Nick,

I hope you like bar graphs.

I thought we did a pretty good job with our predictions, but as it turns out, maybe we don’t deserve that much credit. Despite Pitchfork’s reputation for being deliberately contrarian, the site is actually fairly predictable.

I collected all of the data from Pitchfork’s Best New Music picks since 2003 (the year site started handing out that label). Over the past eight years, the site has been consistent with the number of BNM picks per year and how many show up on the their 50 Best Albums lists.

I also suspected that albums were more likely to be BNM’d during the summer and late fall. I was close, with the big months being May and September. It’s likely that the biggest albums are released in late spring to ramp up toward the festival season, as well as September, since a lot of bands tour heavily in October in November.

I compared the average score of those bestowed with the Best New Music label by year. The trend is leaning toward lower and lower scores still garnering BNM over the years, but it’s only a trend of one tenths place difference. So not much to write home about.

And last, for funsies, I checked out the distribution of scores among BNM albums. Again, surprisingly consistent, with most albums in the 8.2 to 8.8 range. The distribution is scarily bell curve-like.

So there. If you (or other readers) are interested, here’s the link to the Google spreadsheet with all of the Best New Music data I collected. Feel free to toy around with the data.