Who's on the list?

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

Every album, by who made it

Each dot is one album on one year's list, in rank order: #1 is the top left, and the list reads across and down like a page. Purple is a band, teal is a solo man, and gold is a solo woman. Click a color in the key to light up one kind of artist, pick years from the box, or search for an artist to see where all of their albums sit. Hover any dot to see who it is.

Interesting observations

The first thing you notice is the purple. The second is the gold: a few scattered dots in the early years, then whole rows of it by the 2020s.

The grid and tiles above speak to every album on every list. The charts below pull back to ask how we arrived at these totals and what trends might be observed if we unpack things a bit.

The share, year by year

The same story, as a share of each year's list. Every album counts once.

The curves use a three-year average to smooth the bumps. Hover to see the actual numbers for any single year.

Bands start near three-quarters of every list and settle at roughly three in five. The teal swells through the 2010s and then settles back to where it began. Nearly all of the lasting change is gold.

Who gets to #1?

The top spot tells the same story, only more starkly.

Bands took the top spot every year from 2001 to 2004. Sufjan Stevens broke the run in 2005, and then bands won it nine years straight. Since 2015, solo artists have hit #1 four times: Courtney Barnett twice, David Bowie, and Lizzo.

Solo artists: counts, not just shares

A rising share can mean one group is growing or another is shrinking, so here are the actual numbers: how many albums by solo men and by solo women made each year's list.

Dashed lines are the average for 2001–2010, 2011–2020, and 2021–2025. Only artists with a recorded gender are counted.

Solo women went from five or six albums a year to more than twenty in most recent years. Solo men took a different path. They rose from about a year to about through the 2010s, with of those ten years coming in above the most solo women have ever had in a year (), and then fell back to about by 2021–2025. So the same starting and ending numbers hide a hump in the middle. Bands gave up the room: they went from about albums a year to about in the 2010s and about now. Most lists have 91 albums, so more room for one kind of artist means less for another. (The 2012 list was longer, at 120, which is part of why that year stands out for solo men.)

Counting albums or counting artists?

So far every chart has counted albums, so an artist with three albums on the lists counts three times. Counting each artist once instead barely changes the picture:

Solid bars count albums on the lists. Faded bars count each artist once.

Who's behind the rise?

So where did all those solo women come from? One possibility is a handful of stars returning year after year. The other is a steady stream of new names. This chart counts the artists on each year's list and splits them in two: those appearing on a list for the first time (solid), and those who had been on an earlier year's list (faded).

Each artist counts once per year. The lists start in 2001, so the earliest bars treat everyone as new, including veterans who had been recording for years. That's why the comparisons here start in 2011.

The answer is new names. About solo women a year made a list for the first time in 2011–2015, and about a year did in 2021–2025. For solo men it went the other way, from about a year to about . Once artists are in, women and men come back at about the same rate (more on that below), so the change is mostly in who gets through the door, not in who stays.

The names behind the numbers

New names are only half of the story, though. Once they arrive, many of them stay. By 2021–2025, % of the solo women on each year's list had been listed before, up from % in 2011–2015. And a small core does a lot of the work: the solo women with three or more albums on the lists since 2016 are only % of the different solo women listed in that stretch, but they account for % of the entries. So the rise has two parts: a wider front door, and a group of artists who keep coming back through it.

Here are the solo artists who landed three or more albums on the lists since 2016: women and men. Each dot is an album, placed in the year it made the list. Hover to see which one.

Soccer Mommy landed an album in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, and Little Simz in 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025, a new album every other year. Mitski and Beyoncé landed four each, and Angel Olsen landed five between 2016 and 2022. On the men's side, Ty Segall landed three years running (2016–2018) and then again in 2021, 2024, and 2025. Kevin Morby landed five times between 2016 and 2022 and hasn't since. In general the men's line is the bumpier one: from one year to the next, the number of solo men on the list moves by about albums on average since 2011, against about for solo women.

That raises a question about the men. Did they stop making albums, or did their albums stop landing?

Did solo men stop making albums?

To find out, I took the solo artists who were already established, meaning first listed in 2015 or earlier, and looked up every studio album they released from 2016 to 2025, whether or not it made a list.

Studio albums released 2016–2025 by artists first listed in 2015 or earlier. Reissues and unusual releases can slip in, so treat the percentages as approximate.

So the men didn't go quiet. % of established solo men put out at least one studio album, about the same as the women, and together they released of them. Damien Jurado put out studio albums in that stretch and made a list. Andrew Bird: and . Neil Young: and . Ty Segall shows the other outcome: albums, of them on lists.

What changed is the odds. About % of those men's albums made a list, compared with % of the women's. I can't tell from this whether that is listener taste, what KEXP championed, or both. How much those albums were actually played is a separate question for a later post.

Once they're in, do they come back?

The first post asked who sticks around, and this is the same question for these groups. Of the artists first listed from 2011 to 2020, how many came back to a later list within five years?

Why five years, and why start in 2011? Of the artists who ever came back, % were back within three years and % within five, so five years catches the large majority of comebacks and still lets me include artists who debuted as recently as 2020, just as the solo women's rise was taking off. Starting in 2011 skips the early years, when the lists had no history and almost every artist looked like a newcomer.

Dots are the share of artists first listed in 2011–2020 who appeared on another year's list within five years. The line is the range the true figure could plausibly fall in, given how many artists there are. It works like the margin of error in a poll: the fewer artists in a group, the wider the line. Read each line left to right along the percentage scale. Where lines cover the same stretch, the real rates for those groups could be the same. Here all three lines cover roughly % to % (the shaded band), so the data can't tell us that one group comes back more often than another.

About % of the solo women came back, compared with % of the solo men and % of the bands. The solo women's dot sits a little higher, but their lines cover much of the same stretch of the scale (the shaded band), so the data can't separate the three. That is the point. If the women's rise came from a few favorites returning far more often than anyone else, they would stand out clearly here. They don't. More women got on the lists, and once they did, they came back at a similar rate to everyone else.