The final forty

After more than ten weeks of voting, using one scheme or another, polls finally closed on Saturday night, and the last four acts to join the 36 announced over previous weeks learned that they'd managed to sneak in as the door was closing on Storm the Charts 2010.

As I mentioned last week, I've been keeping count. What seems like years ago, as the acts were announced on the catalogue pages, I spent these early mornings listening to the music and noting down whether I liked it or not.

In the way of notes that are not intended for public consumption, some of my comments were a little... raw. Others gushed. Those early notes were on paper (I printed off the catalogue pages as they grew) and when I found a track I really liked, I'd draw a box around it so I'd be able to find it again easily if and when it came time to download. As the days went on I fell into a pattern of writing an X against those tracks I thought were really bad, and a Y for the good ones (that weren't good enough to merit a box). As the list careered towards its final total of 568 artists I invented another category - YY - for stuff that I appreciated was *really* good but not the kind of thing I'd want to download.

So in this rather unscientific and piecemeal way I arrived at a place where I'd defined five categories: X (crap); Y (good); YY (very good); boxed (excellent); and the rest, which didn't make enough of an impression on me, either way, to have any mark at all. A kind of "meh" category. And what, you might be wondering, does the final forty look like when it's Diggered™? Well, it looks like this.

Which, if it says anything at all, probably says "John's musical tastes are somewhat at odds with the mainstream."

So it's talking a lot of sense, because I can't stand rap, or hip hop, or anything like it. Not too keen on most R&B either. I could go on. But that small and perfectly formed green wedge in the pie - the tracks with the boxes - represents eight songs that I will be downloading from next Sunday. An investment of something like six quid and if any of them gets anywhere near the top 40 I'll be well chuffed. And so will they, probably.