Eric has spent years developing a system to answer a question nobody asked: exactly how much does he like every musical artist he has ever heard?
What began as a 169-artist MP3 disc grew into a personal music laboratory involving spreadsheets, metadata, discographies, algorithms, hard-drive disasters, and enough mathematical tinkering to make simply listening to a song seem irresponsible.
In this episode:
- The MP3 disc that started Eric’s mission to rank his favorite artists.
- Why a normal music collection became a spreadsheet-based research project with custom formulas and increasingly specific rules.
- Ratings, skips, play counts, song totals, and a modified Net Promoter Score determine who rises and falls.
- Duplicate tracks, alternate takes, movie dialogue, soundtracks, and background scores are removed before they corrupt the sacred mathematics.
- Elton John and Boston learn that a great greatest-hits album does not guarantee a free pass for the entire discography.
- The Beatles, Journey, Weird Al, Simon and Garfunkel, Elton John, ELO, Pink Floyd, Phil Collins, Chicago, and the Moody Blues occupy Eric’s difficult-to-defend top ten.
- A hard-drive failure wipes out Eric’s metadata and forces him to rebuild the project.
- Weird Al and Tenacious D receive the kind of serious consideration usually reserved for Nobel Prize nominees.
From five-star ratings and greatest-hits albums to mathematical formulas and deeply personal nostalgia, this episode explores what happens when Eric turns his music collection into a long-term scientific experiment with no peer review.
Todd asks the reasonable questions.
Eric supplies the spreadsheets and a ranking system that may eventually determine the precise musical value of every song on Earth.
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Produced & Edited by Eric Hersey – Strong Minded Agency, Eric Hersey’s bio.
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