Measuring the Unmeasurable: Ranking One’s Favorite Music, Part 6 (My 100 Favorite Albums)

In five previous essays (here, here, here, here, here), I detail how I used appearances on 434 mixes (August 1981 to November 2023) and total plays to calculate a score for 9,560 tracks. Using these Track Scores (“TS”), I ranked my favorites from a tie for #7,529 (2,032 tracks with one play and no mix appearances) to #1, “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis.

Theoretically, it should now be easy to calculate Album Scores by summing TS across albums.

But when has anything in this process been easy?

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When I acquired a new desktop PC in 2013, I “cleaned” my iTunes data: assigning correct title and artist, plus year and mode of initial release – usually a studio album, but sometimes a single (7” and 12”), EP or one-off release – along with album art and musical genre.[1] As of May 2024, there are 9,948 tracks in my iTunes, though only 9,560 are used for analytic purposes here.[2]

In the process, I learned that many tracks were not initially released on a traditional album (two-sided vinyl or single CD typically consisting of 8-12 tracks), as Table 1 below shows. Also, while I have fully digitized 505 traditional albums, there are at least 36 I own but have not fully digitized,[3] and nearly 2,0000 from which I “own” only a few tracks, topped by six from the Xanadu Original Soundtrack.[4] There are best-of, live and multi-artist collections which remained even after accounting for the initial mode/year of release for every track. Thus, Hall and Oates first released “Adult Education” and “Say It Isn’t So” on their 1983 best-of Rock ‘n Soul Part I; I do not want to double-count the other tracks on the album. When I first summed tracks by album, artist and year, I then had to combine 214 of these sums into 55 albums because they contained tracks by multiple artists (e.g., film soundtracks) or were jazz “albums” with multiple years of release (e.g., Water Babies by Miles Davis consists of three tracks recorded in each of 1967 and 1968). Finally, there are the “albums” that are really EPs, singles or “one-offs.”

Table 1: Categories of Initial “Album” For 9,560 Tracks

Mode	Own	Fully Digitized?	# Albums	#Tracks	Mean Year
12” Single	Yes	Yes	4	11	1985.5
12” Single	No	No	25	26	1985.9
Album	Yes	Yes	454	4,889	1980.7
Album	Yes	No	36	90	1980.4
Album	Once	No	9	30	1980.7
Album	No	No	1,997	3,176	1979.1
Best of Album	Yes	Yes	37	76	1984.3
Best of Album	Yes	No	6	13	1981.2
Live Album	Yes	Yes	14	75	1979.5
Live Album	Yes	No	1	1	1976.0
Live Album	No	No	1	2	1975.0
Extended Play	Yes	Yes	8	38	1988.4
Extended Play	Yes	No	2	4	1982.0
Extended Play	No	No	24	34	1982.2
Single	Yes	Yes	78	170	1973.0
Single	Yes	No	460	460	1973.1
One-off	Yes	Yes	465	465	1945.6
TOTAL			3,621	9,560	1974.2

Fully 70.6% (n=2,555) of the 3,621 “albums” containing my tracks are in the traditional form, of which 505 are entirely digitized. In total, these albums contribute 8,352 (87.3%) tracks, with a mean release year of 1979.5, higher than the overall mean of 1974.2. Overall, though, I do not fully “own” a majority (55.2%) of the traditional albums yielding tracks. On the other end are 1,003 singles and one-offs (27.7%; including CD singles with more than two tracks) that account for 1,095 (11.5%) tracks. The 538 singles have a mean release year of 1973.1, just lower than the overall mean, while the 465 one-offs – almost entirely blues, classical and jazz – have a mean release year of 1945.6, far lower than the overall mean. Finally, there are 63 (1.7%) 12-inch singles and EPs, accounting for 113 (1.2%) tracks. They tend to be more recent releases, with a mean release year of 1984.7.

Meanwhile, not all of these “albums” are of identical length. Traditional albums had five tracks on each side, for a total of 10. The mean number of tracks on the fully-digitized albums I own is 10.8. However, this mean is inflated by 49 albums with at least 15 tracks; the median value is 10. EPs, though, usually contain four-to-six tracks, while singles have two-four tracks. And one-offs run solo.

In other words, simply summing TS by album, artist and year yields values that:

• For completely-digitized traditional albums, depend to some extent upon the number of tracks on the album, from 2 (No Pussyfooting by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield) to 38 (Space Ghost’s Musical Bar-B-Que by Cartoon Planet Band)
• For all other traditional albums, do not distinguish between owned and not owned. Presumably, I have played the non-digitized tracks at least once on the former and never on the latter
• Essentially treat not-completely-digitized albums the same as EPs and non-7” singles
• Treat 7” singles and one-offs identically

There is one final issue. Track scores for an album with a higher-than-usual number of tracks can sum to a large negative number, which is not an accurate representation of how much I like the album, even when I have put a relatively high number of its tracks onto mixes. An example is -21.329 for Sandinista! by The Clash. While I put seven of its tracks onto mixes, the remaining 30 have a mean TS of -0.857, or roughly two plays each.

We start with the last issue.

There are albums I enjoy listening to straight through – Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run comes to mind. There are albums I like except for one or two tracks – Stan Ridgway’s The Big Heat comes to mind. There are albums that contain one or two tracks I genuinely like while the rest is just meh – Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus comes to mind. And then there are albums that are split almost evenly down the middle – I love half the tracks and quite dislike half the tracks. Examples include The Police’s Ghost in the Machine, Jackson Browne’s Hold Out and The Eagles’ The Long Run. Thus, I want to be able to subtract out these disliked tracks without creating high negative scores, as with Sandinista!.

After some trial and error, I settled on adding the absolute value of the median – 0.757 – to every Track Score. This maintained the same arithmetic distance between each TS while making the lowest possible value -0.948 + 0.757 = -0.191. Now, summing the TS for Sandinista! yields a far more reasonable value of 6.680.

Next, I addressed the question of varying number of tracks. For not-full-digitized albums I own, I assigned a value of -0.191 (see preceding paragraph) to each non-digitized track. For not-fully digitized albums I do not own, I assigned a value of -1.012[5] to each non-digitized track, assuming these albums have 10 tracks. I then standardized the 454 completely-digitized albums to 10 tracks by multiplying the sum of median-adjusted TS by the square root of (10/x), where x = number of album tracks, unless x>14, when the multiplier was 10/x. For live albums, I halved the sum of median-adjusted TS, while I multiplied the initial score for best-of albums by x/10, where x is the number of tracks not assigned to other albums.

I used the same logic for EP’s and all forms of singles – other than also multiplying these values by 5/10 or 10/5 (EPs, above and below 0), 4/10 or 10/4 (12” singles) and 2/10 or 2 (7” singles[6]) to account for the typical maximum number of tracks on these media. That leaves only “one-off” tracks, which I multiplied by 1/10.

Thus, I had now accounted for ownership, incomplete digitization and typical number of tracks.

There was still one remaining problem, however.

Albums are more than just the sum of their tracks – they have a kind of gestalt value. When I calculated Album Scores previously, Track Scores topped out well below 10.0, with only a handful higher than 4.0. This kept high-ranking tracks from dominating Album Score. Now, however, 482 tracks have TS≥4.0, 56 have TS≥10.0 and six have TS≥20.0. No amount of subtraction will keep one or more high-ranking tracks from dominating an albums’ score. To “flatten” these high scores, I used the square root of all TS>1.[7]

Thus, the initial album score is the sum of Track Scores that have been:

• Increased by 0.757
• Converted to a square root if median-adjusted TS > 1.0
• Adjusted for not-yet-digitized tracks
• Adjusted for typical number of tracks on a form of media, based upon a traditional album having 10 tracks

All that was left to do was calculate a Historic Adjustment – a small percentage increase in these initial Album Scores – as I did for tracks. These include appearance on a top six ranking in 1981[8] or being a pre-1981 favorite; appearance on a top 50 in 1993, 1994, 1998, 1999; and other. The latter category includes enjoying listening to from start to finish, whether it was recorded in its entirety onto a mix, whether I replaced an older copy with a newer copy (usually vinyl to CD), and so forth. The weighted sum[9] was then divided by 10 and added to one. Multiplying initial album score by Historic Adjustment yields the final Album Score (“ALS”) for all 3,621 “albums.”[10]

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My 100 favorite albums by Album Score are presented in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Matt Berger’s 100 Favorite Albums (as of May 2024)

#	Title	Artist	Year	Album Score
100	Music For the Masses	Depeche Mode	1987	6.564
99	Manifesto	Roxy Music	1979	6.567
98	Can’t Buy a Thrill	Steely Dan	1972	6.572
97	Moving Pictures	Rush	1981	6.588
96	Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band	The Beatles	1967	6.615
95	Katy Lied	Steely Dan	1975	6.627
94	The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway	Genesis	1974	6.629
93	You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess	Yello	1983	6.704
92	Cosmic Thing	The B-52’s	1989	6.711
91	Peter Gabriel [IV]	Peter Gabriel	1982	6.717
90	Wish You Were Here	Pink Floyd	1975	6.767
89	Night Moves	Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band	1976	6.773
88	Icehouse	Icehouse	1981	6.780
87	Swing	Rupert Holmes	2005	6.796
86	Abbey Road	The Beatles	1969	6.808
85	Look Sharp!	Joe Jackson	1979	6.808
84	One Second	Yello	1987	6.811
83	Genesis	Genesis	1983	6.913
82	War	U2	1983	6.915
81	Ellington Indigos	Duke Ellington and His Orchestra	1958	7.046
80	Welcome to the Pleasure Dome	Frankie Goes to Hollywood	1984	7.123
79	Purple Rain Original Soundtrack	Prince & the Revolution	1984	7.137
78	Rumours	Fleetwood Mac	1977	7.201
77	Fear of Music	Talking Heads	1979	7.243
76	Shuttered Room	The Fixx	1982	7.308
75	Water Babies	Miles Davis	1968	7.344
74	Violator	Depeche Mode	1990	7.393
73	Wind & Wuthering	Genesis	1976	7.454
72	Questionnaire	Chas Jankel	1981	7.464
71	Hold Out	Jackson Browne	1980	7.599
70	Drama	Yes	1980	7.962
69	Sketches of Spain	Miles Davis	1960	8.166
68	So	Peter Gabriel	1986	8.226
67	For Your Pleasure	Roxy Music	1973	8.266
66	True Colors	Split Enz	1980	8.267
65	Feline	The Stranglers	1982	8.287
64	All Four One	The Motels	1982	8.318
63	I Robot	The Alan Parsons Project	1977	8.409
62	Twin Peaks Original Soundtrack	Angelo Badalamenti/Julee Cruise	1990	8.413
61	Discipline	King Crimson	1981	8.420
60	A Lonely Grain of Corn	Uncle Bonsai	1984	8.440
59	Breakfast in America	Supertramp	1979	8.641
58	More Songs About Buildings and Food	Talking Heads	1978	8.699
57	Panorama	The Cars	1980	8.784
56	Happy?	Public Image Ltd.	1987	8.844
55	Call of the West	Wall of Voodoo	1982	8.949
54	Anatomy	Stan Ridgway	1999	9.016
53	Care	Shriekback	1983	9.134
52	Avalon	Roxy Music	1982	9.153
51	Pretenders	The Pretenders	1980	9.325
50	Claro Que Si	Yello	1981	9.375
49	Life’s Hard And Then You Die	It’s Immaterial	1986	9.394
48	Computer World	Kraftwerk	1981	9.403
47	With Sympathy	Ministry	1983	9.453
46	Eve	The Alan Parsons Project	1979	9.459
45	Replicas	Tubeway Army	1979	9.618
44	Heaven & Hell	Joe Jackson	1997	9.709
43	Night and Day	Joe Jackson	1982	10.022
42	Black Diamond	Stan Ridgway	1995	10.331
41	Flesh + Blood	Roxy Music	1980	10.442
40	Remain in Light	Talking Heads	1980	10.457
39	Vienna	Ultravox	1980	10.509
38	Aja	Steely Dan	1977	10.612
37	Duke	Genesis	1980	10.761
36	The Hot Rock	Sleater-Kinney	1999	10.824
35	Evening Star	Robert Fripp and Brian Eno	1975	10.946
34	Mosquitos	Stan Ridgway	1989	10.963
33	Candy-O	The Cars	1979	10.978
32	Hammett Original Soundtrack	John Barry	1982	10.997
31	Trespass	Genesis	1970	11.082
30	Spooky	Lush	1993	11.445
29	Dub Housing	Pere Ubu	1979	11.515
28	A Walk Across the Rooftops	The Blue Nile	1984	11.549
27	Waiata	Split Enz	1988	11.853
26	Selling England by the Pound	Genesis	1973	12.033
25	The Key of Cool	Mitchell Froom	1984	12.126
24	A Flock of Seagulls	A Flock of Seagulls	1982	12.182
23	Green Thoughts	The Smithereens	1988	12.313
22	Pleasure Victim	Berlin	1983	12.408
21	True	Spandau Ballet	1983	12.771
20	The Hurting	Tears For Fears	1983	12.860
19	New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)	Simple Minds	1982	12.904
18	The Public Eye Original Soundtrack	Mark Isham	1992	13.209
17	Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret	Soft Cell	1981	13.427
16	Abacab	Genesis	1981	13.439
15	The Lexicon of Love	ABC	1982	14.295
14	Shabooh Shoobah	INXS	1982	14.594
13	Dare!	The Human League	1981	14.917
12	Rio	Duran Duran	1982	15.137
11	Partners in Crime	Rupert Holmes	1979	15.340
10	The Big Heat	Stan Ridgway	1986	15.898
9	Ghost in the Machine	The Police	1981	16.455
8	Born To Run	Bruce Springsteen	1975	17.285
7	Before and After Science	Brian Eno	1977	17.306
6	Quartet	Ultravox	1982	17.718
5	Bête Noire	Bryan Ferry	1987	17.988
4	Trick of the Tail	Genesis	1976	22.376
3	Fisherman’s Blues	The Waterboys	1988	23.654
2	The Cars	The Cars	1978	23.973
1	Kind of Blue	Miles Davis	1959	24.715

As with my top 100 tracks, there is a clear tilt toward Anglo-Irish white male pop and rock of the 1970s and 1980s. Setting aside Australia’s Icehouse and INXS, and New Zealand’s Split Enz (two albums), only Germany’s Kraftwerk and Switzerland’s Yello (three albums) are not either American or British. Besides three Miles Davis albums, the only African-American artists to record one of my top 100 albums are Duke Ellington and His Orchestra and Prince & the Revolution.

The only solo female artist to record one of my top 100 albums is Julee Cruise, who wrote and sings on three tracks on the Twin Peaks Original Soundtrack. The all-female trio Sleater-Kinney sits at #36 with The Hot Rock, while Fleetwood Mac, Lush and Uncle Bonsai each have two female lead singers. Berlin, The Motels and The Pretenders are fronted by Terri Nunn, Martha Davis and Chrissie Hynde, respectively.

Five of my top 100 albums are original soundtracks from a film or television series – one each from Angelo Badalamenti/Julee Cruise, John Barry, Mitchell Froom, Mark Isham and Prince & the Revolution (albeit a pop/funk/rock mashup), while the Davis, Ellington and Swing (Rupert Holmes) albums are jazz, and the album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno is ambient. Uncle Bonsai is an alternative folk trio.

Although this list ranges from 1958 (Ellington Indigos) to 2005 (Swing), only six albums in my top 100 – adding the three Davis albums and two albums by The Beatles – were released earlier than 1970, while only nine albums – adding Anatomy, Black Diamond, Heaven & Hell, The Hot Rock, The Public Eye Original Soundtrack, Spooky, Twin Peaks and Violator were released after 1989. The remaining 85 albums are split between the 1970s (27) and 1980s (58). The mean year of release is 1981.2 (vs. 1974.1 overall), with a median of 1981 (vs. 1979). Just over half (51) of these albums were released between 1979 and 1983, topped by 15 released in 1982.

These 100 tracks were released by just 68 artists, led by Genesis with eight, including #4 Trick of the Tail, followed by Ridgway and Roxy Music with four each – five each if you count Ridgway-led Wall of Voodoo and former Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry. The Cars, Davis, Joe Jackson, Steely Dan, Talking Heads and Yello each have three albums, while The Alan Parsons Project, The Beatles, Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, Holmes, Split Enz and Ultravox each have two.

Brian Eno has one solo album, the top 10 Before and After Science, but he also appears with Robert Fripp on Evening Star and on Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, while producing both Talking Heads albums. Fripp also appears on King Crimson’s Discipline as does Adrian Belew, who plays on Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. Tony Levin is the lead bass player on Discipline and both Peter Gabriel albums.

Oh, and Hynde and Simple Minds’ lead singer Jim Kerr were once married to each other.

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As interesting as these facts are, they do not address the key question: are these actually my 100 favorite albums?

As with my 100 favorite tracks…yes, for the most part.

I can certainly quibble with a few albums. Night Moves by Bob Seger and the Bullet Band feels a bit high, despite containing “Mainstreet” (#47) and the title track (#312), as does Hold Out, despite containing three tracks in my top 500 (“Boulevard,” “Disco Apocalypse,” “That Girl Could Sing”). I may have had a “Frankie Say…Relax” sweatshirt in 1984, but Welcome to the Pleasure Dome feels a bit too high, as well. Moving Pictures could drop five or so slots from #97 without muss or fuss. All Four One is debatable. And as much as I love Genesis, Wind and Wuthering might be overkill.

Fine, but which six albums would replace them?

If I take the back-of-the-envelope 0.317 95% confidence interval (“CI”) I estimated for Track Scores and multiply it by 2.64, the overall mean number of tracks per album, I get an equally-back-of-the-envelope Album Score 95% CI of 0.837. Albums #101-122 are within 0.837 of Music For the Masses – including John Barry’s The Cotton Club Original Soundtrack (#106; Top 50 in 1999) and King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King (#119). Looking a bit further down, I see Who’s Next by The Who (#138), Autobahn by Kraftwerk (#172; top 6 in 1981), Crime of the Century by Supertramp (#178) and Scheherazade and Other Stories by Renaissance (#221).

That all said, 32 of these albums appeared in my top 50 when I first ranked my favorite music in January 1993, while 52 appeared on at least one top 50 ranking between 1993 and 1999. Before and After Science, Bête Noire by Bryan Ferry, Trick of the Tail, and Quartet by Ultravox were in the top 10 in all four previous rankings, with Quartet always #1. The lowest ranked – excluding a Split Enz best-of album, which no longer qualifies – album from that first top 10 is Happy? by Public Image Ltd. at #56.

By contrast, six of my current 100 favorites albums had not even been released – and The Public Eye had only premiered two months earlier – in January 1993. I was unfamiliar – in whole or in part – with an additional 12 albums. That leaves 41 albums which did not appear on my Top 50 in the 1990s (though they could have ranked between #51 and #100). This is a very clean split between “long-time favorites” and “newcomers,” demonstrating strong face validity.

I purchased Davis’ Kind of Blue in the summer of 1998. That September I put its third track, “Blue in Green,” on Stuff and Such, Vol. LXII, which I made for a trip to Maine with my then-girlfriend. The other five tracks on the album, including the alternate take of “Flamenco Sketches,” has appeared on at least one mix sense, while “Blue in Green” has been my favorite track since around 2003. Kind of Blue debuted on the 1999 top 100 ranking at #10, and it would have been #1 had I ranked my albums in 2004. For all that I have considered it my favorite album since around 2000, however, its Album Score sits within the 95% CI of The Cars’ eponymous debut and just outside the 95% CI for Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys, the closest my wife Nell and I have to “our favorite” album. Trick of the Tail forms a quartet of albums that lie roughly within a standard deviation (2.34) of each other – and roughly two SD ahead of Bete Noire at #5.

Quartet, meanwhile, top the 13 albums in my current top 100 I associate with Philadelphia’s short-lived “alternative rock” station, I-92 Rock of the 80s, which broadcast over the first seven months of 1983. Listening to this radio station as often as I could, I first heard tracks by Berlin, The Fixx, INXS, Ministry, Shriekback, Simple Minds, Spandau Ballet, The Stranglers, Tears For Years, Wall of Voodoo and, of course, Ultravox. I also had more exposure to U2[11] and Yello (“I Love You” from You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess). Throw in other early 1980s albums in a broad “new wave/post punk/synth pop” category by ABC, The Blue Nile, Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, The Human League, Icehouse, Joe Jackson, Chas Jankel, Kraftwerk, The Motels, The Police, The Pretenders, Soft Cell, Split Enz (2), Ultravox and Yello – as well as the first Joe Jackson and Tubeway Army albums, and three albums each by The Cars and Talking Heads (all released between 1978 and 80) – and you have 38 albums, by far the largest “bloc.” Falling just outside this bloc are later albums by The B-52s, Depeche Mode (2), Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Public Image Ltd., Stan Ridgway (4) and Yello, as well as the difficult-to-classify experimentation of Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing.

The next largest bloc (24) – dominated by eight albums from Genesis and four from Roxy Music – combines progressive and art rock. It also includes two albums each from Alan Parsons Project and Peter Gabriel, and one each from Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Rush, Supertramp and Yes.

The remaining 27 albums, finally, range from jazz (5) to soundtrack (5) to classical-influenced (Heaven and Hell) to folk-influenced (Fisherman’s Blues, A Lonely Grain of Corn) to pop (Partners in Crime) to classic rock (9; three from Steely Dan, two from The Beatles, one each from Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band and Bruce Springsteen) to the varied alternative music forms of It’s Immaterial (Indie Pop), Lush (Shoegaze), Sleater-Kinney (Indie Rock) and The Smithereens.

In the next, and final, installment of this series, I combine Track and Album Scores into Artist Score, with a few major and minor tweaks.

Until next time…and if you like what you read here, please consider making a donation. Thank you.

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[1] First-listed in either Wikipedia or AllMusic

[2] I have not yet “cleaned” (or played) 142 recently-added tracks, while 246 live versions of studio tracks have been “collapsed” into their original studio versions.

[3] This does not include at least seven best-of or live albums – and at least one studio album, Music For Films by Brian Eno, from which I have digitized zero tracks.

[4] Three from Electric Light Orchestra, two from Olivia Newton-John, and one from Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard

[5] Track Score for a track with no mix appearance and no plays, or -0.948 + -0.064.

[6] Multiplying already negative values by 5 seemed excessive.

[7] The square root of a value greater than 0 and less than 1 is larger, while one cannot calculate a square root for values less than 0.

[8] #1 = 3, #2-6 = 2

[9] Weighted 1/43, 1/43, 26/43, 14/43, 36/43, 19/43 and 21.5/43, respectively

[10] I also computed a final Album Score in which I did not use the square root of TS>1. The two score are correlated a near-perfect 0.95. Meanwhile, I also removed four “demos” from each of Loverboy’s Get Lucky and Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless and 13 “An Evening with Sheldon Harnick” tracks from Fiddler On the Roof Original Cast Recording. All three albums moved, appropriately, into my top 200.

[11] I already knew and loved “I Will Follow” and “Gloria,” from 1980 and 1981, respectively.