Pazz and Jop.

who's doing it?

The email is from "The Village Voice" and says the poll will be posted on their site. But no editor name on the email

Ballots due 12 noon Friday January 4

Yeah, I got an email asking for a ballot as well... Strange!

I'm definitely gonna send them my list. I already have it made up so it's no real extra work.

In fact anyone who wants it I'll be happy to tell them.

it's a phishing scam, but they're phishing for music recs

wonder how uproxx feels right now

Mystified. It's like...a bankrupt store announcing a final sale after they've vacated the premises?

thank god, one more list to tell us that mitski and kacey musgraves made the best albums of the year

Mystified. It's like...a bankrupt store announcing a final sale after they've vacated the premises?

― clemenza, Thursday, December 20, 2018 11:27 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hear if you submit a ballot you get a great deal on copper wiring.

Forks said:
Hi! Could you clarify who is running this poll and how the (now defunct) Village Voice is involved?

D@v1d Sw@ns0n said:
Sure. We have a skeleton editorial crew who are working on the Voice archives project, and given that we have the capability to continue the poll, we wanted to do so. And I’m happy to answer any other questions.

well christgau says it's ok

WOL? LUT? Huh? But just for the record, I knew Pazz & Jop 2018 was in the works and I'm voting. In fact, I'm kinda proud. The list has been updated, and any cross-publication/generation poll will will be better than none. I urge anyone who gets a ballot to participate. https://t.co/41mTiOM5pE

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) December 20, 2018

Swanson answer is OK by me. Def voting in this. F Uproxx.

lmao wol & lut

but, as i've said before, any effort by anyone to run this thing without updating this site is incomplete: http://furia.com/pjs/table_voter_all_total.html

I would be happy to donate to a Kickstarter to get 2017 updated in there if Gl3nn names his price

i'd love to see a kickstarter to get that site updated for 2017 and 2018, and then start moving backward, too. i assume the voting data is long gone, but it'd be nice to go back as far as possible. that site is *already/still* a great resource .... it'd be even better if it went back a decade or two.

fund it immediately

I'm hoping somebody else will take over. I already told the Voice I would be happy to talk to anybody they could find to be the poll's new statistician. Most of the math I did isn't that complicated, and I can help pass it on. Let me know if you're interested, or know anybody else who might be.

But while I appreciate the notional Kickstarter sentiment, a lot, money is not the issue for me, it's time. And love.

When I started crunching P&J numbers, it was some of the most interesting music data I had. That stopped being the case a while ago.

A part of me is thrilled that the poll might survive, and I did get a ballot and might vote (I didn't last year). But I also spent enough years analyzing this poll, and now analyzing a lot more music data, to realize that the P&J in its honorable and venerable form is not really helping music in any of the ways I care most about. If it didn't exist, I wouldn't be trying to start it. I want some new thing, something far more inclusive and wider-reaching and less arbitrary.

There's an obvious, however partial, sense in which Spotify is that thing: a P&J with 200 million voters and a ballot of unlimited length. You can object, of course, that those 200 million listeners aren't all committed to thinking critically about music, and ballots of unlimited length don't force you to make any hard decisions. And, indeed, just counting streams isn't that interesting, in the same way that just counting P&J votes isn't that interesting, which is how I got involved in the first place. But I basically squeezed as much insight out of the P&J numbers as I could think to. That's nowhere near true of listening data yet.

money is not the issue for me, it's time. And love.

yeah, but ... how much money would make it worth your time

*whiney fans a fistful of washingtons and leers suggestively*

glenn, how do you parse Spotify listening data into conclusions that aren't dulled by this:

those 200 million listeners aren't all committed to thinking critically about music

That's the fun part.

But the key, of course, is that we have all the listening data. We don't have to ask somebody what kind of listener they are, and we don't have to stipulate that an individual listener has only one answer to that question.

xxxpost clemenza, sorry they didn't use more or your or my comments, but either way, I've been blogging mine for the past 15 years, I think (ones before that will have to wait 'til I find an external floppy drive that works, any suggestions?)Reading your own ancient stuff can be educational, if you can stand it.
P&J will prob be the same thing I sent Uproxx or however you spell it---just now asked whether all ballots will be accessible; that was always my main interest. Probably won't, but still hoping.

The Pazz and Jop mailing list never, ever got scrubbed. I remember it used to be in an access database? I'm still getting ballots even though I stopped voting in the mid 2000s.

There's an obvious, however partial, sense in which Spotify is that thing: a P&J with 200 million voters and a ballot of unlimited length. You can object, of course, that those 200 million listeners aren't all committed to thinking critically about music, and ballots of unlimited length don't force you to make any hard decisions. And, indeed, just counting streams isn't that interesting, in the same way that just counting P&J votes isn't that interesting, which is how I got involved in the first place. But I basically squeezed as much insight out of the P&J numbers as I could think to. That's nowhere near true of listening data yet.

― glenn mcdonald

i think my objection would be more that i never thought that the primary goal of p&j was to provide interesting fodder for data analysis.

it's certainly nice to have a user base of 200 million people, particularly when one realizes the leverage one possesses over that userbase (which realization renders questions of simple data analysis relatively insignificant...)

The Pazz and Jop mailing list never, ever got scrubbed.

Well, I didn't get a ballot this time around, but I wouldn't have voted if I had. P&J's moment has passed.

"pazz and jop ballot submitted," a sentence I never thought I'd type ever again

Oh, I wasn't saying data-analysis was the P&J's primary goal, just that my involvement was all about tabulation accuracy and data analysis...

Pazz & Jop is a critics' poll, it's not really comparable with streaming. Spotify is more like Kazaa or something

I'll happily vote, but yeah, it's a missed opportunity to be something bigger and better and different than Uproxx or the results of the AOTY aggregate.

I'd love to see a poll that allowed for up to 100 ballots, and disqualifies anyone who can't list at least 25. Also give them an opportunity to vote for an optional genre category, whatever the voter feels they have enough knowledge of.

i'd love to see a poll that disqualified you, for walking around wishing you could disqualify people

and disqualifies anyone who can't list at least 25

Strongly disagree with this. I really, really like 15-20 songs a year. When people throw lists of their 100 favourite songs of the year at me, I always wonder where "I've heard this and I don't dislike it" kicks in.

Constantly! I generally can pull a thousand tracks I heard and kinda like any year. The 1 or 2 hundred at the top are things that really clicked.
All this comes down to (imo) the fact that we all listen and appreciate differently and it's often hard to cope with other peoples gifts or restrictions when it comes to ability to enjoy.

I honestly find it hard to name 10 songs I really liked this year

“Mo Bamba,” “Big Bank” and four things produced by Kanye West

Good thing you don't work in the music industry or any of its supporting branches!
http://i.imgur.com/Ki8qjpS.jpg
(<3 u whiney)

personally whenever i see ppl write 25-to-50+-deep lists of their favorite albums of the year my first thought is always "idek if i've even listened to that many albums this year". and somehow some of the ppl who can draw up such lists struggle to come up with a similar list of songs? like, do the albums you supposedly love not have songs on them?

It's rare that my singles and album lists overlap. I'm cheating if they do.

never really understood why people like to pretend that none of their favorite albums contain favorite tracks (esp as the concept of the 'single' continues to erode)

For me, as pertains to best of year lists, it's so that I can share the love more effectively. If there's enough great stuff on an album to justify it as one of the best things I heard this year, you can assume several great singles are on there. Inverse isn't always the case.

ever really understood why people like to pretend that none of their favorite albums contain favorite tracks (esp as the concept of the 'single' continues to erode)

― dyl, Sunday, December 23, 2018

Because I love enough singles that I don't need to fill precious spots with tracks from albums that I'll place.

Good thing you don't work in the music industry or any of its supporting branches!
(<3 u whiney)

or should I say, more accurately, last year as a “journalist”

I generally can pull a thousand tracks I heard and kinda like any year.

How many are you hearing total (including the ones you didn’t kinda like)?

Whiney, sorry to hear that or maybe happy for you? Would love to hear what you're up to sometime, drop a fella a line.

Morrisp: Tough question! I can ballpark based on some metrics of what's on my playlists. Figure I think 70/80% of what I hear is worth giving more than a single listen and roughly half sticks. So maybe 3500-4000 tracks a year or so? Generally at least an album a day; on days when I'm traveling or working in the studio, maybe more like four? That doesn't take into account other streams of music and live music and CDs and so forth. This was a year when I made an effort not to do too very much repeat listening.

If you care, here's the current (unorganized and very much incomplete) list of 2018's keepers that are on Spotify. Would be happy to talk about any of these!
https://open.spotify.com/user/forksclovetofu/playlist/5F4O9GGhAEY5zYDDakpCuB

as always, though i'm aware my dilettantism is extreme from a lot of folks perspective, i'm continually aware of the massive amount of well-known, obscure or just unknown-to-me (and often great!) music I'm missing out on. the great thing is that it's not going anywhere and hopefully I will find or be guided to it in good time.

Thx, very interesting! I can’t fathom consuming/processing that much music; it’s really impressive.

Life is easy, albums are hard.

I feel like almost anyone - with the proper handholding - can make a great song, but - to augment your point Al - albums _are_ hard.

Xp Nice of you to say Morris! I consume/process a lot of media, period! Some of it's a function of my pathology, some of it is insatiable curiosity. Even when you hit a run of lousy albums in a row, the payoff high of hearing something new that broadens the soul is almost always worth the investment of time and energy.