Tuesday, December 15, 2009

My Top Albums of 2009

So, last year I bitched about how hard it was to post your top albums of the year and swore I would make it easier (at least for me) this year. Tonight I threw together a quick hack to do that. It is still definitely a hack, but at least 2 steps easier than the way I used to do it.

Basically, I take my Last.fm data for most played albums of the year, and then filter it to only show albums that were released in 2009.

I then took the resulting RSS feed and headed over to Widgetbox to create a widget that would display it...

UPDATE: Mark Reeder managed to take my idea and make it a lot better. Below is the embed code from his Filterable Charts hack.

My chart looks pretty representative of my taste, even though if asked to provide the list editorially I would probably posture a bit by adding some albums that I think were good (although my actions didn't actually prove it out). The only real exception to my list above is that U2 album... I gave it a bunch of tries to get me on board but ultimately failed (I think it is pretty bad actually).

It would probably be pretty interesting to look at some music bloggers' and critics' charts to see how different their "best of" lists are from their "top played".








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4 comments:

Xavier Amatriain said...

As I said in my tweet, I am missing things from my list. If I look at my lastfm profile I see 2009 albums that should be included. Clear example is The Decemberists' Hazzards of Love, which should make it to the first positions. Or another one: Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers. This should be 2nd. Any idea why these are not there?

http://www.last.fm/user/xamat/charts?subtype=albums

jherskowitz said...

It looks like the Last.fm data for albums release years is a little sketchy. In your example those albums didn't have data for release year and therefore didn't make it through the filter (in other cases re-release dates caused stuff to get through that shouldn't have). I will try hitting MusicBrainz for that data instead to see if that cleans it up.

Louie said...

Yeah, i'm having the same problem. I've listened to hundreds of albums this year but the data is coming back only for two. Here's what i see when i run the pipe:
image here

jherskowitz said...

I switched it to use MusicBrainz to look up the release date, but I am getting a bunch of time outs and errors for those lookups. It needs some better logic... will try to improve it soon (before the year is up).