25 years of KEXP annual Listeners' Favorite lists

As an introduction to the project, we'll start with the lists themselves. What's in them, what kinds of trends have we seen over the years, movers and shakers. Stuff like that.

Each spoke is one year of KEXP's Annual "Favorite Albums of the Year" list, 2001 (top, running clockwise) through 2025. Rank 1 sits nearest the center; longer spokes are years with more entries (most years have 91, but 2012 has 120 and 2024/2025 have 100). Dot color and size both encode the same thing: how many distinct albums that artist has had across all 25 years combined, so darker and bigger means a more consistently list-worthy artist over the full quarter-century, not just this one year. Use the dropdown above the chart to highlight specific years, or search for an artist to see every year they made the list.

On a phone? Tap a dot or bar to see its details. These charts have more room on a laptop or tablet.

Interesting observations

The wheel above shows every entry from every list. The charts below pull back to ask what those entries add up to.

How rare is a repeat appearance?

The wheel counts list spots: every dot is one album on one year's list. This chart switches to counting artists, each one once, however many albums they have. The colors mean the same thing, but the question is different: once an artist makes the list, how often do they make it again?

That three-artist top tier isn't a round number I picked. It's a real cliff in the data. Going from 9 albums to 10 is where the population actually falls off; every cutoff near it is a gentle, steady slope by comparison.

Does it matter when an artist first shows up?

So most artists appear once, and almost none reach ten. What separates the one-and-dones from the regulars?

You'd expect an artist's tier to just reflect how good and prolific they are. That was my hypothesis, at least. I was thinking of artists I follow like TV on the Radio, The National, and Interpol: they showed up in the early 2000s, listeners fell in love with them, and then kept voting for them as they released new albums. I checked, and the basic idea holds up: the average listed album goes from about an artist's 4th in the early 2000s to between their 5th and 6th over the last decade. So I expected the yellow bar, the artists with just one album, to start tall in 2001 and shrink year after year as familiar artists piled up more albums. But the tier is a 25-year total, and the 25-year window itself has edges, so an artist's odds of reaching a high tier also depend on how much of that window they had to work with.

The pattern isn't a steady climb toward higher tiers as the wheel turns. It's a U-shape. The "1 album" share is highest right at both edges of the 25-year window (2001–2004 and 2024–2025, each above 30%) and lowest in the middle stretch (down near 12–14% around 2008, 2017, and 2019–2020).

That matches a real, well-known effect from cohort analysis, cutting from both directions rather than just one: near 2001, any artist whose prolific run was already mostly behind them before the list existed gets none of that earlier history counted. That's a left-truncation effect. Near 2025, a brand-new artist simply hasn't had the calendar time yet to earn a second appearance. That's the mirror-image right-censoring effect. Even artists who've clearly won listeners over, like IDLES and Fontaines D.C. (four albums on the lists each so far, represented by the purple 3–9 albums tier), are still years from the 10+ tier. They just haven't had the calendar time. An artist who happened to arrive mid-window, by contrast, had room on both sides to build a track record.

If anything, this understates how much artists had already built up before 2001: KEXP's lists start that year, so there's no way to see who was already a favorite earlier, which means the real climb is probably steeper than any chart here shows.

How much of each year's list is brand new?

The U-shape already hints at how much room each list leaves for newcomers. This chart asks it directly: of everyone on a given year's list, what share had never appeared on an Annual list before?

2001 opens at a trivial 100%, because there's no prior list anyone could have already been on, so that point isn't a real finding, just the starting condition. From 2002 on it's a real, steady decline: 89% turnover in 2002 falling to a floor around 30–34% by the mid-2010s, where it's stayed ever since (with some noise: 2021 and 2024 both tick back up over 40%). Read together with the U-shape chart above, the story is consistent: the list matures over its first decade as a growing pool of past artists becomes available to return, then settles into a steady state where roughly a third of any given year's list is a name that's never appeared before, not shrinking further, just holding.

That third isn't a free pass for established names, either. The National has made the list with every album since 2005's Alligator (eight in a row), and TV on the Radio with all five of theirs. But Interpol landed six albums in a row, from 2002 to 2018, then missed with their seventh, and Arcade Fire's first five albums all made a list while their last two didn't. With a fixed number of spots, every newcomer comes at the expense of someone established.

This lines up with KEXP's own mission of championing music discovery. Listeners clearly develop favorites and keep voting for their latest releases, but the community still devotes roughly a third of its annual ten-album ballot to artists it's never voted onto a list before.

Is the top of the list reserved for familiar names?

A third of every list is new names. But newcomers could be filling the bottom of the list while the top stays familiar. Is that what's happening?

The tiering used above is a 25-year total, so it includes albums an artist hadn't released yet at the time of a given appearance. That's fine for "how prolific did this artist turn out to be in the 25-year window," but it's the wrong measure for "was this artist already known at the time they got this rank," because an artist's first-ever appearance would get credit for albums still years in their future. So this chart uses a different count: how many times this artist had appeared on an Annual list up to and including this one. For example, the wheel shows Sleater-Kinney in the purple 3–9 tier, with 6 albums across the full 25-year span. But their 2005 album The Woods was only their second Annual-list appearance up to that point, and this chart is what shows that distinction. Here, The Woods is captured in the teal box (second appearance) in the 11–20 rank column (representing the #16 ranking in 2005).

The gradient is real but softer than it looked in the original view: first-timers make up 25.6% of rank 1–5 entries, climbing steadily to 54.1% by rank 51 and below. The top of the list does skew toward familiar names, just not as absolutely as counting every artist's eventual career total implied. One specific number worth sitting with: of the 25 albums that have ever hit #1, 7 of them (28%) were that artist's first-ever appearance on an Annual list. Debuting at the top isn't rare. Those artists just tend to come back.

When artists come back, how long is the wait?

Those returning artists raise a different question: how long do they stay away? The charts above already show that repeat appearances happen; these three numbers are about the timing.

How consistent are the artists who keep coming back?

And when they do come back, do they land in the same spot?

Appearing on the list once says something about an artist. Appearing several times says something else: how reliably an artist keeps landing in listeners' favor, or how much their standing swings from one appearance to the next.