With the last of the ballots in for 2011, we can now tell you the top ten albums for the club as a total. I’ve tabulated the results, reconciled them backwards and forwards, and had them audited by a top accounting firm (no, not really, who could afford that).
There were eleven ballots in total – everyone from the December meeting that wished to provide a list, plus Sandra (who was on injured reserve at the time); and Tyson (who couldn’t make the meeting but was the first to provide a list).
For those that ranked albums from 1 to 10, their favorite album got ten points, their second favorite got nine points, and so forth down to one point for the tenth place album. If they provided a list but said “no particular order”, I took the total points available (55) and divided by the number of albums listed.
So, without further ado, here they are, the top ten albums of 2011 as voted upon by the members of #yegmusicclub.
#10: Hey Rosetta! – Seeds
#9: Tom Waits – Bad As Me
#8: Wye Oak – Civilian
#7: Blind Pilot – We Are the Tide
#6: PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
#5: Library Voices – Summer Of Lust
#4: Bon Iver – self-titled
#3: Decemberists – The King Is Dead
#2: Foo Fighters – Wasting Light
#1: Black Keys – El Camino. Which just goes to show that if you’re a fairly well established act you can release an album in December and still have it reach the top of the charts. Or maybe it’s so fresh in everyone’s minds that it got more points than it would’ve if it was released earlier in the year. Either way, of the eleven ballots cast this album appeared on SIX. No other album can claim that (the Foo and Decemberists were on five).
Just as a point of reference, every album in the top ten appeared on at least two ballots, though there were a number of other albums that appeared on two ballots, just not high enough to score into the top ten.
In addition to the top albums, I also calculated “musical correlations”. I’ve long been interested in how closely some of our tastes parallel each other, so I used a system I discovered a long time ago (while playing APBA Baseball, believe it or not) to see how closely our tastes mirror each other:
In this system, you take the points as determined above and multiply it by the points of that album for each and every other person, and then divide by the total maximum (i.e., The Colonel rated Decemberists third (8 points), Brad ranked it tenth (1 point), so there’s a total of eight points of correlation, out of a total of 385, so the Colonel-Brad correlate at 2.1%). Now, I only did that for those that ranked ten albums from one to ten. But that still left seven people in the correlations.
Yeh yeh, I know, most of you zoomed right over that paragraph as well. It was a little dry. But here’s the cool part – the results of those calculations, from highest correlation to lowest (if a correlation was ZERO I left it off the list). Yes, I am a math geek.
Brad-Marc – 41.0% Aaron-Marc – 28.1% Sandra-Tyson – 25.7% Marc-Sandra – 15.1% Marc-Tyson – 14.0% Brad-Sandra – 13.5% Aaron-Sandra – 11.7% Brad-Tyson – 10.9% Aaron-Tyson – 9.1% Nicole-Sandra – 7.0% Marc-Nicole – 6.8% Aaron-Nicole – 6.0% Nicole-Tyson – 5.5% Michael-Sandra – 2.6% Aaron-Brad – 2.1% Brad-Nicole – 0.3%