Comments | poptimists: Best Song of 2005: Finalists

katstevens in poptimists

Best Song of 2005: Finalists

Mar 23, 2010 17:32

Nordic chums Robyn and Royksopp led a very close final heat of 2005 - they're joined in the next round by the Narcade Fire, Girls Aloud and Mariah. So our top 40 of the year looks a little bit like this:

( Top 40 of 2005 )

2000s

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After all the heats are done... meserach March 23 2010, 18:13:57 UTC

This may also be an opportune moment to do some thinking about what we'll actually do once we have our Top 40 from each year (or top 400 of the decade, if you prefer).

To get from 400 songs to, eventually, one "Best Song of the Decade" will require either several further "rounds" before the final (to whittle down to say, 100 and then 40 and then ten and then one) or an extremely brutal second round (whittling 400 straight to ten? Ouch.)

My thoughts are that we need one somewhat brutal second round and then should perhaps slow down a bit to draw out the process once we have a more manageable number of songs. It's be nice once we're down to, say, a top 40 or so, if we could get some proper discussion and argumentation going, perhaps even a structure a bit like the one the Singles Jukebox are using where people justify their votes with a bit of writing, even if it's only optional.

It would also definitely be good if the second round mixed up the years, so we aren't just pitting each year's top 40 against itself. More fun to be comparing 2002 and 2009 tracks, etc. Thought will need to be given to selection, seeding etc.

Most obvious approach to second round perhaps is to take the whole top 400, allotting them into, say, eight or ten heats completely at random, and then taking the top X from each poll much as we have done for the polls thus far.

Other options might be to do some sort of seeding (based on first round votes/positions?) to try and prevent lumping the biggest names together.

If we whittled down to 128 or 64 songs we could do some sort of ridiculous elimination-tournament structure!

Re: After all the heats are done... katstevens March 23 2010, 19:47:12 UTC

The only solid ideas I had for the next round were as follows:

- mixing up years (seeding is a good idea I think)
- format: previously we have done a knockout tournament for the Now polls winners' 64 (gosh that seems like a long time ago) and groups-of-4 for the Pazz&Jop polls, the latter of which I think is probably a better way of cutting down to a small group quickly (and will make for more agonising choices).

Re: After all the heats are done... meserach March 23 2010, 21:51:36 UTC

Groups-of-four as in, stick all 400 tracks into 100 groups of four, and then in each group it is "tick one, most votes wins"?

OUCH. That's.... terrifying.

It will achieve a 75% reduction in numbers in a brutal brutal fashion, but it'll require a lot of careful attention to seeding - that's a format in which the draw matters a great deal.

Hmmm.

Re: After all the heats are done... katstevens March 25 2010, 10:57:37 UTC

The only problem with seeding is that you get the same old songs winning every time (and people get sick of ticking them). Looking through the (seeded) Jop polls there were very few upsets compared to the Now polls.

Re: After all the heats are done... koganbot March 25 2010, 19:02:53 UTC

I do remember that "Billie Jean" made the finals from a surprisingly low spot (was only a fifteenth seed).

For me the whole thing will be a surprise no matter what, since I knew so few of the tracks to begin with.

A problem may be to get people to listen to the tracks they haven't heard. You could simply say, "BEFORE TICKING, PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO LISTEN TO ANY TRACK IN THIS MATCH THAT YOU HAVEN'T PREVIOUSLY HEARD. THANKS."

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