Individual song polls

[Shmoolikipod]

The purpose of this post is to explain why I gave so many 2 -5s for songs that are objectively good as well as my methodology of ranking them. After having done AMOLAD, BNW & I was ready to vote for Killers, I noticed that my ratings were 80% above 8.

I looked my draft notes for the rest of albums and saw a mere 20 songs below 5. What’s the point of a 1 -10 scale then?
I decided to start over with the purpose to distribute the songs more uniformly.
Senjutsu needs some time to sit, so I will exclude it for now. Thus we are talking 152 catalogue songs.

First I put a few songs to no.5 & no.10 positions in order to have some perspective.
I left rating 1 for 2 songs only and distributed the rest 150 songs uniformly from 2 -10. That is 16 songs for each position plus 6 surplus songs, which I redistributed to positions 7 -10. Below how the catalogue distribution for each rating looks like:

View attachment 17536

Considering that my initial list of 10s would include at least 20 (and more likely ~30) the process was painful and took me a fair amount of time to complete. For example Children of the Damned which was a 10 had to move into 9 rating since the places for 10 were pre-determined to be 18. Similarly many songs were removed 1 or 2 places below the initial draft ranking, for the purpose of uniformity of distribution. If there are 2 songs of rating 9 and one position left I move the one that I like less to 8.
The result is satisfying. Regarding the album ratings, there was a nearly absolute agreement between the average albums scores with the ranking on top of my mind.

I’m posting this now so to have a reference I can hyperlink in my Individual Album Judgement posts and will re-adjust AMOLAD & BNW soon, before proceeding with the rest of catalogue.
I’ve done the ratings for all songs already in an excel sheet and I’ll take a few days more for fine tuning.

I always struggled with this too, I'd do a ranking and realize I only have like 10 songs below 5. Like, I'd say Octavarium is a good amount of tiers above Lord of Light any day of the year, but it's hard not to give LoL 10 just because better songs exist. I write all the praises in the world and then not give it the highest marks? How can I explain detracting from the score?

 

[____no5]

Yeap, that's why I wrote this note. I will be likely praising a rated 4 song and some people may say wait what? So I will link the above to my Individual Album Rating posts (where you state all scores and give the average) in order not having to explain (hopefully).

Other than that I am quite happy that I did it with a structured way this time. I struggled a bit (mostly to decide which songs to downvote), but the result is very rewarding.

 

[LooseCannon]

Hi, I've reopened the songs from Somewhere in Time for voting, after resetting the votes. Apologies for the delay, as I was travelling.

Please add your vote for these song and consider the following tips:

• Try to be consistent across the Iron Maiden catalogue. Don't vote based on the place on the album, but the place in the overall catalogue.
• 1 should be the worst Iron Maiden songs, 10 should be the best. You can have lots of 10s and 1s as you see fit.
• Don't vote based on other people's votes. IE, if you think a song is overrated, don't give it a 1 or 2 just because you think it's getting "too high" of votes.

The next album, opening up on the weekend of October 15th, will be Dance of Death.

 

[LooseCannon]

Hi, I've reopened the songs from Dance of Death for voting, after resetting the votes.

Please add your vote for these song and consider the following tips:

• Try to be consistent across the Iron Maiden catalogue. Don't vote based on the place on the album, but the place in the overall catalogue.
• 1 should be the worst Iron Maiden songs, 10 should be the best. You can have lots of 10s and 1s as you see fit.
• Don't vote based on other people's votes. IE, if you think a song is overrated, don't give it a 1 or 2 just because you think it's getting "too high" of votes.

The next album, opening up on the weekend of October 22nd, will be Virtual XI.

 

[____no5]

Ranking of Maiden’s Catalogue Pt. II: Enter Senjutsu.

For ranking Maiden's Catalogue, my initial plan was to let a few months for Senjutsu to sink in, before rating it.
However the structured approach I followed to rank the first 152 songs (16 first albums) has helped me a ton with the ranking process by helping me build a solid perspective on the catalogue. As a result I don't feel I need to wait any longer.

In the start, I thought to just throw the Senjutsu ratings into the existing pool of rankings without restrictions, but I realized it might be unfair to it, leading to lower album average. I did some experimental calculations and in deed, it resulted to lower average score than I thought it to be right out of the bat. No, each ranking of the new 10 songs should be interacting with the rest of catalogue, i.e. every new 8 to lead another song fall into 7 etc.

To do it justice, I decided to re-distribute the ratings in a nearly perfect way. In order to elevate a bit the album average I assigned only 9 places for rating 1. For ratings 2 -10 there are strictly 17 places assigned for each one.
The grand total from 1 -10 is now 162 songs.



The album average distributions are now:

Upper Tier
2 Albums ≥ 8.00
4 Albums ≥ 7.00

Middle Tier
5 Albums > 5.00

Lower Tier
4 Albums ≥ 4.00
2 Albums > 2.00

Similarly with my previous reference post the purpose is to explain why there are so many 2 -5s ratings for songs that are objectively good and why the album averages are relatively low.

 

[LooseCannon]

Hi, I've reopened the songs from Virtual XI for voting, after resetting the votes.

Please add your vote for these song and consider the following tips:

• Try to be consistent across the Iron Maiden catalogue. Don't vote based on the place on the album, but the place in the overall catalogue.
• 1 should be the worst Iron Maiden songs, 10 should be the best. You can have lots of 10s and 1s as you see fit.
• Don't vote based on other people's votes. IE, if you think a song is overrated, don't give it a 1 or 2 just because you think it's getting "too high" of votes.

The next album, opening up on the weekend of October 29th, will be Powerslave.