Hello fellow football fans, and welcome to a post that will assign numbers to your footy feelings. On the eve of the 2018 World Cup, I noticed that no one had made a “World Cup Thread”-type list, so I decided to start one. At some point, I realized that I could leverage the comments people […]

Hello fellow metalheads and welcome to a post that will put the division symbol in m/. Metal music is not unlike a cult or gang, and any self-respecting gang has its own hand sign. For metal, it has been the metal horns. When you point at someone, you point 3 fingers at yourself; but when you do metal […]

Hello fellow once-a-year-birthday-havers and welcome to a post that will answer how old people on this website are (or at least those that willingly posted their ages on a sputnik list). So, I surveyed you all to give me more ideas for Statnik, and many of you suggested things I had already done. No worries, […]

Hello, fellow numbers in a weighted average, and welcome to an investigation of how much weight this site really has. It may come as a shock to you or for some reason you’ve never even considered it, but metacritic collects the ratings from the staff reviews of this very website to make their average scores. Specifically, […]

Hello voters, and welcome to a post about a long running music poll. The Pazz & Jop Poll is a year end Album of the Year list scored by votes tabulated from an assortment of elite music critics. In fact, the most elite music critic (outside of PSH’s character in Almost Famous, I guess), Robert Christgau, […]

Hello fellow aggregators, and welcome to a celebration of teamwork with data. Rob Mitchum is one such aggregator, and for the past 5 years he has been putting together a spreadsheet per year of all the top 50 AOTY lists released by reputable publications. For this post I did something I don’t normally do, and that’s […]

Hello budding data viz lovers, and welcome to a post that will put the division in Joy Division. When it’s time to explain patterns and numbers to layman, it’s usually done with the help of a graphic of some sort. Why? Because numbers are abstract and visual aids are useful tools to make the abstract […]

Hello lovers of album art, and welcome to a quick post dedicated to distorting them. Using a model (deepdream) by our favorite overlords, google, and code from a really great tutorial, I have generated some (what I guess I will call) “surrealed” images. Enjoy. Generally I work in R for the stuff I do here, […]

Hello staff/non-staff users and welcome to the first of these posts that will analyze not how sputnik users rate albums, but what they write about them. Reviews are the focus of this site. User written reviews and their prominence are what distinguishes this website from other music database websites. Somehow/someway the reviews on here by the most deft […]

Hello users, and welcome to a blogpost detailing a tool to help you rig the sputnik ratings in your favor. Probably a third of users’ comments are related to how much they dislike the average rating of albums (verified fact, obviously). Some albums’ average rating is too high, too low, there are not enough 5’s, […]

Hello everybody, and welcome to the 2017 charts… sort of. So, I scraped together every album listed in the genre pages of the 2017 charts on August 10, 2017, and calculated the average of the ratings, user usage weighted averages, and their rankings. The user usage weighted averages are described here (idea for the algorithm here); they are […]