December always used to be the month when I'd make a point of going to bookstores to buy the year-end Music magazines like Q and NME and The Face (R.I.P. The Face), for their "best music of the year" lists. The benefit of the year-end lists is that for most listeners and reviewers, it's not until your musical selections have had to compete with each other for your attention before you can really know what's good and what just seemed good when you first bought it. And annual hindsight is a good antidote to the inevitable layer of hype that surrounds new releases throughout the year.
Online lists have almost completely taken the place of the print mags for me, and the ability to listen to a track after you read a paragraph of description is a big improvement over the glossy but not interactive paper lists. But I wish there was still more thought given to how to make an onilne "bests" lists more utility-driven. I glanced over PitchforkMedia.com's Top 100 Tracks of 2006 this morning, and felt that it was a little unwieldy and dense. 100 of anything is tough to go through, but especially so when it's paragraphs of text about musical tracks, ten at a time, listed by rank rather than some other organizing principle. If you don't have much prior frame of reference, it's hard to get into.
The first question of the list designer should be: is the list intended to show off the listmaker's editorial prowess in making musical selections, or to expose the reader to lots of new music that they may want to buy? If there's a strong element of helping out those of us who may not have been keeping up with the year in music, you need to help us out a little more.
One suggestion I can think of is to present the whole list as a listenable mix of tracks, where I can skip around until I find something I like, and then read more about it. You wouldn't have to give the music away for free, just let me play it in the course of using the mix. I'll gladly buy what I like. The key is to make it easy for me to go between the words of the reviewer and the music itself. Maybe there are DRM issues here, but I'd think by now something could be worked out. On that same subject, how about setting up a package deal where if I buy your whole list of best tracks through iTunes or the like, I get a nice little discount?
Another thing that would help is cross-categorization. Offer your list ranked in order of greatness, but give me some other ways to organize it as well, to help me get past the arbitrariness of ranking unilke songs against each other.
I don't mean to single out Pitchfork's list -- I can't find many other lists online that make extra special effort to make themselves easy to cozy up to. For your consideration, I did also come across:
Any other suggestions for helpful year-end music recommenders?
