This week marks the 4-year anniversary of music discovery Discord server Omnivoracious Listeners. To celebrate, the staff (myself among them) have collected the statistics from our 1000+ albums reviewed during that time frame.

I thought it would be fun to get Manifold involved a little bit in this celebration. Below, I’m going to list our top 30 highest-rated albums, including the number of raters and the standard deviation. On January 1st, 2025, I’m going to recheck this list. If an album not present on the current list is on the list at that time, I will resolve the market to YES.

The current list:

Some caveats and clarifications:

1. The new album must have at least 10 ratings to be considered eligible. This is to prevent an album that we are currently reviewing on January 1st from getting 1 or 2 10/10s and being on top of the list at that moment, only to inevitably drop with more ratings later. This market is intended to capture a new entry with staying power. (The Living End, currently on the list with 7 reviews, is grandfathered in.)

2. The album does not need to be newly reviewed between now and January 1st to be eligible. By this, I mean that an album from our past history, if it were to get enough positive reviews to climb onto this list somehow, would count for YES.

3. Shuffling around of the current list without new entries/names does not count. If this is all that happens, this resolves as NO.

More context for how reviews work:

Six new albums from the rock/metal sphere of genres are reviewed each week. Each is selected from a different list within the server. One is voted on by the entire group. Three are randomly selected from each of a NEW (released in past 2 years), MODERN (1994-present), and CLASSIC (before 1994) lists, which are submitted to by all users. One is chosen by a staff member, which rotates through the group. The last is randomly selected from a THEME list, which refreshes every few weeks. Example past themes include extreme metal, albums with city names in them, and albums by female-fronted bands.

Users listen to albums and give them a percentage rating score, where 100 is a perfect score. These scores are saved in our server bot, which tracks the average rating as well as other statistics. If a user listens to part of an album but does not finish it, they can put an NA score, which is shown in statistics but does not negatively count against the album’s score.

To follow along and insider trade, or if the server interests you, feel free to join us on Discord! Invite link: https://discord.gg/ENTfBJKVDu. My name on the server is OwenLeaf.