Finding My Peak Year of Music

Spotify Wrapped and I don’t fully get along.

I play a lot of focus music in the background while I work, skewing my annual stats. Indeed, this year two of my top five artists were Frédéric Chopin (Polish, 1810-1849) and Franz Liszt (Hungarian, 1811-1886), both Romantic period virtuoso pianists. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love classical music. Now I have proper statistics to prove just how nerdy I am:

Yet it’s clear that any top artists I might listen to in a year may not be a fair representation of my all time favorites. So I set out to explore which bands are indeed my top favorites, hoping that some new insights into my music preferences would emerge.

The process

I am lucky that I had a starting point. A good friend Tony, who puts my music nerdiness to shame, maintains a playlist of his 50 favorite artists and two top songs by each that he has been jamming to. This results in a 100 song playlist, ranked so that the top two songs are band #1, the next two band #2, all the way down to band #50. He revisits it every so often adjusting rankings based on listening patterns. It may not surprise you that Tony is pristinely organized and is a certified public accountant (CPA).

I decided to give it a go and similarly built my own 100 song list in Nov 2022, which I call “The Senators”. This holiday break I revisited the list to brush off the dust, scrutinize each entry as well compare to another 25 or so bands right on the cusp, and re-rank it all. I used Spotify Wrapped top 100 song data as an additional data point to see which artists did or didn’t maintain momentum through the year.

Certain artists fell considerably in my rankings, such as Kanye West who can’t seem to keep his mouth shut. I just wasn’t listening to him as much this year. But I do try to separate the artist from the art. I still have controversial Michael Jackson on the list and how could I not include Pink Floyd, despite Roger Waters being quite problematic. Other artists skyrocketed into the rankings, like a new found love for Primus (thanks Sam) and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (thanks Tony). I was in a bit of a metal mood these past few months so Black Sabbath saw a rise. I also spent a full month earlier in the year neck deep in the discography of Lenny Kravitz, so he got a bump as well.

With my fresh list compiled, I realized I don’t have such a great grasp on certain music timelines. Lots of artists and bands on my list had broken up, or even died, well before I was born. I think of it like being able to binge all six seasons of a TV show after the fact, versus being an early viewer from season one and waiting years for the new releases, devouring them each time. It is much easier to recall order when each release is experienced as a discreet event. You have more supporting memories to graft on to, like when in high school a friend Chris and I were singing along to good kid, m.A.A.d city in its entirety while on a roadtrip and got pulled over for a speeding ticket. In my head I am able to place Jay-Z, Kanye, Drake and Kendrick all distinctly on a timeline in comparison to each other. Yet the overlap of releases by the Beatles, Cream and Jimi Hendrix to me is a lot more messy.

And so the final concept emerged – I would plot out my top two albums for each of my 50 favorite groups to see which eras of music I found the most appealing. Said another way, I would find the peak year of music in which the maximum amount of my favorite music was being released.

The ranked list

Using my Senators list, I picked out my favorite two albums for each band to establish a cohort of 100 albums. Some simple rules applied: no greatest hits collections, no live albums, and no singles. It had to be a proper studio album. I also did not rank them within each band. They are listed as album 1 and 2 in the table below simply due to chronology:

Upset with a ranking? Curious why a certain album didn’t make the cut? Let me know in the comments.

I don’t pretend to be a music critic, this is all just my personal taste. I also want to highlight that this collection of 100 albums is supposed to serve as a representative proxy of my music tastes, NOT my pick for top 100 albums of all time. If that were the case, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead would surely have a handful of albums each, and bands toward the bottom of the list likely wouldn’t have two a piece.

The findings

With my personal cohort of 100 set, we can start to see some interesting things. Here is a graph album releases by year:

The year 1977 comes away as the big winner with six albums: Animals (Pink Floyd), Terrapin Station (Grateful Dead), Rumours (Fleetwood Mac), Exodus (Bob Marley & The Wailers), The Stranger (Billy Joel), and Out of the Blue (Electric Light Orchestra). We can also see other years of big releases: the late 60’s, a lot across the 70’s, and the 2010’s. Interestingly I see the period between 1985 to 1998 as lacking lots of top releases.

We also can see what an absolute legend Carlos Santana is. My two favorite albums by him span 30 years (1969 and 1999). Who else has a career that long where they are still pumping out chart topping albums? This man played at Woodstock and then also collaborated later in his career with Rob Thomas, CeeLo Green and Lauryn Hill. Unreal.

But this way of presenting the data may not paint the full picture. You can listen to album for more than just the year it is released, especially for albums of this caliber. Let’s say that there is a three year window after the release of an album of peak listening. If this were the case, we should look at the data on a three year rolling basis:

Now we can start to see some smoothed out trends. The only remaining issue here is that all albums are weighted equally. It might make more sense that those towards the top of the list get more recognition, and those at the bottom less. I assigned a simple reverse score based on artist ranking (so 1st place gets 50 points, 2nd place 49 points, down to only 1 point for 50th place). With that, we get our final graphic:

Now there are three clear peaks. I have dubbed them, in order of score: The Rock Renaissance (1969-1971), Peter’s High School Tunes (2010-2012), and The Eclectic Era (1977-1979).

The Rock Renaissance (1969-1971)

This three year period was categorized by:

• Rock legends: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Allman Brothers Band, Santana, and the Rolling Stones
• Face-melting jamming: Grateful Dead
• Limitless genre bending: Elton John and the Beatles

Here I can see some clear timeline mixups. For example I always though of Led Zeppelin as the de-facto fathers of hard rock / early metal and somewhat separated from the genre they popularized. Yet lo and behold, there is Black Sabbath along with Zeppelin both dropping two epic albums in this time period.

Another learning is that Elton John and the Beatles were releasing albums at the same time! Granted Elton had a significantly longer career than the Beatles so he scored hits across the 70’s and 80’s, but in my head I forget that they briefly overlapped.

Peter’s High School Tunes (2010-2012)

This three year period was right in the core of my high school years, when a lot of my music discovery was no longer driven by myself or my parents, but by my peers. Here we see:

• The rise of a hip-hop superstar: Drake
• Conceptual rap albums taking new form and structure: Kanye, Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z x Kanye collab album
• Garage rock revivals: Black Keys and the The Strokes
• Psychedelic multi-instrumentalism: Gorillaz and Tame Impala

The Eclectic Era (1977-1979)

Here I am finding it very hard to draw clear boundaries around bands and albums. This includes Pink Floyd, ELO, the Grateful Dead, Fleetwood, Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Queen, Earth Wind and Fire, ABBA and Van Halen. Interestingly, this time period would have been when my parents were about 12-14, so I think it is no surprise that this is among some of their favorite music and played it for me a lot growing up.

The only major takeaway I have on timelines here is that it is all a huge blur. Look at this mess of genres! Hard to imagine how many amazing shows there must have been touring the country in these years between album releases.

A final comment about the British

In the past when asked what kind of music I like, I thought it was clever to answer: old and British. But through this analysis I realize that’s not really true.

First let’s look at age. I was always convinced that I am a lover of old music and new music just doesn’t have the same flair. Conveniently, my year of birth falls right in the center of the full date range, so we can count up the number of albums before and after I was born to compare. There are 55 albums before I was born, and 45 after, so I do somewhat favor older music, but not by that much. Yet when we look at just the top 50 albums, 26 of them are actually after I was born, and 24 before. This means of my top bands and albums, I lean almost a pure split!

When it comes to the Brits, we see a similarly messy conclusion. Across the top 100 albums, 50 are from Americans and only 34 from British bands. Yet when looking at the top 50 albums, it now is 20 British to 18 American. It seems that as a whole, the Brits are strongly represented at the top of the list, and this is especially impressive considering how much smaller in population they are compared to the U.S. But we can see across the entire cohort the American music is quite dominant.

Conclusion

Despite some clever analysis, I am left with some pretty shallow conclusions: I like a wide array of genres, countries, and ages. My “peak” music eras were during my formative teen years, similarly during my parents formative years, and the origins of what we now call classic rock.

This surely was fun to put together though! If you have some time this holiday season, I definitely think putting together your list of top 50 artists is an enjoyable thing to do. If you do, please share with me.

Cheers,
Peter