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Romanelli
Bone Swah
Gender: Male
Location: Broomfield, Colorado 
Moderator
- #1
- Posted: 11/09/2025 23:12
- Post subject: World Album Of The Day
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Hey!
Long about a decade back, there used to be a thing on BEA called World Album Of The Day. It worked in the same way Album and Chart Of The Day works, only it was for albums outside of the normal English speaking world. I don't remember why it went away. The text at the bottom read like this:
"About world album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com world album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours, but not including albums from Australia, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom or United States. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety."
Given the number of non-English language albums being added to the site from non-English language artists, would there be any interest in doing this again? A chance for us to maybe broaden our horizons a bit?
😎
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I'm leaning on the threshold
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And crashing through the walls
Of dying history
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II
workd my but just to not know what to name my rank
Age: 100
Location: Questionmarkland. You ask: "Where is that land?" There is no answer. Only a ? 
- #2
- Posted: 11/10/2025 00:58
- Post subject:
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It would be really amazing. I totally support it, and I absolutely appreciate the interest in non-English-speaking music, which I've always been trying to discover as much as possible, leading to successful discoveries which I always cherish.
I've got some suggestions which would improve WAotD (World Album Of The Day):
If the WAotD algorithm usually picks the top-ranked 1000 non-English-speaking albums from the overall chart, like the regular AotD algorithm does, then it may not display enough variety. So perhaps its algorithm should also favor albums being rated and/or being listened to the most in the last 24 hours along ones being ranked the most etc.
And we might should exclude albums by "Mixed Nationality" bands, since there are many of them which have made English-speaking albums and have been based in English-speaking countries, and they have 3% of all albums on the Overall Chart, so they might become WAotD most of the time and contradict the purpose of WAotD.
If anyone else's interested in it too, then II think it would be really cool for BEA, since non-English-speaking music on the site has kinda been underrepresented on music rating sites.
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MadhattanJack
Just to end the list
Gender: Male
- #3
- Posted: 11/10/2025 02:34
- Post subject:
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| Romanelli wrote: | | I don't remember why it went away. |
Obviously I wasn't here at the time, so take everything I say with a grain of salt (which y'all should do anyway)...
According to the forum history, the last World Album of the Day on BEA was #590, 94 Diskont by Oval, posted on 04/17/2014. Scanning through the 590 announcement threads, I'd say the World Albums of the Day were dominated by acts from Germany and elsewhere in Northern Europe, no question about it. Those results were "sprinkled in" with acts from Japan, Jamaica, and France, but very few from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South America. That probably wasn't what was intended when the concept was initially implemented, right? On top of that, lots of world-music acts form and operate out of English-speaking countries, so they were all disqualified, somewhat unfairly I should think.
So I guess what I'm saying here is that using the country-of-origin as the sole means of labeling an act as "world music" doesn't reliably result in a selection of bands that actually play world music, i.e., acts within the world music genre. I couldn't find the discussion and/or announcement about discontinuing it, but almost a year later, there was this thread in which the whole idea of "world music" was referred to as a "Western-centric construct," implying that it's inherently supportive of English-language cultural hegemony, and I suppose maybe even racist as far as some people are concerned. There seemed to be a fair amount of agreement with that notion, but of course, this was during the pre-Trump Era when more people actually had respect for other cultures and cared about stuff like that (or at least claimed to).
So at the risk of coming off as a contrarian, I think I'd recommend not resurrecting this idea, unless we're going to commit to adding real, non-country-specific genre tags to several thousand album entries. (I say "several thousand" because we'd only have to tag the Top 10,000 or so for this purpose, it wouldn't have to be every album in the database.)
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baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash
Age: 31
Location: Massachusetts
- #4
- Posted: 11/10/2025 03:00
- Post subject:
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Instead of adding a new category, what if we kill two birds with one stone by making the existing album of the day more diverse and interesting?
It could be pretty simple: a country can only have the album of the day every 100 days (or a different number if desired), plus a rule for how often an artist can repeat, which would address the issue of one artist dominating the rankings in some countries. There could also be a rule about how often a year can repeat (perhaps every 50 days), adding another dimension of diversity.
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albummaster
Janitor
Gender: Male
Site Admin
- #5
- Posted: 11/10/2025 08:25
- Post subject: Re: World Album Of The Day
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| Romanelli wrote: | "About world album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com world album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours, but not including albums from Australia, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom or United States. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety."
Given the number of non-English language albums being added to the site from non-English language artists, would there be any interest in doing this again? A chance for us to maybe broaden our horizons a bit? |
Getting flashbacks from this. IAoTD was implemented somewhat naively. The original idea came from here, but after it went live some people became upset that 'international album' didn't correspond with 'world music' and English-speaking countries outside of those specified were caught with a 'world music' moniker which wasn't intended, even though it was named International Album of the Day deliberately to avoid this. The whole concept was to throw up albums outside of the norm (the BEA user-base is also mainly from the same make-up of countries as those selected for exclusion).
I agree a lot with the contrarian view put forward by MJ. It's extremely hard to implement this on BEA with a 'world music' intent without knowing the genre/music style, or the primary language of each album, but this wasn't the intent of IAoTD. If the intent became to do this differently, BEA simply doesn't have the metadata to do this right now and we'd still end up with Kraftwerk & Daft Punk albums (high ranked German & French artists).
Like bay says, we could adjust the algorithm to not have the same country twice etc within a certain period, but there's only so many countries and it's much easier to do this on AoTD with a no-artist repeat than it would be for this category. We will end up with extremely obscure albums being posted which nobody will engage with and the Announcement forum will be even more 'spammy'. The idea of merging this into the existing AoTD is probably the better approach, but will anybody want to engage with these posts if the albums were even more obscure? People currently only generally respond to the top-ranked albums or artists (as can be shown in the history). I'd be happy to add this to the list, but not the highest priority right now, but if anyone else wanted to add dedicated discussion threads for these types of albums, then why not. That's what the site should be about.
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