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KEXP listeners' favorite albums data project

John

John

— 3 min read
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Backlit gray block letters spelling KEXP on a glass storefront
The KEXP sign outside their Seattle Center headquarters

My intent in creating the original file behind this project was to give myself a shopping list of sorts, something to guide my exploration of music and record store browsing. That's it. No grand plan, just wanting to crowdsource some recommendations from the KEXP community to inform my bin flipping. It's grown a lot since then.

I plan to turn this into a real series; not just one chart, but whatever else 25 years of KEXP listening data turns out to have buried in it. I'm starting with the annual "Listeners' Favorite Albums of the Year" lists, and once that's had some room to breathe, I intend to move on to KEXP's special Fall Drive lists: things like the Listeners' Top 666 Albums of All Time and Top Albums of the Last 50 Years. Different shape of data, different questions worth asking of it.

A quick note on naming: KEXP itself hasn't been consistent about what to call any of this. Over the years the annual list alone has been branded a "Year-End Poll", "Top Albums", and most recently both "Best of [Year]" and "Best Albums of [Year]", sometimes on the very same page (2025's own countdown is titled "Best Albums of 2025" but asks listeners to "vote on their favorite albums of the year" in the next sentence). I'm using "Listeners' Favorite" throughout this project because it's the more accurate description of what these lists actually are, and there's no single "official" name to defer to anyway.

Where this KEXP data actually comes from

Before getting into any specific chart, it's worth saying once, clearly, where all of it actually comes from, so I'm not re-explaining the same three sources at the top of every future post.

It's built from a few different sources that each do a different job:

  • KEXP's own play/spin history: pulled directly from KEXP, the actual record of what's been played on-air over the years.
  • KEXP's published lists: Annual and Special alike, listener-voted, but not comprehensively available anywhere in a structured format. Each list gets hand-entered as it comes out.
  • MusicBrainz: the open music metadata database, used to fill in everything KEXP's own data doesn't carry on its own: release dates, discography order, genre, that kind of thing.

None of these sources agree with each other automatically. Matching an on-air spin to the right release, deciding what counts as an artist's "real" discography versus a live album or a bootleg, resolving MusicBrainz's own inconsistencies: all of that takes real editorial judgment, and I've made a lot of those calls along the way. Where a call like that actually shapes what a specific chart shows, I'll say so in that post directly, rather than leave it buried in a methodology note nobody reads. The corrections and judgment calls that apply across the whole project are collected in Data Notes.

It's worth noting that I don't have access to any of the actual listener vote counts that generate the album lists and rankings. While acquiring that data would be amazing, and provide the ability to do some fun different cuts, I have found enough publicly available data to keep myself very busy.

That's the general shape of it. The 25 years of KEXP annual Listeners' Favorite lists post is the first real thing built on top of all this, and worth reading next if you haven't already.

The posts so far

Every post in this project gets added here as it comes out, so this page can be the one place to find them all.

Annual Listeners' Favorite lists

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