Getting Better or Getting Worse?
I have been thinking that the quality of album releases has fallen off a lot over the past decade. But I am not so sure. Hence I have gone back to 1986 and looked at Q magazine’s albums of the year list (not necessarily my favorite albums), to see how many new albums from each year I would still listen to, at least once a year:
1986: 7
1987: 5
1988: 12
1989: 9
1990: 7
1991: 9
1992: 7
1993: 9
1994: 4
1995: 9
1996: 7
1997: 11
1998: 11
1999: 10
2000: 10
2001: 14
2002: 6
2003: 6
2004: 10
2005: 3
2006: 9
2007: 5
2008: 9
2009: 3
2010: 7
2011: 5
It is quite horrifying that, for the past 25 years I bought Q each December to find out the top 50 or 100 albums, and have actually bought a high proportion of them (particularly in the past 10 years), so few of them are still valued. For example: I bought 35 of the 50 from 2011 but have only listened to 5 of them in recent months, and none are in my favorite albums of all time list. It is also worth saying that quite a few of my favorite albums are not in the Q list (e.g. Natural History by I am Kloot, Bananas Foster by the Jigsaw Seen). Thanks to music collector, I can scroll through albums that I bought by the year released, and even though 2009 looks like a dire year (above), I bought lots of records that year (I only buy really good albums on vinyl), so I obviously didn’t like the Q list much.
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