The end of year poll is all jolly good fun, but I know I am not alone in wondering how many of the albums discovered in the year of release will have the staying power of our early musical loves. Well, there’s an empirical way to check that. Just supposing you were to draw up your 100 favourite albums; how many did you acquire within a year of release? Well, here’s a list I prepared earlier – of course I did; it’s a thread that gets run from time to time hereabouts – and 24 of the 100 were bought on release or soon after.

Let’s look at it another way. How about your favourite album from each of the last 50 years, which was the subject of another recent thread? How many of those were pounced upon on their release date or soon after? For me, it’s a similar outcome, with 23, heavily weighted towards the latter years.

Now, when we came to my choices for the top ten for this century, (another thread variant floated earlier this year), 9 out of 10 were bought on release. This reflects habit changes as they were nearly all purchased from » Continue Reading.