2010 Song Project - Explanation

I've made several references to my 2010 Song Project, so I figure I should explain what that is in case anyone is curious.

The past two year (2008, 2009), I've put together a list of the 500 best songs from each year and a list of honorable mention songs. I intend to do this every year I can.

The first phase of this project involves listening to as many albums as possible from a given year. I get my album lists from Metacritic (http://features.metacritic.com/features/upcoming-album-release-calendar/) and the All Music Guide newsletter. I also download Blalock's Indie Rock Playlist every month (http://www.blalocksirp.com/), which is a great source for under the radar songs. The final source of new music is the year-end best of lists produced by Pitchfork, Spin, Rolling Stone and any one else who puts out a list. Each year, my evaluation process has involved approx. 700 albums released the previous year, plus the play lists and countdowns. As I listen to each album, I flag the songs that think are worth listening to more than once and mark them down in a spreadsheet. The rest, I never listen to again (sorry, Black Eyed Peas).

Phase two begins once all of the content from 2010 has been listened to. In past years, I would face each song off head to head with another song in a tournament format, but since this process took too long and created too much hassle in phase three, I've decided to have the first round of the tournament be more of a qualifying round. Basically, I'll listen to every song and determine if I think it has a shot of making the final list of 500. If it doesn't, I'll remove it from consideration. I hope to eliminate more than 70% of the previously flagged songs using this method.

After the qualifying round, I will stage the tournament. The tournament will determine the #1 song of 2010, but more importantly, it will lay the groundwork for figuring out the entire 500 song countdown list. The reason for this is the simple logic that the only song that could have defeated the #2 song of 2010 is the #1 song of 2010 and so on. By keeping track of which songs the #1 song defeated in the tournament, determining the #2 song is a simple matter of determining the best song directly defeated by the #1 song. After #2 is decided, #3 is decided by comparing the best song defeated by the #2 song to the best remaining song defeated by the #1 song. This process continues until all 500 songs have been determined. It seems complicated, but after the first 25 or 30 songs, I'm only adding 2 or 3 songs to the process when I add each song. The process of determining songs #2 through #500 is Phase 3.

Since I didn't have a qualifying round the previous two years, Phase 3 was a very long process and involved a lot of songs that only barely merited consideration for the final list. This delay, coupled with another change that I made to speed up the process (I had previously listened to every song on every album from start to finish whereas now I make my decision on a song as soon as I can tell if I like a song or not), caused my Best of 2009 list to be delayed until August of 2010. I hope to have this year's list ready sometime in the early summer.

I intend to complete Phase 1 of my 2010 project on Monday (March 21st) and start the qualifying round of Phase 2 on Tuesday.

I've posted my 500 best songs list for 2009 on this blog. If you're interested in my best of 2008 list, leave a comment and I'll post it as well.