Greetings, friends!

It’s that time once again for you to have your say: voting is now open for the Top 50 LPs of 2023 community feature!

As in years past, we will also be including EPs/Live Albums/Compilations in a separate category.

This will be the first year we’re going to try to pull this off without the forums, so thank you for your patience in learning to love Google forms (where you no longer have to follow that complicated underscore system!).

Ballots will be open for approximately two weeks (a projected cut-off date of Thursday, December 28th around 11:59PM ET).

LP Ballot Rules

If you would like to submit an LP ballot, please review the guidelines before submitting your ballot officially (it’s not a race!):

• Your ballot must have exactly 10 LPs on it (please note that the ballot asks for the album name first and not the artist!)
• You are allotted 100 points to divvy up across your 10 LPs
  • Some users liked 10 albums equally, so they’ll assign 10 points to 10 LPs
  • Some users choose to assign more points to their favorite LPs on the year
  • The maximum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 30
  • The minimum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 1
  • These are whole-number votes, so do not worry about fractions or irrational numbers
• Where an album is ranked (e.g., Position 1 vs. Position 10) on an individual ballot matters in the final calculations
• The frequency in which an LP appears across the community ballots matters in the final calculations
• Please strive to enter artists and LPs as they are depicted in the database (e.g., including all of Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre instead of “Periphery 5” or “Periphery V”; ‘Tangled Thoughts of Leaving’ instead of TToL, etc.)
  • This is especially important for artists that have ISO codes in their name due to our horrific cataloging system
    • Sleepwalker (JPN) – Skopofoboexoskelett (correct) vs. Sleepwalker – Skopofoboexoskelett (incorrect)

Example Ballot A

1. Thirty Seconds to Mars – It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day (10)
2. Drake – For All the Dogs (10)
3. Anne-Marie – Unhealthy (10)
4. Corey Taylor – CMF2 (10)
5. Sleep Token – Take Me Back to Eden (10)
6. Greta Van Fleet – Starcatcher (10)
7. Pierce the Veil – Jaws of Life (10)
8. Emarosa – Sting (10)
9. PVRIS – Evergreen (10)
10. Gorillaz – Cracker Island (10)

Example Ballot B

1. Thirty Seconds to Mars – It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day (30)
2. Drake – For All the Dogs (17)
3. Anne-Marie – Unhealthy (16)
4. Corey Taylor – CMF2 (11)
5. Sleep Token – Take Me Back to Eden (11)
6. Greta Van Fleet – Starcatcher (5)
7. Pierce the Veil – Jaws of Life (4)
8. Emarosa – Sting (3)
9. PVRIS – Evergreen (2)
10. Gorillaz – Cracker Island (1)

We will work to ensure we capture all ballots accurately (particularly those with accent marks or non-Roman characters; e.g,. Utiseta and Útiseta), but please note that ballots will be disqualified if:

• A ballot has fewer than 10 LPs on it
• More than 100 points are assigned across the ballot or the total points assigned do not add up to 100
• An LP from a year other than 2023 is placed on the ballot
• An EP, Live Album, or Compilation is placed on the ballot
• There are multiple ballots with the same username attached to it (BE NICE. Don’t impersonate users who are deceased. I can’t believe I’ve already had to write this 12 hours into this post being live). It’s fine with us if you need to change your ballot, but don’t submit multiple ballots unless you know that we will only look at whatever your most recent submission was.
• The ballot is unsalvageable because we cannot, in good faith, figure out what the heck the voter was trying to convey to us

The LP ballot is now closed.

EPs/Live Albums/Compilations Ballot Rules

• Same general ideas as above, but there is a 30-point allocation for exactly 3 EPs/Live Albums/Compilations
  • The maximum number of points that can be assigned to any one EP/Live Album/Compilation is 21
  • The minimum number of points that can be assigned to any one EP/Live Album/Compilation is 1
• We will work to ensure all ballots are captured properly unless the errors are too egregious to bring them into compliance

The EP/Live Album/Compilation ballot is now closed.

Links and Call for Writers

The contributing writers coordinate the year-end write-ups, and there is always demand for assistance. If you’d like to potentially pitch in to this effort, please navigate to the Request Form available [here].

To read previous community features (where the artwork is still intact before one of our many server crashes killed previous entries), please navigate below:

[2022], [2021], [2020], [2019]

Please feel free to campaign for your favorite records in the comments section below.

The 2023 LP ballot is now closed.

The 2023 EP/Live Album/Compilation ballot is now closed.

Sending you and yours best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season. Have fun! We’ll see you January 9th for the community’s 50-31 list.