Top albums of 2009: the Obsessive Edition.

It’s late December, so it’s time for the deluge of “best albums of 2009″ posts. But since a lot of the albums I keep on repeat find their way to my end-of-year “best of” lists, I’m wanted to try a different approach–one that combines music wankery, listing  and graphs into one big nerdgasm. Onward!

My initial plan was to just take the high counts from my Last.fm charts for the last year. However, I realized that this would unfairly punish short and/or recently-released albums. Furthermore, that doesn’t really describe “obsession” as I’m used to it–the kind of constant repetition that drives my girlfriend insane (see also: Hercules and Love Affair, In Ghost Colours). So I decided to use the yearly chart as a jumping-off point, but only count the first two months after an LP initially appeared on my weekly charts. I then divided the total play count by number of tracks, and finally came up with an average for the eight-week span. The list, eight-week average and graph are after the jump. And, please–no complaints about the methodology. This isn’t 538.

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Top albums of 2009: the preview.

Normally, I do the rather-arbitrary “choose 10 (or, last year, 25) albums and rank them” thing about now. But thanks to a slow week at work, my innate graphic geekiness, and Microsoft Excel, you’ll be getting science. So…get ready.

Show Yr Work Update: My fifteen “most-obsessed-over” albums have 11.2 tracks on average, with a standard deviation of only 1.265.