Beatles Countdown Introduction

Feb 24

It’s finally over.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been busting my hump trying to put together a project where fans vote on the top Beatles songs of all time. But, like a lot of people have asked me, why do it at all? Well, for a number of reasons. It’s good content for an obvious reason, huh? Another would be it’s also always fun to get people involved interactively from all places of life about things they all love (in this case, The Beatles). A really good reason brought up by one of the voters is that it’s really nice to have a non-commercialized look at arguably the best band of all time. Sure, many publications have released their list of best songs by The Beatles, but who really votes on those things? The staff of Rolling Stone? The guys who get them coffee? I never understood why a major music publication wouldn’t do something like this solely on fan votes. I know it would be very time consuming & definitely a painstaking endeavor, but the pay-off would be so much better than thirty guys we will never know sitting in a room, making a list, & pissing off half of their audience. So that brings us to Balarama’s list.

What I did starting in January was basically get any & all Beatles fans I could to submit a ballot of their favorite songs. I went everywhere – literally. Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm, Beatles Websites & Beatles Forums, Music Websites & Music Forums, et cetera; if you can think of it, chances are I went there to try and solicit votes. Did I go about it the best way? Yes and no. Some places I handled with tact while others I impatiently blitzed the hell out of. Neither one worked better than the other so that’s a plus and it really just depended on my mood at the time like most things in life. Those means asides, the results I got were great. Considering I started with absolutely zero names & ideas on where to get people, I’d say I did pretty damn well for myself. Of I course I didn’t get as many people to vote as I would have liked, but I will always think we could have gotten more. For my first endeavor into something like this, I’d say it was a success so far. Of course, I didn’t do it by myself and I want to thank a couple of people here real quick:

My fiancée
Not only did she vote & get her Dad to vote, she also put up with me constantly counting votes and lurking for more votes instead of getting ready for dinner and a movie.

Facebook
How they didn’t ban me for the obscene amount of posts I put up is a true testament to why they rule. I’d check out The Beatles fan page and The Beatles Fans Around The World group if you’re on Facebook.

DMbeatles Fourms
This was one of three forums to really help me out in getting votes and the first to truly do so. I got a big handful of votes here as well as the support of others that I really didn’t expect after a bunch of places turned me down or worse. I highly recommend you check the place out and if you want to, just click here!

Muzic Forums
The next place that really gave me a lot of help. Here, some of the staff even jumped on and helped me promote it which was something that really took me by surprise. If you want a place to just talk Beatles, go to DM’s, but for all around Music – definitely go here.

Invisible-Movement
This site and their forums (two separate places so click the links for both) helped me out as well. Not only did the webmaster Iva do the new site layout, but she also tweeted about the subject, let me post about it on a John Frusciante fan forum, and much more to help out. I got a lot of votes from this place as well and I really appreciate it. Learn more about the great site by going here.

And finally – The Voters
Most of you reading this were those who voted in the project and helped me along the way. Some gave me advice on where to go for more places, others told their friends & family to get them to vote, and a couple just kept in touch to see how it was going. Even more so, almost all of you put up with some form of my hounding to get a vote and some re-did them for simple clerical errors just to help out. It was all volunteered and out of the goodness of their hearts too. I really appreciate it from all of you. I have all of your contact information so hopefully I can get something together for you at the end, but if not, hopefully this list and the countdown of it will be enough for you. Thank you all so much!

With that little background done, I guess people want to know how I got the list after compiling all the votes. Well, what I did was ask people who were interested for their top 25 songs by The Beatles in order with their favorite being number one. Using a reverse ranking system where the number one song on the list got 25 points and the last song on the list got 1 point, I was able to craft a list around that. Now, I did run into four problems here and there with them.

The first was that some people sent me a list with only 23 or 24 votes. Others accidentally had listed one or two songs twice. Now, for most of them, I was able to get back in contact with them and they fixed the problem. For others though, I tried, but ultimately couldn’t get back in contact with them. I still wanted their voice to be heard so I still counted the votes. However, because only 23 or 24 were on the list, I ranked them with points that way. That means that if you had 23 songs on your list, I gave your top pick 23 and your last pick 1 just to even it out. 23 was as low as I would take though.

The next problem I ran into was actually pretty easy to solve: different versions of songs. Some people would list Let It Be versions of songs while others would list Let It Be…Naked versions. The same goes for the acoustic & electric versions of “Revolution” (Revolution 9 was counted separate) and a bunch of songs from Anthology. I completely understand where people are coming from, but had I split votes like this, the top 100 would have been drastically different and a little annoying with songs repeating. So I counted them together. I’m sorry, but the good news is that for some that have two very different versions (like “Revolution”), I’ll include both versions when we countdown.

The third problem I had was about medleys. The first one was about what is generally considered to be the “Abbey Road Medley” which starts with “You Never Give Me Your Money” and ends with “Her Majesty” on the second side of Abbey Road. I had a bunch of people e-mail me that that was too much to include and it’s not a true medley, only the last three songs are. Well, I vehemently disagree as do others so I included it this way. I promise to go over why when it comes up in the top 100. The problem was that some people included different songs in their top 25 for them. For example, one person voted for “You Never Give Me Your Money” as well as “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” Both votes were going the same place and I couldn’t give the Medley all those points unfairly. For some people, I asked them to re-do their list and they obliged. Others I couldn’t get in contact with, I just modified their votes so they now only had 24, instead of 25, and counted them as I stated above. The other medley problem I had, which was a bit minor but worth mentioning, was that some people put the songs “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” & “With A Little Help From My Friends” together. Now, the first song really does lead up into that one, but in my opinion, no more so than a regular intro in most albums and no more so than most of the other songs on that album. For example, “Good Morning, Good Morning” matches up with the first note of the title track’s reprise and that song runs right into “A Day In The Life.” It’s also the same bleeding that you hear if you listen to “Back In The USSR” and “Dear Prudence” back to back as they were intended. So I counted them as separate songs. Now to accommodate, I took of their 25th pick for ballots, moved the rest down, and put a tie for both songs so that one didn’t get more votes than the other. Had to do it, guys.

The last problem I ran into was when it came time for the list to be done. There were unfortunately a couple of ties. I had to break them somehow so what I did was see how many votes a song actually got and use that to break the tie. For instance, if two songs each got 543 points, but one song got 11 votes while the other got 13 votes, I gave the one with the 13 votes the win in the tiebreaker. Fair and easy actually.

Let me make something clear though. None of these problems were major occurrences or trends. It happened a couple of times each so it’s not like I went around editing votes and what-not.

After doing all of that guys, I had a final list of two hundred songs (yes, you’re reading that right). No, not every Beatles song got a vote, but some really obscure songs did so that was interesting. It was really cool to see the diversity in some people’s votes too as no one really seemed to stick to one type of song or Beatle. That was definitely a cool perk of doing this project.

So we have the list? What now?

Well, starting today, I’m going to start the countdown which will reveal the list bit by bit. I’d like to say I’m going to do ten a day, but really, that would take a lot of effort and I do have a full-time job with lots of overtime. I think the plan will be to do as many as possible a day until I get until the top 10 and stretch those out two a day. With that said, I plan to be done in less than two weeks. Each slot on the top 100 will be set-up just like the regular posts here on the websites. Download link, YouTube video (multiple for different versions maybe), and information about the song that you might not have known otherwise. Of course, my opinion as well as it is my website!

However, just because I have some other songs I want to cover, I will also be doing regular posts during this time. This might break the easy access if you’re just going down the list, but never fear. If you hover on Lists in the menu above and then click the Beatles option, you will be taken to a list that will update each time with the direct URL to the song. Nice and easy, huh?

This has been quite the project and it’s not over yet. Stick around guys, there’s a lot of good music coming your way and I thank you all for your patience once more!

Huzzah!