Some PA Statistics

Yes I have the data and of course I do not have to count anything manually!  I copied the whole contents of the Top 100 page of each year as text in excel and then it was just a matter of getting it ordered properly into a table form.

Will check that. BTW I tried to make the subgenres evolution graph in this style and it gets too messy, the jumps from one year to another are too abrupt. Showing it as % bars instead of areas is a bit more clear (see post below). Will see which graph style fits best for this one.

Considering I am a nincompoop, these statistics need more details for me  the x y axis are not very clear to me, however I bet it will make perfect sense to others  big hug to you, Gerinsky  

No problem Kati  the horizontal axis are the Top 100 albums of the year, from # 1 at the left up to # 100 at the right, and vertical is their rating. Since I used the 'normal' rating and not the QWR, it is possible that an album with, say, a rating of 3.90 is higher in the position rank than an album with rating 4.00, that's why you see a "saw" with ups and downs and not a simple slope line getting lower and lower as you move to lower positions in the ranking. I hope it's a bit more clear now? 

No problem Kati  the horizontal axis are the Top 100 albums of the year, from # 1 at the left up to # 100 at the right, and vertical is their rating. Since I used the 'normal' rating and not the QWR, it is possible that an album with, say, a rating of 3.90 is higher in the position rank than an album with rating 4.00, that's why you see a "saw" with ups and downs and not a simple slope line getting lower and lower as you move to lower positions in the ranking. I hope it's a bit more clear now? 

Gerinsky, you are so awesome really!  Yep, got it now, thus average rating is 4 or between that and 4.10  high scores indeedy  another big hug to you

The sub-genres are arranged in the order they appear along history, so newer sub-genres get added at the top of pre-existing sub-genres. So for example the first at the bottom of the pile was JR-F, then came RIO-Avant, Psychedelic etc. RPI appeared in 1971, Neo in 1982, Tech-Extreme in 1985 etc. 

A curiosity, RPI completely disappears in 1980 and stays absent until its comeback in 1988, after which it has remained present every year.

Sure you will need to show this at full size in order to see something (unless you have a huge monitor)

Thanks for running the 2012-2013 comparison. Based on these data, 2013 to 2014 did mark quite a change.

Agreed, the number of ratings is quite low for 2014 compared to other years. Based on my anecdotal observations of reviewer behavior, however, I would expect that as more reviews come in that the 2014 ratings would actually go down - not up. In watching rankings for individual offerings evolve over time it is pretty rare to see these ratings go up over time (yah, yah in the short term they go up - but, I am speaking longer term), but quite common for them to fall over time. I'm thinking specifically of the overall ratings for say the Steven Wilson offering (the Raven), or as we are now seeing for the most recent IQ offering. It seems as though the true believers offer their opinions first and that these get tempered latter with a more diverse set of reviews.

Another great data mining activity there - if we only had access to the data !-) Do we know what data are actually archived at the server end?

This is not a graph but just a table showing the sub-genre of the Top 25 albums for each year, with each sub-genre colour coded.

To keep it in a reasonable size I have split it in two images, one from 1965 to 1990 and another from 1991 to 2014.

(again you will have to "show image in new tab" to see it big enough)

I wish you all a nice New Year's eve and a healthy and happy 2015!

A couple of thoughts about this one. First is how strong was the RPI released in 1972 and 1973. One might tend to think that it was the 'genuine' British Symphonic which ruled on those years, but it is clear that PA fans love more their Italian counterparts: in both years there are 7 RPI albums in the Top 25 for only 4 of Symphonic from other countries.

The second thought is the apparent decline in recent years of Prog-Metal, Tech-Extreme, Experimental Post-Metal and Post-Rock/Math. These subgenres occupy a significant share of the Top 25 of the 1990's and 2000's but their presence in the last 5 years is quite diminished.