MEDIA

INTERACT

COMMENTS

01/29/08

Text: Nik Mercer

The Hype Machine finally put its massive computing power to work on three spectacular Best of 2007 Lists: the Music Blog Zeitgeist of 2007!

While the Best 50 Songs list is surprisingly bland and mediocre, the Top 50 Albums is massively useful and entertaining. And everyone loves a well-planned, objectified, mathematically-generated list, right? The Hype Machine Top 50 Albums of 2007 list represents exactly what the Top 50 should have been as it aggregates every blogger's lists and related numbers -- talk about populist! Impressive.

Here's what the Hype Machine folks had to say on the creation of the Zeitgeist:

The Best 50 Songs: We looked at popularity data broken down by month of what people were clicking and playing the most of. Then we selected the most interesting and unique tracks to represent each month. What you get is a pretty varied overview of the year in singles.

The Best 50 Albums: We collected over 600 top 10 album lists to come up with the best overview of what albums really made an impact this year. We weighted them according to their position using the method Jeff used in last year’s Bloggregate. Using that scoring ( #1=15 points, 2=14, 3=13, 4=12, 5=11, 6=9, 7=8, 8=7, 9=6, 10=5) we ended up with over 1200 albums ranked by popularity. And you can explore them all! Click on the “mentions” link on the album cover to see each individual list mention. Finally, you can download the data used to prepare this list here: raw data, compiled data. This data is distributed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

The Best 50 Bands: According to how many times their music was posted by the music blogs we index, these are the bands and musicians who really got bloggers excited.