voters think when they read all the stuff that pitchfork covers? lately i've been surprised by how many metal reviews they've been running, for pitchfork. do those voters just like click past those, or are they reading them and listening to a bit of metal but not promoting it to all-time-list levels when they vote?

i've been wondering about something some dude said too

tbf 2010 is tied for the year w/ the highest number of albums in the list (xpost)

― some dude, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 1:35 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

since i've gone to mostly computer-based listening i've noticed that i've lost a lot of track of what i've enjoyed listening to in the past several years. i might not have seen physical copies of some of my music in years. a lot of it is er purely non-physical. but because of space limitations i delete a lot pretty regularly as it ages and i find i hadn't listened much to it lately. all of which means it's just hard to really bring to mind a lot of the music from former years.

old lunch are you aware that you could add albums to your list that weren't in the database?

Yeah. I did one, then I got lazy. As I'm sure most people did.

i'd wager the opposte, actually

and in any event, i'm not sure what the end game is? pitchfork loads every album ever from 96-11 into the database?

I was under the impression you could only vote for stuff PFM reviewed, whether it was on their shortlist or not.