Hayley Westenra pisses all over them with her album going 11-times platinum

oh and also - you've got space race / mi-sex backwards (the group was 'mi-sex', the album 'space race')

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My definition of good music is music that I enjoy listening to. Everything else is bad music.

So ... as this is a list based on time in the charts you can probably describe the albums listed as those that were enjoyed, even if briefly, by a large number of album purchasers. Hence, by my definition, this is good music.

I think the biggest problem with this is that it's biased too much towards new stuff. As a generalisation, the older albums definitely deserve to be there. It's probably too soon to make a call on the post-2000 stuff.
Also, good as some people might think 'Riverhead' is, it doesn't deserve to make the list twice...

and its not just that 'enjoyed' as related to SALES (which we must remember are guided by advertising, promotion and trends) is NOT a reflection on the value or quality. the list is totally devoid of underground artists (a lot of which define the 'nz sound' from the outside, where is the clean, the terminals, the bats, the d4, the datsuns, dead c, birchville cat motel), and its lacking a lot of the era-related material, i mean forchrisakes, dave 'sold a gazillion albums' dobbyn isn't even on the list!

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i doubt there is more than 100 people outside NZ (who weren't living in nz in the past couple years) who even know who Ben Lummis IS...

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//dave 'sold a gazillion albums' dobbyn isn't even on the list!

Does anyone actually have any figures on this?? Some of his more recent solo efforts have sold as few as 3000 copies... which doesn't really suppor the gazillions theory...

I'm actually wondering whether there's a methodological flaw underlying this list. Perhaps it needs to be corrected for the total number of albums sold in a given year or something... I'd expect a popular vote to be skewed by recency effects, but to have this happen for cumulative sales suggests perhaps the number of albums being bought is not constant.

// peter posa, dinah lee, ray columbus and the invaders, mothergoose, max merrit, the la de da's, human instinct, the dudes, d d smash, toy love, the clean, tall dwarfs, ardijah, shona lang, the bats, dead c, king kapisi, headless chickens, head like a hole //

using nothing but album sales as the measure, would any of those realistically have a hope of breaking into that #20 list?

Nearly all the albums cat_nz has listed would have been #1, and at least gold, if not platinum (and, in a few cases, multi-platinum) status. I think only the Headless Chickens and a couple of the 60s/70s acts might have any hope of sneaking in.

// maybe there's someone out there with the 20 definitive
// swedish reggae albums sung in cantonese?

that'd be jon bywater.

// yeah but again the word is DEFINITIVE

indeed. I would've left it out, myself.

cat_nz's initial request was for "...the most successful/best selling albums..." and I thought we'd veered towards the best selling albums as an easy way of avoiding the whole subjective 'what is the best?' debate, which, I'm sure we all know, is something even two people with similar tastes will never agree on, let alone the nzm massif.

to me, that top 20, if treated as a bestsellers list, looks about right.

sandy edmunds!

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from the RAINZ / Tui awards:

shihad
herbs
dave dobbyn
strawpeople
dance exponents
bic runga
neil finn
headless chickens
supergroove
the chills
omc (our biggest selling artist of all time!)
straitjacket fits
tex pistol
che fu
dd smash
peking man
the feelers
tim finn
front lawn
hello sailor
jan hellreigel
satellite spies
head like a hole
stellar*
garageland
screaming mee mees
cocunut rough
the mockers
darcy clay
the crocodiles
jenny morris
chris knox
DLT
king kapisi
push push
sonya waters
the dudes
weta
fur patrol
greg johnson
zed
the narcs
netherworld dancing toys
stereobus
betchadupa

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