The shows from each day are now available for download!
Download them here and listen on those commutes, walks and flights (or just in iTunes while you work)!
Also, a pro tip: If you want to see which blogs featured a given album, just click on the points and other numbers in the top right corner – you will then see thumbnails of each post that listed it with the given rank!
It’s here! Every day this week, we will be revealing more and more of the best music of 2008!
This year, we teamed up with Blogfresh Radio, imeem, Musebin and Tuneup Media to make our overview of music in 2008 even better than last year’s!
Here’s what we have for you:
1) Best 50 Albums of 2008 – We compiled data from over 700 year-end blog posts (many found via Largehearted Boy’s list of lists), analyzed it, and released it into the wild so everyone can see what bloggers were excited about in 2008. You can listen to full previews of the albums via imeem and browse bite-sized reviews via Musebin. We’ve also shared the data we used to compile this list under a CC license so people can see what we are working with. Check out last year’s post to see how we arrived at our numbers.
2) Zeitgeist 2008 Radio Show – Blogfresh Radio produced a kickass podcast series featuring the 50 albums in our Zeitgeist. The shows include interviews with prominent music bloggers and plenty of music, so tune in every day for the next segment as we count down to the best album of 2008.
3) Best 50 Artists – We looked at what bands were written about most frequently in the past year and built a list of the top 50. Then we mixed it with the most recent tracks for each of those artists to create a vibrant overview of the year in artists.
4) Best 50 Songs – We looked through our users’ favoriting activity and picked out the most loved songs of each month of 2008. We’ll release more data throughout the week, so keep checking back to see if one of your favorite songs made the list.
Enjoy, and let us know what you’re remembering/rediscovering/finding out about for the first time!
This past week we’ve been busy fixing lots of things around the site. Here’s what’s up:
– If you use Safari on a PowerPC (and sometimes Intel) Mac, we no longer crash your browser! We are sorry for doing that before; it was totally not personal. Tech details here (Thanks Chirag!)
– If you’re using Safari or IE6, save yourself. But our excellent badge page works as it should again, so go play!
– The site is also a ton faster which we are super-happy about!
Oh yeah, we’ve also re-designed how tracks appear on the site to emphasize what’s important, and make everything easily accessible. Check this out:
Now you’ve got easy links to buy the song you are looking at, or check out who heard or loved this song. Click “Fans”, and it looks like this:
You can switch the display back by clicking “Download” again. Of course you can still favorite the blog that wrote about the track by clicking the heart next to its name — “78s“, in this case.
Enjoy! Would love your comments as always, though if you say mean things, we reserve the right to mock you back.
Inspired by Songza & Aza Raskin, we’ve made more improvements in how the in-page Flash player works.
It now appears at the bottom of each page along with information about the currently playing song and stays there as your scroll, making exploring music blogs that much better.
Enjoy and let us know what you think!