One of the best parts of the end of each year is “end of year lists” from every music review site on the internet. Now we each get our own algorithmically personalized “Spotify wrapped,” which every millennial shares on their Instagram. And among the madness, there is a bare-bones beacon of sanity: albumoftheyear.org.
Throughout the year, this site aggregates reviews across the internet. Its great. But since about 2007, this no-bullshit site has aggregated all of the internet end-of-year lists into one list where we can see what the internet, broadly construed, thinks of the past year’s music. Last year? boygenius. 2022? Beyonce. 2009? Animal Collective.
This past year, though, I got the sense that women had reached new heights in the eyes of the internet. Five of the top six albums from last year, according to the internet, were all-female acts. So I went computer nerdy.
In R, I scraped all of the rankings data for each year going back to 2007 of the top 50 albums according to the site’s aggregate end-of-year list. The AOTY rankings actually allot more points to higher-ranked albums (see above). I then hand-coded each of the observations for whether they were all female, all male, mixed, non-binary, or publicly trans acts. Then I plotted the results for each year based on the proportion of total yearly points for each category.
The results are fairly striking. It seems like the Trump administration really had a gendered effect on the internet’s music tastes. Something to remember about this data is that these are elite opinions from the internet. So what we are seeing is not really about quality but about who has control over elite opinion online. One thing that this made me think about is how white and male the internet of 2007 really was, and how that is really not the case anymore.
But alas, the top line results from this analysis are succinct: the women are killing it lately.