The Top 40 Bands in America Today

This year I was invited to participate in Information Leafblower's The Top 40 Bands in America Today poll, which is sort of like a Pazz & Jop for bloggers, only with bands rather than albums and singles. The idea of it is to figure out which bands currently have the most buzz on the Internets.

Kyle from ILB describes the process:

I emailed over 40 "music/MP3 bloggers" (since we are our own genre now) and asked them to send me a list, ranked 1-10, of the 10 best American bands that they've seen or heard in the last year. The purpose of this list is to reward bands for generating buzz in the year 2005. This isn't a ranking of career longevity. I wanted to know who people are using their bandwidth to talk about.

Overall, I'd have to say that it's a pretty good list, with the caveat that it's very Pitchfork-ish in nature. Most of the top 10 didn't really surprise me at all, especially #1. I had Ryan Adams as #1 on my list not so much because I wanted him to rank very highly, but because I thought he had a genuinely better year than anyone else on the list. He ended up #19 (peep my comments).

It was cool to see The Hold Steady (my #2, if I'm not mistaken) at #6.

Also, my list had more "mainstream" rock and hip-hop stuff. I was surprised to see Fall Out Boy, which I had ranked fairly highly, not even make the list. Other than the uber ubiquitous Green Day, they were one of the only rock bands I heard on the radio all year.

Checkit: The Top 40 Bands in America Today

Also, on the outside chance that anyone gives a shit, I set the site up now to where it will automatically post links (like these) everyday at some point in the morning (that I'm still figuring out). They're just the same ones I used to post here, but I figured it would be that much more intuitive if they were actually on the front page.