The Pudding analyzes how Rolling Stone's Top 500 album list changed over time:
Great visual essay, putting in factors like popularity, streaming availability, and selection of judges.
Thanks for link, really nice visually made.
An interesting general point:
"The Rolling Stones" magazine does not list one album from Asia or India or Africa.
"The Pudding" writes about the influence of white men and "not currently available on Spotify".
But they completely ignore that the music world not only exist in the United States of America (and a little bit in United Kingdom and maybe Australia).
So the first and biggest point should IMHO be that missing addition
"Greatest Albums of All Time"
through the eyes of mostly American people and mainly the American music market.
Just an example, based on best-selling albums in the world:
Everyone has heard about Pink Floyd and "The Dark Side of the Moon".
Rolling Stones "Greatest of All Time" Rankings: #43 in 2003 and 2012, #55 in 2020.
This album was sold about 50 million times since it's release on 1973.
But have you ever heard about the album "Aap Kaa Surroor" from Himesh Reshammiya?
It was sold over 55 million times since 2006!
I'm pretty sure that there are chinese artists selling more copies then many listed artists.
The wikipedia article just says:
A number of issues make exact figures difficult to calculate, as historical data before the 1980s and from developing countries is incomplete.
and showing a map from such "developing countries":
You're trying to broaden the context of the article beyond its stated scope. It compares the lists of Rolling Stone's Top 500 albums with each other, so the frame is set. It's not meant to create an objective claim on the greatest or best-selling albums of all time, but to show how different factors contribute in an even restricted frame of reference.
The title of the linked article is the question:
"What makes an Album the Greatest of All Time?"
and the used dataset by Pudding is based on the Rolling Stones Books from 2003, 2012 and 2022
with the title "RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time"
So in my opinion these are not the "Top 500 Albums".
These are the selected "500 Greatest Albums of All Times".
I stick to it:
The most influencing factors are not the added female judges or Spotify or the Gen Z.
The most influencing factor is IMHO the preselection of mostly American music.
It makes sense that an American magazine with a panel of mainly American artists will skew in that direction.
It is also worth looking at how the idea of an album have developed in different parts of the world.
Take as an example the Indian music industry which mainly functions as a complement to their film industry. And as such few “albums” in the western sense was published, except soundtrack albums and compilations. Also owning a device that could play back records was a luxury item until the last decades, so music was something the average listener experienced in public like festivals, concerts or in cinema.
In China and Soviet Union popular music was a fusion of traditional and western styles (typically jazz and blues), but limitations set due to politics ensured late main stream use of albums. Only “correct “ music was allowed and while influential music it would be a different way to think of albums.
I think this is not the main reason. In the last 70 years popular music has been influenced very much by America and the english language. In many western countries popular music in english language has become very dominant, especially with younger people. So America had much influence on non american musicians and listeners in other countries. You cannot tell that in such a degree for the native music of other countries.
Since there have been long-playing records, there have also been so-called albums. However, the concept of a music album played a relatively minor role until the end of the 1960s (except for jazz and classical music). When an artist released an LP, the result was often rather haphazardly put together. It wasn't until the end of the 1960s that the dominance of singles disappeared and "serious" music enthusiasts bought albums; singles were for kiddies.
In the meantime, everything has changed again with music streaming. Although there are still albums and album lovers, the majority put together their own playlist and fewer and fewer people listen to an album in its entirety. The importance of the physical album is disappearing and virtual albums (digital medium) can only take their place to a limited extent.
I think this page shows with all its findings that we have to be careful to accept something as true or fact.
Esp. in the age of artificial intelligence the is hungry for all kind of computer digestible data the imminent danger to feed such a machine with biassed data unknowingly, poses a real threat.
So the merit of that page is to point out which influences led to the ranking.
And we consumers now know better how to grade the rating and can now better estimate how great any alleged greatness really is.
Hopefully, there will be similar natural intelligences to help us with other, possibly AI based decision advisors.
Thank you for the eye-opener
Even the "of All Time" claim was bogus. American record albums go back to the mid 1920s (classical) and to the early 1930s (show tunes). By the mid 1950s Broadway musical albums sold in huge numbers. But it was the Rolling Stone reader's parents who bought those albums. So there is a generational prejudice to the "of all time" choice as well
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Yes, the latter is basically a fact, but that is not a causality for the jury of the Rolling Stone-magazine.
The claim "The Greatest Albums of All Time" will always be flawed. The first reason is that it is something undefined and second it is subjective to each and every person.
To put it at a different angle. If I ask someone "What do you think is the greatest album of all time", it will be relative to that person. Whatever he or she says, will be as long as that is what he or she believes, be correct. It does not matter who that person is, or background, or if there are some objective metric that says that he or she should have chosen an Indian album, because by statistics the greatest album should be from India.
So if we scale this up to the jury of the Rolling Stone magazine, it must be some average or median of what those people believe are "The Greatest Albums of All Time". The claim is thus not wrong, but if you attribute it to a collective cultural greatness for all of humanity it definitely will be wrong or at best unmeasurable.
So as a claim it is flawed and must be, as long as it is undefined, as it can be both right and wrong depending on context.
As for the article, it is an analysis of how the Rolling Stone list have changed throughout the years, and what have influenced it. It is not an article about factors that did not influence the rankings. That would have been an entirely different article, which of course is interesting on its own.