SJ.com's Greatest Musical Artists of All-Time List

EDIT: It's been decided that we are going with your personal "favorite" musical acts of all time instead of the more nebulous "greatest." Send all of your votes over to me via PM by August 3. Thought I'd update the first post to settle any confusion...

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I had a ton of fun reading I Should Coco's SportsJournalists.com's 500 Top 300 Songs poll that was compiled awhile ago. Based on everyone's strong and varied opinions about music (especially after brackets we did a while ago), I thought it might be fun to compile a list of the SportsJournalists.com's greatest musical acts of all-time. I'd be happy to put the list together and post the results - probably rolling out a few every day along with some YouTube videos, background information, etc. Does this sound like something other SportsJournalists.comers would be interested in?

How deep the list goes would depend on how many people vote and how many artists they vote for. I suspect that asking people to vote for 100 bands/musicians to be on the list would be way too much? Would 20 be more reasonable? That seems like enough to be varied and reflect everyone's diversity and not have the same 10 acts get all the love.

I'd like to expand this to include all forms of popular music in the 20th century on (rock, pop, country, rap, jazz, etc.) so, no, you can't vote for Bach (unless it's Sebastian, in which case I'm throwing your vote away). I would leave the definition of "greatest" up to the person voting, only to say that I would suspect that you would want to go with more than just "personal favorite" - otherwise, I'm discounting all the Carly Rae Jesperson votes, or whatever she is.

Thoughts?

 

I think you should include the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

So everyone would get a certain number of votes? From scratch?

 

My understanding is that we are going to numerically rate all musical performers and composers in all genres of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

OK, gonna have to clear some time for that.

 

I'm going to go ahead and predict a Phil Collins win.

 

Yeah, I was thinking that people could just rank their choices from 1-20 and send them to me via PM. I'll compile the list and go from there.

It will settle the debate for once and for all who is better: Phil Collins or Rush.

 

So I want to be clear on this, we expand away from just our top 20 favourites to who we view as the 20 greastest acts whether we liked them or not?

 

I've gone back and forth on this: would people be more inclined to see a list of the board's "favorite" artists or the artists the board thinks are the "greatest"?

 

Oh they're two very different things to me.

 

I like my interpretation better.

 

So many eras, so many genres, so many interpretations ...