Listening to All the Music

When people talk about the beauty of the early web – before the Internet was “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four” – they’re often talking about reference sites like Wikipedia, remarkable collections of information compiled by a mix of the knowledgeable, the obsessive and the strange and unreliable.

One of my favorite reference sites is the AllMusic Guide, the brainchild of Michael Erlewine, an astrologer, musician and archivist who wanted to create an archive of every recording “since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost”. The guide launched as a 1200 page book at CD-ROM in 1992, moved onto the Gopher text-based information service in 1994 and onto the web shortly after. It’s been bought and sold by tons of internet players, but it remains a vital and active reference work, useful on its own or integrated into music players like Spotify, where its artist bios appear.

AllMusic remains a terrific resource for dedicated music fans, even if recommending it requires some caveats. It’s basically unusable on a mobile device due to extremely intrusive ads. It’s best used on a desktop with ad blockers on and a user account, which block most of the disruptive cruft associated with the site’s attempts to keep itself financially sound. But if you can navigate the various ploys for your attention, you’ll find well-researched bios, comprehensive credit listings and – perhaps most controversially – album reviews on a scale from 1 to 5 stars.

AllMusic reviewers are knowledgeable, opinionated and often very good… and when listeners disagree, they can write their own reviews and ratings. One thing that’s worth noting: AllMusic doesn’t give out a lot of five star ratings. Their annual Year in Review often features only one or two five star albums, and those are disproportionately classical albums. (Fair enough: Mozart wrote some bangers.)

There is no official list of AllMusic five star albums, but there are a lot of unofficial lists from users who’ve compiled their own collections. The best I’ve found is Eric Mack’s, which is not comprehensive, but head and shoulders above the rest. (It has some serious shortcomings – almost no R&B or funk, which I’m working on fixing in my list.) I’ve built my own five star album list, based on Eric’s, enhanced with topic-specific lists I’ve found, and random five star albums I’ve stumbled upon. And now I’m trying to listen to them all.

The list I’m working from has about a thousand entries, representing closer to 900 albums (some appear in multiple categories.) I’ve listened to and reviewed 81 thus far, which suggests I can easily get through this list by the end of 2026. I started listening in November with a fairly simple ruleset – I had to listen to the album the whole way through, even if I already knew it well, read the AllMusic bio of the band and review of the album. In many cases, I’ve listened to the album multiple times, either because it was delightful and I wanted to enjoy it, or because I “bounced off it” – wasn’t able to get into it and give it sufficient attention or deference – and want to give it a fair hearing.

Some thoughts, less than 10% of the way into the project:

– There’s enormous deference for boomer rock in the AllMusic canon. 10 Beatles albums, 9 Dylan albums, 9 Stones, 6 Led Zeppelin albums get five stars. For the Beatles and Zep that means 50% or more of their core LPs get five star status. I can see the argument: the Beatles invented the modern rock band and Zeppelin invented arena rock. But I can also wonder if the first six Zeppelin albums are really all that amazing, or whether there’s a certain canon effect going on.

– A corollary: it’s hard to tell whether an album is overrated or whether you just don’t like a particular artist. I’m not a big Dylan fan, and while I’m grateful only 9 of his core 47 albums are now assigned listening for me, 9 is still a LOT of albums.

– As a result of the Dylan situation, I am not moving linearly through the list. I began selecting at random, but have realized I need more of a system. Now I sequence a few days listening using one album from each of Eric Mack’s subcategories. My listening for the week:

Buck Owens and His Buckaroos – I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail (1965) – Country
Etta James – At Last! (1960) – Blues
The Weavers – The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (1957) – Folk
Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking (1969) – Folk/pop
Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleeps (1977) – Singer songwriter
Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks (1975) – Country Rock
The Beatles – Please Please Me – (1963) – Rock & Roll
Almendra – Almendra (1969) – Psychedelia
Lynyrd Skynyrd – Pronounced ‘L?h-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd (1973) – Arena Rock
Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin (1969) – Hard Rock/Heavy Metal
Brian Eno – Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974) – Experimental/Art Rock
Iggy Pop – Lust for Life (1977) – Proto-punk/Glam
Black Flag – Damaged (1981) – Punk/Post-punk/New Wave
Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015) – Alternative
Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) – Hiphop
Flying Lotus – Los Angeles (2008) – Electronica
Frank Sinatra – A Swingin’ Affair! (1957) – Vocal Jazz/Traditional pop
John Coltrane – Giant Steps (1960) – Hard Bop/modal jazz
Ornette Coleman – Science Fiction (1971) – post-bop/free jazz
Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters (1973) – jazz fusion
Coil – Horse Rotorvator (1986) – avant garde

Am I excited about everything in that list? No. That Skynard/Zep patch was especially tough for me, and I worry that Kendrick/Flying Lotus/Sinatra will cause a hole to open in the earth and swallow me whole. But I am excited about the vast majority of those albums, and I cannot imagine any other experiment that would give me quite this musical diversity in the course of a week’s listening.

– I often know a few tracks by an artist, but realize I don’t know them at all until hearing the full album. Case in point: “Look Sharp!” by Joe Jackson, which is so much more exciting than just “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Many of the five star albums have an artist’s best known track, but they’ve usually got several bangers on them to make the list. I feel like I’ve wasted a chunk of my life by waiting until I turned 53 to listen to Etta James’s “At Last” all the way through.

– Bands I’ve never heard off that show up on the five star album list are often a revelation. Talk Talk was a nondescript English new wave band that evolved radically over a short time and put out Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991), two stunning jazz-inflected experimental albums that effectively ended their career, but got the five stars they deserved from AllMusic. Discovering Spirit of Eden alone would have made this experiment worthwhile.

– This is a golden age for music fans, though not a golden age for music discovery. 95% of these albums are on Spotify – the few that aren’t are usually on YouTube. The 21 albums I’ve got lined up to hear this week would have cost me $300 to hear when I was a teenager, and they’re now part of a monthly subscription fee that’s very affordable to me, and criminally unfair to the artists in question. I’m choosing to think of the Five Star experiment as my alternative to Spotify’s timid algorithmic suggestions, which do a great job of turning my disco playlist into five years of New Years’ background music, but rarely introduce me to truly magical new music.

I’m increasingly convinced of a couple of algorithmic hypotheses:

– It’s unwise to explore a huge space (all recorded music, everything people wrote on social media yesterday) without algorithmic assistance

– Every algorithm has opinions, biases and limitations associated with it

– Algorithms controlled by content-hosting platforms often have biases and opinions at odds with the desire of the users

– Encountering content you don’t like is good for you. Corollary: in a huge search space, it’s really easy – and really boring – to recommend pretty good matches that will be pleasing, but not especially exciting. What’s apparently much harder is finding the album that will change your life, which is probably not a near neighbor to something you’re already listening to.

Let me know if you want a copy of my revised list (largely Eric Mack’s with some additions), and please let me know if you have a more comprehensive list of AllMusic five stars. I am not especially interested in lists other than AllMusic – we all need our algorithms, no matter how limited and arbitrary they may be.

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Source: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/01/07/listening-to-all-the-music/