Welcome, Rationale & Methods

First, welcome. The Sun Cleaner's Staff has always enjoyed making lists. Now we are bringing our love of lists to the broader public...

Music is one topic discussed in excruciating depth. Music is important to people. We thought it would be fun to create a list of "our" (read: Sun Cleaners Staff) favorite albums of all time. We thought it would be more fun to have you vote in a Album Tournament. The format is quite similar to the NCAA tournament.

Now, a moment of defense. This list was created by Sun Cleaners Staff and may not reflect your personal opinions or favorite albums. We encourage you to take an opportunity to think about your favorite music, and perhaps leave a comment or note so that we can listen to it, and consider it for future endeavors. There are also many albums the the Sun Cleaners Staff love that were not included - THE EXCLUSION OF A CERTAIN ALBUM DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE ALBUM IS NOT APPRECIATED BY SUN CLEANERS STAFF. We encourage you to leave comments on the survey.

You may also ask yourself why the Pulp Fiction OST or Al Green's Greatest Hits are not included... All of the albums in the present tournament are studio albums or live alums with 100% original material. We are planning on doing a soundtrack sub-tournament in the coming months.

Below follows a detailed description of our quasi-empirical quantitative methods, only the most avid methodologist (not Methodist) should read on....You've been warned.

Sun Cleaners staff created eight arbitrary music categories based on genres and types of music that we waste our lives listening to. We then created a list of 8 albums within each category. The rationale for this method was to insure that a wide variety of genres were included in the tournament. For example, we didn't want 7 Wu-Tang albums and 18 Bob Dylan albums, how fun is that?

After creating the initial list we decided it would be a good idea to sleep on it, so we could identify any oversights. This helped us identify a few critical albums. After adjusting the list, each staff member broke the albums into octiles (quartiles x 2). The "best" albums received a score of 1 and the "worst" a score of 4.5 with intervals of 0.5. The data were then joined together, and the mean score was calculated. A random number generator was used to address ties. Stata code available by request. This method was used to create a "bracket" with four regions, each with 16 albums. Albums were seeded 1-16 within each bracket, a one seed being the higher rated album.