Every year, our resident web developer and general nerd Matt experiments with graphing the data we've spent all year painstakingly producing. This year is SPB's tenth so we're very happy to be able to draw some conclusions on the past decade in music: put simply, things are much better now. Let's have a closer look.
This chart shows average album review scores (as awarded by SPB) over the past 10 years. Clearly 2003 was a poor year for music, and 2010 was amongst the most dizzying highs in our collective memories. It's good to see, then, that 2012 brought things back from a disappointing 2011. Will 2013 be the year we set a new record? Only time will tell (or advanced supercomputer predictive technologies).
This chart featured in last year's roundup too, but we've updated it for 2012. It shows the breakdown of album review scores on a per-year basis: we awarded much fewer 10/10 reviews in 2012 versus any other year in SPB's history. 2012 was also only the second year in our history where our lowest-scoring record review was a 3/10 -- clearly, 2012 wasn't dazzingly bright or awkwardly poor, either. We're not quite sure what that means.
