Top albums of 2011: Spotify playlists

At this time of year I tend to search out some of the best albums lists churned out by websites, magazines, record shops and so on to see what I might’ve missed over the past year (those things do serve some purpose). A good starting place is Metacritic, which rounds up a load of top 10’s from various sources.

This year I’m looking for Spotify playlists of those top albums so I can skip through them and transfer anything that sounds decent to my ‘New stuff to listen to’ playlist. Those playlists aren’t too easy to find though – I’d have thought people would have started putting them together as a matter of course, but apparently not (although that’s probably fair enough in the case of the record shops).

Anyway, here’s a starter list. I’ll add to it as and when I find more:

• Stereogum Best of 2011 (Spotify)
• Fluxblog 2011 Survey (Spotify)
• Quietus Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Guardian Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Piccadilly Records Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Rough Trade Top 100 Albums of the Year (Spotify)
• NME’s 50 Best Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Fly Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Wire Top 50 Releases of the Year (Spotify)
• Uncut Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Rolling Stone’s Best 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Drowned in Sound Top 50 of 2011 (Spotify – sampler)
• Clash Top 40 Albums of 2011
• Filter Top 10 of 2011
• Hype Machine Zeitgeist 2011 (Spotify)

Most of these are full albums. If there’s just one track from each then I’ve labelled that ‘sampler’.

A single, aggregated playlist might be good. Maybe next year there’ll be something like a Metacritic Spotify app for this. Oh, and I should point out that not every album is on Spotify, so not all of these playlists are 100%.