Why, how, when?

Welcome!

I have decided to start up this blog for discovering amazing music, and sharing that experience with anyone. I’m going to use all the online tools and sites available to pull out the relevant information about every artist, album and song, creating a complete picture for the listening experience.

It will be a slow process. Most music blogs and websites pile up tons of new music every day and write reviews of albums that were listened to merely once or twice. And that doesn’t do justice to an artist’s work, considering the months and even years taken for composing and arranging their songs, writing meaningful lyrics, spending weeks and weeks in the studio to record the songs, etc.

I’ll be selecting great albums, with no discrimination whatsoever regarding the musical genre or release date. I will be using a mathematical algorithm to select each album. The source for the album selection will be the website www.rateyourmusic.com, which in my opinion is the most complete online music database. There are yearly charts on RYM, based on the ratings given by RYM users.

To select an album, I have to pick up a year and a chart position.  I will use the current date as a starting point. I will use the product between the day and the month to come up with the decade. For example, I started yesterday, on 30.12.2009. The product is 30*12=360 and 3+6+0=9, so I’m choosing the nineties. Next, for the year, I’m doing the sum of the day and the month. So 30+12=42 and the product 4*2=8. So I’ll be looking at the yearly chart from 1998.

I will choose only ‘popular’ albums, i.e. having at least 500 ratings. Going from high to low, I will choose the Xth album (current date). In this first case, that album is Tori Amos – From the Choirgirl Hotel, currently ranked #53.

Some might argue that the album selection method is not the best, but time will prove if picking the albums from the RYM charts is indeed as effective as I believe.