The Greatest Music
20 Most Important Albums of All Time
Wave Magazine (USA) – 20 Most Important Albums of All Time (2004) is a small, staff-curated canon list from the San Jose/Silicon Valley entertainment magazine The Wave. The selections are presented unranked, focusing on albums framed as historically “important” (impact, influence, and genre-defining legacy) rather than personal favorites, and it leans heavily toward rock’s core lineage while still nodding to major left-turns like punk, metal, and hip-hop.
The 100 Most Important Records Ever Made
In June 1992 (Issue 100), The Wire marked its 100th issue with “The Top 100”: an unranked, chronological sweep of what it called the most significant records of the 20th century. It’s a very “Wire” canon—spanning early blues/jazz and modern composition through rock, hip-hop, electronic music, and global/field recordings—less a mainstream greatest-hits list than a map of boundary-pushing audio history.
The 1000 Best Albums of All Time
Fnac’s Les 1000 CD des disquaires de la Fnac (Dec 2008) is a collective, staff-driven canon: Fnac’s record-store specialists (“disquaires”) pooled their picks in a large internal vote to build a near “ideal” 1,000-album library, spanning major genres and highlighting certain titles as indispensables.
TIME's All Time 100 Albums
TIME’s All-TIME 100 Albums (2006) is an unranked, editorial canon compiled by critics Josh Tyrangiel and Alan Light, presented chronologically by decade rather than as a leaderboard. Spanning the mid-1950s through the early 2000s, it mixes landmark studio releases with a handful of influential compilations and box sets, aiming to capture records that shaped popular music’s sound, culture, and industry. The selection ranges widely—rock, soul, hip-hop, pop, jazz, punk, and beyond—balancing consensus classics with boundary-pushers to sketch a historical map of albums that mattered most, not just commercially, but artistically and culturally.
The Top 10 Albums of the 1980s
In a Los Angeles Times critics’ poll published December 24, 1989, the paper’s regular pop-music reviewers voted on the best albums of the 1980s using a 10-to-1 points system (10 points for a first-place vote, 9 for second, etc.). The Clash’s London Calling was a runaway #1, and the voting was notably wide-ranging—84 different albums received at least one vote—though the final Top 10 skewed toward the earlier half of the decade.
Entertainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Albums
Entertainment Weekly’s 100 All-Time Greatest Albums (2013) is an editorial canon—not a public ballot—assembled through internal debate among EW writers and editors to capture “game-changing” records of the album era. Presented as a ranked top-100 with The Beatles’ Revolver at No. 1, the list leans toward the pop/rock/hip-hop core EW covers, while acknowledging shifting cultural lenses (e.g., Daft Punk’s Discovery rising due to EDM’s influence). EW framed the result as a 50-year snapshot rather than a definitive consensus of all genres or eras.
Top 100 Albums of the 2000s
Adresseavisen (Norway) published this “best of the 2000s” feature on December 4, 2009 (later updated November 2, 2010) as a staff-picked countdown of the 100 best albums of the decade, described as “the 100 records we managed to argue our way to.” The list was compiled by eight members of Adressa’s music desk: Terje Eidsvåg, Vegard Enlid, Ole Jacob Hoel, Kai Kristiansen, Audun Hoem Hagen, Leif Gjerstad, Magne Gisvold, and Ali Reza Soufi Pour.
The 100 Best Albums of All Time
Epoca (Italy) – The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1988) is a ranked “all-time” albums list published in 1988 by Epoca, a major Italian weekly news and culture magazine from Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (often compared to Life). The list is presented in order of preference as a single ranked Top 100. Publicly available transcriptions preserve the rankings, but do not include voter credits or methodology, so the number and names of contributors are not currently documented.
Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums
A book series created by Encyclopedia of Popular Music editor Colin Larkin (1st ed. 1994; later pocket/2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2000), presenting a ranked “top 1000” derived from a large, ongoing public poll—ballots gathered in record shops, universities, schools, and at the MIDEM trade show—rather than a critics’ ballot. The project grew across editions, with annotations for each album and shifting results as more votes came in.
Uncut’s 200 Greatest Albums of All Time
Uncut’s 200 Greatest Albums of All Time ran as the February 2016 cover story (issue “Take 225”), positioning a classicist, UK-leaning canon topped by Pet Sounds, Revolver, Astral Weeks, and The Velvet Underground & Nico. It’s presented as an Uncut editorial survey rather than a public poll, and the package cross-references how many of these albums had ranked in earlier Uncut/NME lists, framing the feature as a conversation with rock history as much as a fresh plebiscite.
The 100 Albums of the 80s
This is a ranked, end-of-decade canon that leans heavily toward the decade’s post-punk / new wave / art-pop / indie core, while still giving major space to era-defining funk/pop and hip-hop.
100 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
Published in Kerrang! (Issue #682, Jan 1998), “100 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” is a hard-rock/metal-leaning essentials list that blends ‘70s giants (Sabbath, Zeppelin, AC/DC), punk cornerstones (Sex Pistols), and ‘90s era-defining records (Nirvana, Sepultura, Metallica). It reads like a late-90s Kerrang! time capsule: aggressive, riff-forward, and tuned to the tastes of the magazine’s core rock/metal audience.