Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp A Butterfly' is the Most Universally Loved Album of 2015

For hardcore analysts of the plethora of end-of-year "Best Of" lists, it may seem obvious that Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly is the most universally loved album of the year by critics, and now there are numbers to back those claims.

Nate Silver's statistical journalism website, FiveThirtyEight.com, has conducted an analysis of 30 publications "Best Of" lists ranking movies, TV shows, books and of course, music, based on the number of lists made.

To Pimp A Butterfly blew all other competition out of the water making it onto 19 of the 30 publications surveyed, which is 100 percent of the music-specific lists. Coming in second and third was Vince Staple's Summertime '06 and Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION, each making 12 of the lists (63 percent).

The study doesn't seem to account for how highly ranked these albums were on the list, just how often they were mentioned among the various publications. Accounting for ranking would likely change the list dramatically, however, it seems likely that Lamar would stay at No. 1.

Perhaps more unforgivable is notable music publications omitted from the study, most likely because this is the only the second year the site has analyzed these lists and the first year including music. Without highly regarded publications such as Pitchfork, Stereogum, NME, Mojo and Consequence of Sound mentioned at all, it seems hard to call this a definitive study of music "Best Of" lists.

The study also looks at how original these lists are, finding that Bloomberg and The New Yorker had the most original picks among book and movie critics, while TV Guide had the most widely cited picks among movies and TV Shows.

Among music lists analyzed in the study, Vogue and Slate were found to be the most original, with fewer than 25 percent of picks included on at least four other lists.

Check out the full list over on FiveThirtyEight, which includes notables such as Courtney Barnett, Joanna Newsom, Father John Misty, Miguel, Sleater-Kinney, Björk, Sufjan Stevens and many more.

Tags

Kendrick Lamar, Carly Rae Jepsen, Vince Staples, Courtney Barnett