Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time List Sucks

Halfway through out journey through Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time, let's take a look at why it's been so boring.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

Why do we rank albums? On a personal level, I know why I, the guy writing this, like to rank albums. I do it because I like telling the world something about the music I like and I look forward to being affirmed for my good taste and/or criticizing people who disagree with me for their bad taste. We rank to know we’re not alone, you might say. That’s why we rank albums. 

But why do magazines and websites rank albums? That’s a little harder to explain, and I say that as someone who has been involved in figuring out several different magazine/website end of year album rankings. The best explanation I can give you sits somewhere between “it’s good for clicks” and “people expect it,” which isn’t much of an answer (especially since it’s not clear to me that either is true). 

But let’s go one step higher. Why does Apple Music have a ranking of the 100 best albums of all time? Apple is not a magazine and it is not meaningfully a website. It does not need clicks and nobody was wondering what Apple Music considered to be the Top 100 albums of all time. It is not considered an authority on this subject or, really, any other. 

Apple is a major tech company whose relationship with music has been almost entirely defined by its hardware and the occasional ad campaign (those silhouettes of people dancing against a plain Brat background were as defining for my college years as any other TV commercial I can think of). Apple Music has a streaming service and Zane Lowe, but neither of those really explain its interest in a Top 100 list. So why did they do this? The only clue we have comes from Apple’s own copy, which calls the list a “modern love letter to the records that have shaped the world we live and listen in today.” This is actually useful intel, and we’ll return to it shortly. 

Halfway through listening to this list and I am of the opinion that, to quote a friend of mine who texted me when I announced this little countdown that Apple’s Top 100 “is the worst list I can imagine a major company making.” He’s correct. Look, I’m sorry but …WHAT is going on with this list?? Are the people at Apple Music okay? 

All in all, Apple’s Top 100 Albums of All Time feels like a family portrait created by Midjourney. Technically, at a glance, you wouldn’t say there’s much wrong with it. But the more you look, the less sure you are about that. Parts of it look a little too perfect — there’s no grime or asymmetry. And some of it isn’t perfect enough — too many fingers on one hand, too many teeth in one smile. It’s what happens when you outsource creativity. It’s what happened here. 

Some of the stuff on here is just baffling. Apple Music gave themselves 100 albums. One hundred albums! That is just not very many. It raises the stakes. And then, given these very limited confines, they include The Fame Monster? The Marshall Mathers LP? Hotel California? Look, I think all of these albums are totally fine for what they are (with the exception of Hotel California, which is bad), but top one hundred of all time? Music is subjective and rankings are made to be argued with and yada yada, I get it. I was going to disagree with parts of this list no matter what. That’s the point. Duly noted. But give me a break! Straight Outta Compton kicks off with three very well-known and very good songs but look me in the face and tell me the back half of that album justifies it being anywhere near the Top 100 Albums of All Time, let alone at number 70. 

And this is before we get to guys like Bad Bunny (76) and Travis Scott (98) whose albums came out in 2018 and 2022. I am not totally unsympathetic to the idea that someone could have released one of the 100 greatest albums of all time within the last two years, I guess, but at least part of what separates a great album from merely a very good one is longevity! Its ability to retain its relevance and vitality across multiple generations! Maybe future music lovers will appraise Travis Scott’s ASTROWORLD as an all-time masterpiece but that seems at least a little unlikely since even modern music lovers find it more or less “fine.” 

All of that can be totally subjective and I accept that. But the things that aren’t included here are way more telling than anything that is. There is almost no metal, save for Master of Puppets (69). No Black Sabbath. No Iron Maiden. No Judas Priest. There is also virtually no country, unless you count Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. No Willie Nelson. No Johnny Cash. No Dolly Parton. Not even folks like Jason Isbell or Miranda Lambert. At some point, you can’t chalk all this up to erasure. Let’s call it what it is: blindspots. 

Look, I’m halfway through this list, and I can at least see the argument for most of these albums being part of a “modern love letter to the records that have shaped the world we live and listen in today.” Most of these albums are great. By my count, I’ve come across three that I think I’d put in my own personal top 100. Even when an album isn’t exactly my thing, I’ve worked hard here to write about it in a way that honors its impact (which Straight Outta Compton has, no matter how lackluster I find half of it) or can be appreciated by its fans (I’m not the biggest Guns ‘N Roses guy, but I’ve worked with people who will tell you that Appetite for Destruction saved their life, and I want to do right by those people). 

But all in all, this list is pretty messed up. It feels like exactly what it is, exactly what Apple writ large has become — a huge corporation trying so hard to be so many things to so many people that it loses all semblance of humanity and just looks like an impersonal algorithm that goes for the most obvious and inoffensive choices while ignoring all the quirks and idiosyncrasies that would make it feel authentic. (For a much better list, take a look at Paste’s Top 300 Albums of All Time. That is a weird list that looks like it was made by real, flesh-and-blood nerds arguing about their favorite music). 

I’ll finish the countdown and, given the nature of the list, probably more or less like the Top 50 albums just fine. There’s not a whole lot not to like about them, and that’s kind of the problem. A real list — one picked not by committee or corporate board, but real people — would have unusual picks, things I’ve never heard of, and probably one or two albums that I straight up hate. I’d probably find the list quirky and maybe offensive and possibly illuminating. But at least I’d know it was real.

---

Applecore: Our Journey Through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time Continues

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen.

53: The Rolling Stones — Exile on Main Street

By 1972, the Rolling Stones had almost nothing left to prove. After a brief and not super successful foray into psychedelic rock, the Stones got back to what they were good at and knocked out Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers, one after the other, about a year apart. That means “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Gimme Shelter,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Brown Sugar,” “Sway,” “Wild Horses,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “Dead Flowers” all came out within about three years of each other. They really don’t make rock and roll bands like this anymore.