I understand exactly what you're saying, but I don't believe it in the case of Dylan, and thus I have no choice but to question the legitimacy of it overall. Let me try and explain: There are no artist only rankings on Acclaimedmusic. There's only yearly songs and albums and overall songs and albums. They are therefore comparing the songs of, let's say James Brown, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Four Seasons, Wilson Pickett, Temptations and Bob Dylan in 1965 against one another, along with every other song released that year. Similarly, on the all-time greatest songs list, they are ranking the songs of Run-D.M.C., Elvis Presley, The Clash, Prince, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, Nirvana, Del Shannon, Christina Aguliera and Bob Dylan against one another, and every other song by every other artist throughout history. So since they are using THREE Dylan only song lists in their rankings, WHAT exactly are they using them for? There are no Four Seasons-only rankings or Donna Summer-only rankings to sort out which of THEIR songs are rated highest among their own catalog, so why is there for Dylan and how can that be legitimately defended. In other words, the rankings are supposedly made (as you claim) by rating songs only against other eligible songs. Okay. Well, since there are no other artists eligible for inclusion the Dylan-only lists then those lists can not be used when ranking him against other artists.... ie. the only rankings the site has (yearly songs, all-time songs). Therefore the Dylan-only lists have no bearing on the only thing acclaimedmusic does supposedly, yet they're being used to determine WHICH Dylan song will rank highest among all Dylan songs when compared to OTHER ARTISTS? That doesn't work. If "Like A Rolling Stone" finishes highest in the supposedly "all-inclusive" lists they put into the formula for 1965, but "Positively 4th Street" ranks higher in an all-Dylan list, is the latter going to trump the former on the 1965 rankings and if so, will 4th Street be moved over songs by other artists that beat it, or will LARS be dropped behind songs it beats in the all-inclusive source lists? It makes absolutely no sense either way. They CAN'T use those to set the Dylan placements because the only thing that would make it objective in any way are the rankings on the all-inclusive source lists. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact that there ARE artists only rankings.

Go to the site and click on "Artist Lists" in the upper left corner. Then click on the top artist links. They have top 1,000 artists, top 200 artists for both singles and albums, top artists of each decade and top artists of 1900-1949.


Here's their top 100 artists of the 50s:


1 Elvis Presley

2 Miles Davis

3 Chuck Berry

4 Buddy Holly & The Crickets

5 Frank Sinatra

6 Little Richard

7 Ray Charles

8 Bo Diddley

9 Thelonious Monk

10 Ella Fitzgerald

11 Sonny Rollins

12 The Everly Brothers

13 Jerry Lee Lewis

14 Johnny Cash

15 Muddy Waters

16 Charles Mingus

17 Count Basie

18 Fats Domino

19 Duke Ellington

20 Hank Williams

21 Art Blakey

22 Dave Brubeck

23 Eddie Cochran

24 Bill Haley and His Comets

25 Charlie Parker

26 Howlin' Wolf

27 Ornette Coleman

28 Dizzy Gillespie

29 Gene Vincent

30 Big Joe Turner

31 Bud Powell

32 Billie Holiday

33 Carl Perkins

34 Johnny Burnette

35 Clifford Brown

36 Sarah Vaughan

37 Ritchie Valens

38 Jackie Wilson

39 The Coasters

40 John Coltrane

41 The Drifters

42 Louis Armstrong

43 Lloyd Price

44 Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers

45 The Platters

46 Benny Goodman

47 James Brown

48 Sam Cooke

49 Max Roach

50 Jackie Brenston

51 The Isley Brothers

52 Cannonball Adderley

53 The Flamingos

54 Erroll Garner

55 Dion

56 The Five Satins

57 Link Wray

58 The Modern Jazz Quartet

59 Screamin' Jay Hawkins

60 Marty Robbins

61 Harry Belafonte

62 Bobby Darin

63 Cliff Richard

64 Little Willie John

65 Tito Puente

66 The Chords

67 Elmore James

68 Lambert, Hendricks and Ross

69 Chet Baker

70 Art Pepper

71 Sun Ra

72 George Russell

73 The Penguins

74 Wilbert Harrison

75 Gerry Mulligan

76 "Tennessee" Ernie Ford

77 The Orioles

78 Bill Doggett

79 Les Paul & Mary Ford

80 João Gilberto

81 The Weavers

82 Jerry Butler

83 LaVern Baker

84 Nat King Cole

85 Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton

86 Horace Silver

87 Nina Simone

88 Art Tatum

89 Lefty Frizzell

90 Lonnie Donegan

91 Lester Young

92 The Chantels

93 Lennie Tristano

94 Kitty Wells

95 Ray Price

96 Jacques Brel

97 Peggy Lee

98 Duane Eddy

99 Lightnin' Hopkins

100 Jimmy Smith

Well, look. If LARS is first and P4S is third, and if, counting the Dylan-only lists, P4S beats LARS head-to-head, then switching them doesn't seem so outrageous.

Overall, it's clear to me that acclaimedmusic is a deeply flawed site on a number of levels. At the same time, though, its not like there's any other metric for acclaim that's that much better. I wouldn't really rely on it, but it's a data point to consider--at least when comparing artists/songs/whatever of similar eras and genres.

Yes, it's a ton better than nothing, or just making an educated guess as to what is more acclaimed.

Sampson wamts to call his criteria "objective," but something is only truly objective if all people would get the same answer to the question, such as 2+2=4.

You can't say that it's objective to decide, for instance, who was more influential between the Beatles and Elvis, or between Dylan and James Brown, because even among experts the answer to those questions is in dispute. I have the Beatles as more influential than Elvis. Sampson has the opposite, and we each have lots of people who agree with our side, so therefore, it's a totally "subjective" portion of the criteria.

Acclaimedmusic is only one thing I use for acclaim. There's also things like the Rolling Stone list, the R&R HOF list, the Grammys, the RIAA lists, etc...

Even the popularity portion of the criteria as used by Samspon is not objective. He tends to only think about singles as compared to albums, and to only think about the USA charts as opposed to other countries, and he tends to only think about initial popularity as opposed to lasting popularity, which to me is much more important.

Going by initial popularity "Dominique" by the Singing Nun crushes "Summer Wind" by Sinatra, but which song has been more popular over the 50 or so years since they were each released?

We're ranking "Greatness" here, and the sign of greatness comes over time, it does not come because a record happended to be insanely popular for a few months many decades ago. "Say, Say, Say" by McCartney and MJ was number one for 6 weeks. Does that make it "more popular" than "Thriller" which only got to #4?

Here's Acclaimedmusic's top 100 1960s artists:


1 The Beatles

2 Bob Dylan

3 The Rolling Stones

4 Jimi Hendrix

5 The Beach Boys

6 The Velvet Underground

7 The Byrds

8 The Who

9 Aretha Franklin

10 Otis Redding

11 The Kinks

12 John Coltrane

13 James Brown

14 The Doors

15 Led Zeppelin

16 The Band

17 Creedence Clearwater Revival

18 Elvis Presley

19 Frank Zappa/The Mothers of Invention

20 Van Morrison

21 Sly and the Family Stone

22 Simon and Garfunkel

23 Cream

24 Jefferson Airplane

25 Smokey Robinson and The Miracles

26 Miles Davis

27 Love

28 Roy Orbison

29 The Supremes

30 Ray Charles

31 Pink Floyd

32 Charles Mingus

33 Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

34 Johnny Cash

35 Sam Cooke

36 Dusty Springfield

37 Nico

38 Buffalo Springfield

39 Leonard Cohen

40 Marvin Gaye

41 Fairport Convention

42 Four Tops

43 Ike and Tina Turner

44 The Ronettes

45 The Stooges

46 Stan Getz

47 Nick Drake

48 The Righteous Brothers

49 King Crimson

50 MC5

51 Bill Evans

52 Neil Young

53 Ornette Coleman

54 The Flying Burrito Brothers

55 The Temptations

56 Martha and The Vandellas

57 The Animals

58 The Crystals

59 Grateful Dead

60 B.B. King

61 Small Faces

62 Janis Joplin/Big Brother and The Holding Company

63 Procol Harum

64 The Kingsmen

65 The Zombies

66 Tim Buckley

67 Duke Ellington

68 Ben E. King

69 Patsy Cline

70 Them

71 The Mamas and the Papas

72 The Jackson 5

73 Eric Dolphy

74 Herbie Hancock

75 Scott Walker

76 Traffic

77 The Impressions

78 Etta James

79 Wilson Pickett

80 The Shangri-La's

81 Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young)

82 Booker T. & The MG's

83 Frank Sinatra

84 The Lovin' Spoonful

85 Dionne Warwick

86 The Drifters

87 Del Shannon

88 Howlin' Wolf

89 Glen Campbell

90 Wayne Shorter

91 Muddy Waters

92 Sam & Dave

93 13th Floor Elevators

94 Isaac Hayes

95 John Mayall

96 Jeff Beck

97 Desmond Dekker

98 The Shirelles

99 Percy Sledge

100 David Bowie

See, here's a good example of where their results seem really flawed. Obviously Love has critical acclaim out of proportion to its commercial success, and in particular the Forever Changes album is considered a classic. But how many critics do you think, if asked to choose which artists overall 60s output was better (let alone "greater" or "more influential" or something) would choose Love? And that's not even considering all the favorable reviews the Tempts probably received at the time from mainstream and black-oriented publications which probably wouldn't have even noticed Love.



Wait...what? They basically released one single in the 1960s. (OK, there were a couple small independent releases before that, but they received very little attention, even after the group became famous.) Granted, it's a single that is (quite deservedly, in my opinion) considered great, but still.

They may weigh the albums more than the individual songs which might explain why Love and other white acts in general do better than black acts in the 60s.





The site also has their debut album as 1969 and it's #432 for the decade.

The Temptations are #45 of all time on the songs list with Love not in the top 200. But on the album list Love is #128 with the Temps not in the top 200, so I would guess that their all time artist list weighs the albums more than the songs.

Also some of the Temps well reviewed stuff (Just My Imagination, Papa Was A Rolling Stone) is not from the 60s. On their all time artist list the Temps are #135 and Love is #151.

They do and to quite a significant margin I believe.


Don't use these for judging the overall acclaim of artists please. The ones where singles and albums are combined give a completely distorted image due to the much higher weighting of albums. Then there's much more to an artist's acclaim than just that of their recorded output. And lastly you'll have some artists with a very slim recorded ouput placing much too highly. The Sex Pistols are #93 on the albums-only list on the basis of only one album just ahead of The Jam (4 albums ranked, 2 bubbling under), Pearl Jam (5 ranked, 2 bubbling), Al Green (6 ranked, 3 bubbling), Primal Scream (3 ranked, 1 bubbling), Deep Purple (3 ranked, 2 bubbling), Can (5 ranked), Sigur Rós (4 ranked) and Ornette Coleman (a motherfuckin' dozen ranked, plus five bubblers).

It is probably slightly easier to find Dylan-only lists than lists that rank the greatest songs by The Four Seasons. There are also five Beatles-only lists.


I assume that one Dylan list ranking P4S higher than LaRS will have absolutely no effect on the overall song ranking. Even if all three of them ranked P4S higher, it probably still wouldn't. But imagine 1,000 Dylan-only lists that put P4S at #1. With something like that it might seem more reasonable to simply switch LaRS and P4S.

In the end I guess those lists for just one artist will have practically no effect on the overall ranking, and only if a song turns out to be very significantly more acclaimed in such lists than in more inclusive lists, the order of this artist's songs may be affected.

Also, I'm pretty sure the more inclusive a list is in terms of the items that are in theory eligible for it, the higher its impact on the overall ranking will be. How large the gap between the weighting of an all-inclusive and a Dylan-only list is, will obviously be based on the subjective judgment of Henrik Frazzon, who wrote the algorithm, but he must have found a way, for otherwise a song that appears only on cybergrind lists and a song that appears only on techstep lists would be completely uncomparable.

No, I only use it for songs and how they relate to each other. The site was very helpful when I did the top 100 song lists for all the years in the 1990s and the 2000s.

Yeah, for comparing the acclaim of songs from rather small time frames and especially more recent ones, it should be very accurate.

It also seems to be more Europeon oriented with the modern stuff which helped me to not make the lists too USA oriented. I ended up with a nice mix of R&B/Hip Hop and alternative and other white rock genres. I usually added a song near the bottom if it was the top song on an odd album that was a huge RYM favorite, usually heavy metal, detah metal or something along those lines.

Yeah. And that's totally ass-backwards, especially for the sixties. Consider how many more singles were released in that decade than albums. Consider, just for starters, that you're competing with basically ten possible entries by The Beatles (if you're going by the UK configuarations, which have been the standard for the last 25 years or so) on an albums list, while they charted 30 singles in the 60s--and that's NOT counting numerous charting b-sides, nor the releases of their pre-EMI recordings, not to mention the many classic album tracks which are likely to turn up on song lists ("A Day In The Life", for instance). Consider that for every Love or Velvet Underground that's more likely to turn up on an album list than a singles/songs list, there are tons of Kingsmen and Percy Sledges and Crystals and ? & The Mysterians who released very important and acclaimed singles but don't have albums which critics would ever likely notice. Singles should count for more.



Good point. No consideration of their reputation as live artists, for example, which hurts the standing of James Brown, The Who, and the Grateful Dead, no doubt.



Yeah, same issue as with the J5 on the 60s list.

Here's the German Rolling Stone Top 500.

http://www.poplist.de/poplist.php?l=466

12 Chuck Berry Johnny B. Goode

235 Bill Haley & His Comets (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock