New Neal Morse Album in the Top 100 List

I apparently can't post in the 'Errors and Omissions' forum thread, so I'll just park it here for someone to move.

I just noticed that the new Neal Morse album now occupies rank 37 of the all-time greatest albums. It might be, or it might not be, I don't know, time will probably tell. But isn't it a bit of a stretch declaring that position for an album that's only been out for a couple of weeks? Surely something must have gone wrong there.

I've seen many an album burst up onto the charts and then slip away to the dredges of time. Many though find a comfortable spot near the bottom of the chart in the low 200s. I picked up the Neal Morse album simply because of the hype to see if it was a good as everyone says. I have to say that it is quite the brilliant album but doesn't quite reach the 5 star mark for me. Still though, i could think of worse albums to perch at the top of the charts

You know, I was going to add at end of my original post `And I'm actually a massive NM fan'!

Just the other day a friend on here and I were discussing this album, he asked what I thought of it, and I honestly replied that I hadn't even bothered picking it up yet so have not heard it. I initially rolled my eyes at those Mike Portnoy claims of it being soooooo amazing, and the one or two clips I heard from it sure enough sounded like `more of the same'. I said to him `I am going to buy it, because I do enjoy his albums, but at the same time, I have absolutely no excitement about jumping right away on an album that, let's face it, is probably going to sound exactly like a `Neal Morse Album'!

Anyway, I'm putting together an order with my usual prog vendor that I'll probably finalise in the next two-three weeks, etc, and that new Morse one will be included, but yeah....it's definitely kind of late getting to that party!

Well it's the first Neal Morse album I've picked up in many years, so I hope the hype is real. And yes this happens fairly often. I remember IQ's most recent album being high on the charts and reading the same complaints. I should actually see if it's dropped way down like they usually do.

Edited by Mellotron Storm - December 04 2016 at 09:52

Seriously?
Well, firstly I've found it an invaluable list to discover music and artists I wouldn't have known otherwise, and secondly the algorithm behind it bothers me.

Mellotron Storm wrote: Well it's the first Neal Morse album I've picked up in many years, so I hope the hype is real. And yes this happens fairly often. I remember IQ's most recent album being high on the charts and reading the same complaints. I should actually see if it's dropped way down like they usually do. I just checked and IQ's Road Of Bones is at 64 which surprises me actually that it's stayed in the top 100 after what a year? Anyway these things will equal out eventually.

Road of Bones staying high in the charts does not surprise me, John. It is a fine album.

What's up with you? Been a while since you got some?

As somebody with a general interest in rating systems I had a look at the numbers and asked myself whether I think that this is a case to argue about PA's system, which apparently in a sophisticated manner uses the weighted average star rating but also the number of votes.

So this one has 122 votes right now and the rating is 4.55. VDGG's H to He on the next position has 4.30 on more than ten times the number of votes. Morse currently has six reviews, all five stars. Ommadawn, one rank higher, has 4.32 with >1000 votes.

The thing is that there's really no objective way to say a how much higher a rating should be required to make up for the fact that another album has ten times as many votes.
Ultimately 122 is a fair number of votes and if such a number vote an album at 4.55 one can argue that it deserves to be there; certainly a bunch of 12 people couldn't do that to their favourite band.

Still my intuition is that 6 reviews is somewhat too thin; one could ask for at least 10 reviews to appear in the top 100, or for one year time, because obviously people write reviews after a few weeks and there is no indication yet of how well this album ages. I have thought on occasion that an album is five star when I got it and after a year I wasn't interested anymore.

This is not meant to criticise the system; by and large I think it is pretty smart. Still, if I had to set up such a system, I'd probably make it slightly more difficult for very new albums to raise that high.

Note that I actually don't know that Morse album so whether it is good enough in my ears doesn't play any role for what I write here.


Edited by Lewian - December 05 2016 at 10:41

Personally I would give ratings only 0 weighting for the ranking. Very interesting posts, Lewian.

This is general comment and not referring back to your posts: I find it strange that an album with just six reviews and only two of those by collabs would rise that quickly, and do find the algorithm strange. It can be really confusing. Incidentally, the first two reviews were made by people who have only reviewed that album, and one of them has ranked every Morse album 5 stars.

The top 100 is not important to me either in that it does not reflect my tastes or value judgments well, but I also have an interest in stats despite being a mathematically challenged individual (something my maths loving wife teases me about).

Aussie-Byrd-Brother wrote: Us Christians have voted en-masse to get Neal Morse's newie into the top 100 of all time! God bless, it's a miracle! Hallelujah! But really, this sometimes happens when there's a lot of buzz around new albums that a lot of people are pretty excited about, it will likely slip down and vanish from the list over time, once the instant hype and freshness of it dwindle (and, you know, reality sets in....)