Don't Just Look At The Ratings: A Closer Look At Pitchfork's Numbers -- Part 3: Leaderboards! Fun Fun Fun!

Hi. So here's this.  This is a table I made in the making of my last post, that I didn't really get to, and I think it might be the most interesting one I've made out of the data I collected.  It doesn't really lend itself to a ton of analysis or anything, it's just fun to look at.  For the fans of sports out there, you already understand the infinite beauty of something like this.  So I don't really need to sell you on what I've presented above.  For those who don't, here's what's up.

In this table, I've aggregated all the data by artist.  So pitchfork.mean is the average score that artist received from Pitchfork, and pitchfork.sum is the total score that artist has received amongst all its albums.  Think about it like batting average vs. total hits in baseball.  For most artists, there's very few data points.  This leads to means with very high uncertainty.  But for other artists that Pitchfork has given a lot of attention, pretty definitive things can be said about their scores.  For example, it seems Pitchfork has pretty much decided over its 16 reviews that of Montreal is almost exactly a 7/10 band, and that Animal Collective is pretty much precisely an 8/10 band.  Great.

Kanye West just after being told the Mountain Goats
dropped a new album and it's loaded with bangers.

The aoty scores, I think, are more interesting.  There are many more artists and albums included in these data, so the aotyscore.mean can be considered with much more confidence, as these scores are the means of the means of scores given by a large and diverse set of critics.  Aotyscore.albumsum is the sum of each of the artist's album scores, while aotyscore.reviewsum, the metric that the table is sorted by, is the sum of each album's score, multiplied by its number of reviews.  This is my favorite column to look at, as it's a really good measure of to total mass of both attention and praise the online music press has afforded different artists.  Of course, Kanye is at the top by a wide margin.  And, obviously, the Mountain Goats are in second.  Relatedly, it's a little known fact that "Watch The Throne" is actually a concept album about Kanye's longtime battle with the Mountain Goats for greatest musician of all time.

Anyway, if you want to, give this a quick download and sort.  It's a half-decent way, (and certainly a very easy way) to find new artists that you might not have known got so much press, or were so critically acclaimed.