Last summer, we took a week to celebrate Pitchfork's 15th anniversary with a series of features exploring our history and archives. One of our more ambitious concepts at the time was The People's List, a readers' poll of the best albums of Pitchfork's first 15 years. On paper, it's not such a wild idea. But while we could have hastily thrown together a barebones version on deadline, we felt the project had more potential.
A year later, that project is complete. And thanks to those who participated, The People's List isn't just a list-- it's also a comprehensive look at how our readers' varying backgrounds, environments, and personal preferences influence the music they love. Drawing from 27,981 ballots, the feature opens by ranking the 200 albums that received the most votes in total from all ballots combined. From there, we parsed the data by age, gender, genre, and year to show how these variables affect the outcome. We've also broken the results down geographically, listing the favorite albums of the 25 countries and 25 U.S. cities that submitted the most ballots.
One of the most exciting things for all of us at Pitchfork was looking at the individual choices of voters who shared their lists on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and elsewhere. Seeing all these ballots from current and former contributors, from our peers at other publications, from artists, and from friends, reminded us that we experienced the music of these past 15 years together. But even more interesting was seeing how we experienced it differently.
If you read Pitchfork regularly and follow our annual readers polls, you probably have a pretty good sense of which artists are our readers' favorites. And indeed, it should come as no surprise that Radiohead remain the clear-cut favorite, racking up enough votes to win first and second place. As you'll see, though, the surprises far outnumber the expectations. We hope you have as much fun with the results as we did.
