What was it like making your first chart?

[MexicanCola]

While the chart I'm working on isn't the first I got to thinking about the first one I did. I think my top three were:
Meat Is Murder
Debut
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Great taste for a 14 year old I must say. I had a lot of fun making mine but what about you? I'm all eyes....get it? because of the screen an....never mind.

[bobbyb5]

It was fun as hell. But i regret doing it while someone else was in the room with me. They kept trying to influence me to put things in that weren't my first instinct. And foolishly i did. But theyre gone now.

[paladisiac]

The first chart i made was a singles chart back in July of 1984. My #1 was "state of shock" by the Jackson 5 with Michael Jackson taking lead alongside guest singer Mick Jagger. I figured if bozos casey kasum and rick dees could have a chart, then so could i. This was a weekly chart for me.

In the summer of 1995 i bought my first computer. During that summer, i created a database to track my favorite albums of all-time. Though this chart is dated in the year 2000, it's quite representative of my mid-90s chart: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=37168. In January of 2001 i finally decided to have a weekly albums chart.

Both weekly charts came to a crashing halt in the spring of 2010 when my computer crashed. I was dumb, not keeping backups. My last reliable backup to that point was 2003. So i gave up the weekly countdown mess and shifted towards a countdown of favorite singles albums compiled at the end of every year.

The one bright side of my computer crashing in the year of 2010 was that it forced me to reevaluate my favorites from top-to-(near)bottom. Also, coincidentally just before my computer crashed, i was reviewing ALL of my music as a "25th anniversary event" as i started charting stuff in 1984. So from 2009 through early 2010 i was not only reviewing all of my favorites of each year, but i was also listening to other music that i was pretty sure i would dig but just hadn't heard in full yet.

By the time i found the besteveralbums site, i was merely documenting a long, transitional journey of reevaluating my favorite albums which continues on nearly a daily basis for me. After decades of creating charts on my own, sometimes writing code on my own machine to keep track, I was just jotting favorites down in BEA, happy to have a pictorial representation for once.
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fav artists NOW | ALL-TIME favs | i listen 2 more music than u so u don't have 2!

[RoundTheBend]

I used to stack my CDs by alphabetical order and then chronological order.

I only bough CDs from artists I really respected and thought could make a holistic album.

That was the 90s.

I did play around with iTunes' rating system, for like 5 seconds... nothing to be proud of.

That's as close as I got to creating a list until I joined this site.