Personal charts of Live albums - Suggestions

dihansse

dihansse

Gender: Male

Age: 62

This is just an idea so everybody feel free to comment on it.

I've always been reluctant to add live albums to my year charts or overall charts just because of the fact that they are generally not pointing to new released music and most of the tracks of these live albums are already to be found on the regular albums and they shouldn't be competition for those.

But I do think that there are many historic live albums which I find deserve to be a larger part of the BEA community than they are now. I have been thinking anyhow to do something on live albums in the forums where many criteria could be discussed:
- the general recording quality: some live albums are really good but the quality of the sound is so bad that this is at least a negative point for the overall appreciation
- is the live album spanning the whole of the career of a band or at the other side of the spectrum is it focused on just one album
- Is the live album giving an extra layer on top of the regular albums. Some live albums for me contain the definitive versions of the legacy of that band. One obvious example for me is Live in Tokyo from the Scorpions of which the versions on this live album are so much better than the ones on the regular albums.
- And what I would especially like to explore and have a discussion on: what is the best live album of a band or artist: ex Nirvana: Live At Reading, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah or of course the MTV Unplugged in NY one.

But in thinking about that I was wondering: why not have the possibility for each BEA member to create an overall live album chart next to the regular overall top 100 chart. As this chart would be new for everybody it could also serve as a great starting point for further discussions in the forums.

Just let me know what you all think and especially also to AM for the practical implementation.

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

I do love live albums and I include them in my year, decade, and overall chart although they represent a very small part of my charts to be honest.

Having a forum to discuss live albums would be a great idea and I'd very much welcome that and contribute to it.

I may have misunderstood your thoughts on charts so I apologise if I have but it sounds like you are proposing a live chart to sit alongside the regular chart and that it's counted towards overall points allocation. One problem that I see is, for me, where do live charts sit, for example in my overall chart.

The Complete Live At Raji's (2004) by The Dream Syndicate

Is in my overall chart of 100. If a live chart were to sit alongside it, where would I put the album? It cannot go in both so I would end up with an overall chart which doesn't reflect my opinion as I the best albums of all time. I think that it's a nice idea but not sure that feasible. If I've misunderstood the proposal, sorry.

A more general discussion of live albums through a forum though, count me in

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

You can already filter pretty much all charts to only display live albums (overall chart, or Nirvana-only for example). Maybe it would be cool to be able to flag an entire custom chart as "live albums only" (or comps-only, or soundtracks-only) and add a menu option or something to look at just them, in case a site-visitor wants to only see custom charts like that... but it might only be useful if a significant number of people (twenty or thirty maybe?) made such charts. There are probably 20 or 30 live-album charts floating around already though, so maybe that's not a valid objection.

I could make one, but a lot of my favorite live albums are actually bootlegs, so they're not going to be in the database here. Which means a forum thread would actually be more appropriate in my case.

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

MadhattanJack wrote:

You can already filter pretty much all charts to only display live albums (overall chart, or Nirvana-only for example). Maybe it would be cool to be able to flag an entire custom chart as "live albums only" (or comps-only, or soundtracks-only) and add a menu option or something to look at just them

I think that's a really clever thought. Being able to search for a chart as you suggest would be really interesting.

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

MadhattanJack wrote:

You can already filter pretty much all charts to only display live albums (overall chart, or Nirvana-only for example). Maybe it would be cool to be able to flag an entire custom chart as "live albums only" (or comps-only, or soundtracks-only) and add a menu option or something to look at just them, in case a site-visitor wants to only see custom charts like that... but it might only be useful if a significant number of people (twenty or thirty maybe?) made such charts. There are probably 20 or 30 live-album charts floating around already though, so maybe that's not a valid objection.

I could make one, but a lot of my favorite live albums are actually bootlegs, so they're not going to be in the database here. Which means a forum thread would actually be more appropriate in my case.

Just to say that I'm one of those who have live albums charts on the site Top live albums of all time by Johnnyo as well as similar charts for each decade. this thread has reminded me that I need to finish it off and adjust the order a little

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

dihansse wrote:

I've always been reluctant to add live albums to my year charts or overall charts just because of the fact that they are generally not pointing to new released music and most of the tracks of these live albums are already to be found on the regular albums and they shouldn't be competition for those.
...
But I do think that there are many historic live albums which I find deserve to be a larger part of the BEA community than they are now. I have been thinking anyhow to do something on live albums in the forums where many criteria could be discussed:
- the general recording quality: some live albums are really good but the quality of the sound is so bad that this is at least a negative point for the overall appreciation
- is the live album spanning the whole of the career of a band or at the other side of the spectrum is it focused on just one album
- Is the live album giving an extra layer on top of the regular albums. Some live albums for me contain the definitive versions of the legacy of that band. One obvious example for me is Live in Tokyo from the Scorpions of which the versions on this live album are so much better than the ones on the regular albums.
- And what I would especially like to explore and have a discussion on: what is the best live album of a band or artist: ex Nirvana: Live At Reading, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah or of course the MTV Unplugged in NY one.

But in thinking about that I was wondering: why not have the possibility for each BEA member to create an overall live album chart next to the regular overall top 100 chart. As this chart would be new for everybody it could also serve as a great starting point for further discussions in the forums.

Thanks for the interesting ideas, there's a lot to dig into, but it does raise a few questions such as why live albums would get special treatment, but not soundtracks etc (especially if these charts were to contribute points etc but not sure if that was intended). The unintended consequence would be opening a door into adding all sorts of other types of chart, which might already be covered by the custom chart umbrella and not everybody might be interested in live albums as certain genres don't lean into that format as well as others.

As MJ pointed out, BEA already has album-type filtering. It's possible to discover the overall best live albums; the best live albums by an artist; the best live albums of a year/decade etc on various pages across the site. What's possibly missing are filters at chart level so that you can see which charts exclusively contain live albums (or other specific types of album). You can already search for charts containing e.g. 'live' in the title, but specialist filters could augment that.

I'm definitely in favour of doing more on the forums with live albums, especially as I'm also a fan, and having a richer discussion beyond the data could be very interesting. We probably already have/had dedicated thread(s) here for live albums, but these tend to get buried after a while if nobody posts. Perhaps a 'best live album' competition could give a lot of focus to these again, or individual threads for specific live albums.

Subjects like the best sounding recordings are really interesting to me, and as well probably to the audiophiles here. There's some other interesting ideas for topics here (thanks to everyone else for posting as well). Just thinking on the fly, a weekly discussion thread with a new topic each week might help build up activity here rather than have a massive flurry. Each thread could stay open beyond a week, or until it naturally ends, but a new thread could start say every weekend and we have a pool of ideas voted in/curated separately for discussion. This might also help to increase the level of activity on the forums if people engaged with them and might also help to keep the discussion fresh.
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dihansse

dihansse

Gender: Male

Age: 62

Thanks all for your comments and here some further comments based on those:
- I think I'm not the only one to generally exclude live albums from my year and overall charts but I do realize there are many people who include them and would then have to chose where to put their favorite live albums, so I agree this was maybe not the best idea.
- The fact that I and others don't include many live albums in my/our general charts means that filtering on them doesn't make much sense
- But of course, like Johnnyo and many others I have a custom chart with live albums which at the moment is a bit of a mess so certainly needs some ordering, especially because I certainly don't focus on listening to live albums
- So would it make sense to be able to place a filter on custom albums marking them as live album custom charts so there would be a manner in some sort to have a view on all live album charts by members, and find a way to have global ranking outside the general rankings (nothing fancy: just by adding up the rankings)? I guess filtering on the word live would already do the trick.
- Why only live albums and not soundtracks or other categories? I think those other categories are much smaller while live albums in comparison to other categories.

All this to say that ex doing a competition on which live album can be considered to be the best by a certain artist would be fun. Different people could take the lead in choosing a band/artist and a weekly thread seems indeed to be a good idea.

Other ideas are welcome.

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Just as an aside, I personally think Live and Loud is Nirvana's best live album. It's really just a question of whether you prefer the pre-Pat Smear/trio version of Nirvana or the later Smear/quartet version, and I tend to prefer the Smear/quartet version, plus the sound quality is better. 😄

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

dihansse wrote:

Thanks all for your comments and here some further comments based on those:
- I think I'm not the only one to generally exclude live albums from my year and overall charts but I do realize there are many people who include them and would then have to chose where to put their favorite live albums, so I agree this was maybe not the best idea.
- The fact that I and others don't include many live albums in my/our general charts means that filtering on them doesn't make much sense
- But of course, like Johnnyo and many others I have a custom chart with live albums which at the moment is a bit of a mess so certainly needs some ordering, especially because I certainly don't focus on listening to live albums
- So would it make sense to be able to place a filter on custom albums marking them as live album custom charts so there would be a manner in some sort to have a view on all live album charts by members, and find a way to have global ranking outside the general rankings (nothing fancy: just by adding up the rankings)? I guess filtering on the word live would already do the trick.
- Why only live albums and not soundtracks or other categories? I think those other categories are much smaller while live albums in comparison to other categories.

All this to say that ex doing a competition on which live album can be considered to be the best by a certain artist would be fun. Different people could take the lead in choosing a band/artist and a weekly thread seems indeed to be a good idea.

Other ideas are welcome.

Thanks for taking the time to post additional thoughts. I think we're probably converging on a few interesting areas. I can certainly see the argument that live albums are a bigger category than things like soundtrack etc and therefore potentially justify more attention. The challenge from a site implementation perspective is deciding where to draw the line, because once we start creating specialist chart categories there are many different directions we could go in.

I think the idea of better discovery of custom charts is perhaps the more generally useful one. At the moment, searching for 'live' in chart titles already gets us a long way there, although there could be ways to improve finding specialist charts in future. The advantage of approaching it that way is that it could potentially benefit all sorts of chart themes rather than creating a special case for one category (as categories could be calculated automatically from the composition of the chart itself).

Looking into the future and looking at some of the items already on the roadmap, you could also filter charts consisting of artists from a specific country, live album charts, male/female artist charts etc. This avoids adding a burden to users to categorise their charts (some might already exist that haven't been categorised), and avoids the question of "why do we support live chart but not others?" and turns it into a broader chart discovery and analytics feature.

The forum ideas are the ones that can be actioned pretty quickly. Live albums are a great subject for discussion for all the reasons you (and others) have already mentioned. I love the idea of regular discussion topics or competitions. A "best live album by artist" series could be a lot of fun and would probably create some interesting debate and discoveries. If anyone wants to help take this up they'd have my full support as I've got my hands full in other areas of the site at the moment. I don't think it necessarily needs to be an "official" BEA initiative. The best discussions are usually the ones that grow naturally. However, having a few weekly seeded topics or recurring discussions voted/chosen by the community could help give people a place to contribute and keep the forums active.
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MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

dihansse wrote:

All this to say that ex doing a competition on which live album can be considered to be the best by a certain artist would be fun. Different people could take the lead in choosing a band/artist and a weekly thread seems indeed to be a good idea.

I, for one, would probably be up for that. However, you'd have to be careful as to which bands/artists you choose, because some of them have many, many f***-tons of live albums and nobody could possibly have heard all of them, so that might actually be too daunting for people to want to participate. (Several bands have been releasing "official bootleg series" albums lately too, and we seem to have all the Pearl Jam ones but very few of the Bob Dylan ones for some reason.) And there are also going to be bands like The Who, whose "best" live album is, I would say, pretty much predetermined by general acclamation (Live at Leeds, in their case) despite there being several of them to choose from.

Here's a totally non-comprehensive/incomplete list of bands off the top of my head who have ten or more live albums listed on BEA, in order of who has the most:

Grateful Dead 104
Bruce Springsteen & the E St. Band 92
Pearl Jam 70
King Crimson 61
Phish 45
Frank Zappa 45
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 44
Rolling Stones 36
Neil Young 34
Miles Davis 33
Yes 31
Allman Brothers Band 30
Tangerine Dream 27
Deep Purple 26
John Coltrane 24
David Bowie 23
The Doors 19
Eric Clapton 17
Thelonious Monk 14
Bob Dylan 13
The Who 13
Jimi Hendrix 13
Fairport Convention 13
Pixies 12
Fleetwood Mac 12
Jethro Tull 12
Iggy Pop 12 + ...and the Stooges 7
The Cure 11
Elvis Presley 11
Lynyrd Skynyrd 11
James Brown 10
Joe Bonamassa 10
The Residents 10
U2 10

Meanwhile, XTC currently has only one (though it will soon be two), which is obviously a huge problem for me personally. But you know me, I'll probably manage somehow. 😄