How Rolling Stone's top 20 albums of 2017 fared with critics

Rolling Stone released their annual top 50 albums of 2017. This is the top 20 along with the album's Metacritic score, which shows how well each album was received by critics. A score of 80 or above indicates the album was critically acclaimed. A score from 61 to 79 indicates the album was positively received.

20. SZA - Ctrl
Ctrl has a Metascore of 86, a big improvement over her previous release Z, which had a score of 66.

19. Father John Misty - Pure Comedy
Metascore 85. All Father John Misty releases have scores in the mid 80's 

18. St. Vincent - MASSEDUCTION
Metascore 88. St. Vincent's lowest score is still an impressive 78. 

17. Harry Styles - Harry Styles 
Metascore 68. This is a pretty low score for top 20 on a best of list. It's positive but 13 points away from critically acclaimed.

16. Margo Price - All American Made
Metascore 82. Her previous album has a score of 86.

15. Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice 
Metascore 79. Courtney's previous album has a score of 88. Kurt's albums have ranged from 59 to 83. 

14. Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm 
Metascore 80. Previous albums were 81 and 79.

13. Randy Newman - Dark Matter
Metascore 82. Previous releases were 81 and 86. 

12. JAY Z - 4:44 
Metascore 82. That's a big improvement over a previous score of 60. Jay Z's scores have been very mixed with some in the 60's and others in the 80's. His career average is a respectable 74. 

11. The National - Sleep Well Beast
Metascore 85. Other than a score of 78, all of The National's albums are critically acclaimed.

10. Sam Smith - The Thrill of It All 
Metascore 72. This is another that I'm surprised to see so high on the list because it's critical reception was decent. 

9. Migos - Culture 
Metascore 79. That's a big improvement over a previous score of only 67. 

8. Queens of the Stone Age - Villains 
Metascore 81. The band's scores range from 75 to 89.

7. Taylor Swift - Reputation
Metascore 71. That's a decent score but the album likely made it this high on the list because Taylor's is such a big name. It's her most poorly received album critically. Her highest scores are two 77's.

6. Khalid - American Teen
No Metascore. The album didn't receive enough reviews from major publications to receive

a score. But considering the success he's having, his next album will likely have one.

5. LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
Metascore 86. Other than a score of 75, all of LCD Soundsystem's albums have been critically acclaimed.

4. Kesha - Rainbow
Metascore 81. Previous two releases were in the low 70's.

3. U2 - Songs of Experience 
Metascore 77. U2's albums range from 64 to 90. 

2. Lorde - Melodrama 
Metascore 91. Lorde managed to top her debut Pure Heroine, which scored 79, by 12 points.

1. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN
Metascore 95. Kendrick has had three albums with scores in the 90's and two in the 80's. His career score is a very impressive 90.

Has streaming ruined the charts?

Charts like the Billboard Hot 100 are meant to be a measure of what's popular in music. A popular song should be one that's widely known by the general public. In the old days, determining what was popular was easy enough. Single sales and radio play were counted to find the biggest song of the moment. Overall those were accurate measures. Of course, radio play can be controversial. After all, record labels in the form of payola do pay-to-play to get songs onto the radio. But still, radio has a strong incentive to mainly play songs people want to hear. If they play too many songs people don't like, they'll lose listeners. Radio stations use surveys like callout scores and other methods to determine what their listeners like. So, while radio is somewhat imperfect, it's still a pretty good indicator of what people actually like.

But now streaming is having a big impact on the charts and in many ways it's a poor indicator of what's popular. Here's one example of why that is. Someone goes to YouTube to leave a comment on how much they hate Taylor Swift's new song. But by doing so, they've contributed to streams and to the song's chart success. Thousands of people who want to express their disdain for an artist or song by leaving a negative comment are inadvertently making the song more popular. Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do has one million thumbs down and six million thumbs up. Every one of those million thumbs down helped increase its chart position.

If the thumbs up/thumbs down ratio is an accurate representation of how many people disliked Look What You Made Me Do, it would mean that about 84 million of the song's 600 million streams were by people who didn't like it. People won't buy a song they dislike. But for many reasons they will stream songs they dislike. As an example, a new release that gets mentioned on lots of websites, forums, and blogs will inevitably include an embedded video. Many people will click play out of curiosity and contribute to the song's chart success even if they never listen to it again. In that case, streaming reflects how much hype and attention the song got. Not how much people like it.

Curated playlists are another problem. All streaming services have top 40 playlists and hot songs playlists. Many people run these playlists in the background and may not always skip songs they don't care for. Think of someone who's studying or doing housework with music they aren't fully paying attention to running in the background. Even songs they dislike will play and count toward the charts for no other reason than no one bothered to skip them.

Songs that are popular on iTunes but weak on streaming may struggle to enter the top 20 on the Hot 100. And yet a lot more is required to buy rather than stream a song. In Digital Spy, Tom Eames complained about the effect streaming was having on the UK charts. He pointed out that Drake's One Dance was #1 on the overall chart for 15 weeks. But on a sales only chart, it was #1 for only four weeks. In one of those weeks where the song was #1 overall, it was only #14 on the sales only chart. Did One Dance hold onto the #1 for 11 extra weeks because people were deliberately streaming it (either searching for it or playing it from personal playlists) or because it was in so many popular curated playlists?

The daily Spotify chart often has little in common with the iTunes chart. iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon typically have a lot of overlap in their biggest selling songs. Thunder by Imagine Dragons is #1 on all three. But it's at #39 on the Spotify United States Top 50. The #1 on Spotify is Rockstar by Post Malone. It isn't in the Amazon top 10. It's #4 on iTunes and #2 on Google Play. That's fairly close. But the #2 on Spotify Bank Account by 21 Savage is way off compared to sales. It's #55 on Google Play and #57 on iTunes. It isn't in the Amazon top 20. Thanks to streaming, it's #14 on the Billboard Hot 100, just 6 places behind Thunder. This is the case for several songs in the Spotify Top 10. Many don't even rank in the top 25, and in some cases the top 50, on sales. To quote Tom Eames,

Many Spotify users simply play Spotify's curated playlists or the 'UK Top 50' playlist of the most popular songs around right now. Over and over. This means it takes yonks for songs to finally go away or to allow others to have a bloody turn. And it depends on Spotify's algorithm.

In other words, it's not listeners determining what's popular. It's the software they're listening on making that determination. The more types of popular curated playlists a song is placed in, the higher it will rank on the charts even if few people in the general public have ever heard it. These few songs that are played over and over make it harder for new songs to break through. The BBC's Mark Savage points out that this has consequences for musicians and music fans.

In the first six months of 2016, there were 86 new entries in the UK singles chart. Ten years ago, that figure was 230. And while artists like Beyonce, Rihanna and Calvin Harris continue to rack up the hits, new artists are being pushed out of the race. 

There are also concerns about chart manipulation with streaming. Republic Records was accused of manipulating the charts by putting a 3 minute 38 second loop of the chorus of Post Malone's Rockstar on their YouTube page. The loop had 42 million views, which all counted toward the charts, even though none of those listeners heard the full song.

Tom Eames recommends taking streaming out of overall charts to more accurately reflect what truly is popular. But this doesn't make sense because increasingly people are consuming music through streaming services. If you remove tens of millions of streamers from the charts in favor of a dwindling number of purchasers, the charts still won't be accurate.

So, what can be done to make the charts more accurate and give more songs and artists a chance to shine? 

• Exclude curated playlists. That way only songs people actually choose to listen to through searches or from their own playlists count. 
• Weight streamed songs in a way that aligns more with digital downloads. 
• Eliminate radio services like Pandora, which don't involve much in the way of choice. 
• Take thumbs up versus thumbs down and average watch time into account on YouTube to better reflect how much listeners like or dislike a song.

Billboard is frequently changing their formula. Right now, no one (other than the few artists who have long running number 1 songs) seems to be happy with the current formula. 

I helped contribute to the success of Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do when I clicked on it to find how many thumbs up versus thumbs down it had.