Some people will claim that music is too subjective to be rated and ranked, and while this is true to some extent, it can be interesting to see where people’s opinions align and it is in these cases where you might be exposed to a world of music you might never have considered stepping into before. It is for this very reason that I am setting myself the goal of listening to the top 150 albums of Rolling Stone magazine’s notorious ‘500 greatest albums of all time‘ list by the end of 2024.

Whether you are a fan of rating music or not, it’s fair to say that compiling a list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, given the overwhelmingly vast number of albums, artists and genres to have ever existed, is a near impossible task. In a way though that’s the beauty of it…it’s such a difficult task with so many contributing factors that it almost eliminates the ability to dispute the concept (or the order itself). Either way, I’m hoping that by the end of the year I will not only have listened to an array of music I’ve not taken the time to properly study before, but I should hopefully have broadened my musical horizons as well (as I must admit I find myself listening to the same handful of albums the majority of the time)!

The way I’ll be doing this is by listening to 13 albums each month for the first 10 months of the year (starting at 150 and working my way down, so listening to the albums ranked 150-138 in January), and then 10 in November before listening to the top 10 albums in December.

I’ve already made a start on the 13 January albums – I’ve cleared my Spotify account of all downloaded albums (which was quite therapeutic) and I now only have 13 albums downloaded. It may be the ‘New Year, new me’ curse, and I may be getting ahead of myself, but I’ve already listened to 8 of the 13 albums through and it’s only the 3rd January! If I know me though, it’ll take at least a few listens of anything before I can really give a fair judgement, so I hope this enthusiasm endures for the duration of the year.

At the end of each month I’ll be writing up an article ranking the albums from the list I’ve been listening to that month, so watch this space!