scaryblog

Our fourth visit to the swingin' Sixties - how did 1963 do? It definitely felt like a watershed year - how could it be anything other thanks to four lads from Liverpool? There were certainly some decent albums in there though, although I think it's safe to say the women didn't exactly dominate matters. And to no-one's great surprise, the ownership ratio this year was a big fat zero percent. Looking at the best selling albums of the year, we're back to relying on the dubious information from bestsellingalbums.org but I don't think anyone will be surprised to see The Beatles taking the top two spots - although I'm quite surprised that With The Beatles takes the top spot, because Please Please Me was #1 for thirty weeks of the year. The other record which spent an age at #1 was Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday , so it's no surprise to see that at #3 but I wasn't expecting to have West Side Story (which was released in '61) at #4 - it's fair...

I'd given up buying music by this time, so it was interesting to see what we've got here. I'd say the year did well enough across the board, introducing me to some albums I really should have previously heard, but it didn't exactly sparkle. I wasn't expecting the ownership ratio to be high, but I thought there might have been a few bought by the lovely Mrs Reed or the lovely Misses Reed  might have bought  - however it would have been 0% if we hadn't met Olly Murs in the very last week of the year, bringing us to a measly 2%. Or we can stretch it to 6% if you want to include both Ed Sheeran albums we'd previously met.  Looking at the best selling albums of the year, I don't think it will surprise anyone that the top spot was taken by  Ed Sheeran  - it was released in March, spent nineteen weeks of the year at #1 and never dropped any lower than #6. The #2 spot was taken by Rag'n'Bone Man , which was hardly a slouch in the grand scheme of things -...

I was buying a lot of music in '01 but I wasn't sure how much of it was from the charts... Well it all started very badly, but it certainly picked up and had some pretty decent albums hiding away in there - and there was a reasonable mix of genres across the year, although the vast majority of it was pretty mainstream. We had a decent ownership ratio of 21%, compared with 40% in '99 (our highest yet) and a mere 9% in '03 (our lowest of the record buying years so far). It would have been pushed higher if we hadn't previously met  R.E.M. ,  Daft Punk ,  Muse ,  Coldplay   and Eminem , but there was never any danger of it troubling the '99 total. Looking at the best selling albums of the year, the top spot was taken by  Dido  which is very unsurprising news because that girl was EVERYWHERE back then and she had the whole year in the chart. Second place goes to another big non-surprise from  Robbie Williams , but he only had five weeks of the year (a...

And 2025 bites the dust! Wow - there are an awful lot of albums here that I don't remember in the slightest and even fewer I remember liking (I'd suggest we're not far off single figures). It's also interesting how we've had some pretty unknown artists at various times whilst some bigger artists have completely missed out - it's all a case of how your release date aligns with (or more importantly) avoids other artists. The ownership ratio was obviously 0% but it's interesting to consider what it might have been if streaming wasn't an option - I reckon I might have bought five, the lovely Mrs Reed maybe two or three and my daughters maybe another couple, bringing us somewhere in the region of 20%. Except that, of course, if streaming didn't exist the chart would look massively different so it's a completely pointless exercise! Looking at the year-end chart of the "biggest" albums of the year, we see, somewhat unsurprisingly, that Taylor ...

     So, having got to the end of The Guardian's Top 50 albums of 2025, how have they done this year?   Overall, I think it was a pretty decent quality level without too many absolute stunners or stinkers. I was introduced to 25   new albums (a pleasing 50%, down from 31 last year) with eight having already been written up (down from ten last year), although there were six further albums which charted at #2 or #3 but were unlucky not to get a write-up. Best 15 I'm not 100% convinced that this year deserves a top 15, but it's what I went for last year and when I picked my initial list of definitelys and maybes, it came to 15 - so I just stopped there rather than doing any more thinking.  #46 - The Tubs #44 - Sabrina Carpenter #42 - Erika de Casier #38 - Ethel Cain #32 - Perfume Genius #30 - Oklou #25 - Wednesday #22 - Little Simz #16 - Pulp #13 - Suede #11 - Jade #7 - Lily Allen #5 - Lady Gaga #2 - CMAT #1 - Rosalia The only ones I hadn't p...