New Wave Outpost Forum

The question I'm asking is which band appears the most times, including full albums, singles, and/or comps in your collection? This would be analog (difficult to count!) or digital. This would also include a single appearance on a generic comp as well as on a band's own comp.

If most of your collection is digitized, one way to find this out is to copy and paste the Album and Artist columns of your database into Excel. Give each column its respective "Album" and "Artist" title. Go to Data > Pivot Table. You can then create a table where the layout is to have Albums down the first column and "Count Num" of the artists in the data field. Creat that Pivot Table. You then have to expand the Artist field to see that field fully. Copy and paste as text just the Artist column into a new worksheet. You now do another pivot table to take the Count of Artist only, giving you the total number of appearances by a band on any album in your collection (provided it's all tagged correctly).

My somewhat embarrassing and predictable results of my top 20:

New Order 106 albums, singles or comps
Joy Division 65
Depeche Mode 49
The Cure 38
Echo & The Bunnymen 27
Goldfrapp 26
The Church 24
Buzzcocks 20
The Fall 20
The Chameleons 19
The Jam 19
British Sea Power 18
Heaven 17 18
The Comsat Angels 16
The Damned 16
everything but the girl 15
Gang of Four 15
Morrissey 15
Bauhaus 14
Felt 14

For those of you using iTunes.

1) Select all artists and all albums while in browse mode.
2) File, Export (This will take a long while for large DB)
3) Open the text file created in step2 using Excel.

Edit: Yikes, this will give detail to the song level, need to delete all columns except artist/album and remove duplicates. Blir, is there any easier way?

<font size="1">[b]Favorites of 2008 (so far):[/b]
Beach House - Devotion
British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
Crystal Stilts - Crystal Stilts

</font>

Are we counting offical releases only, or do live bootlegs count?

[quote][i]Originally posted by SwampThing[/i]
<br>For those of you using iTunes.

1) Select all artists and all albums while in browse mode.
2) File, Export (This will take a long while for large DB)
3) Open the text file created in step2 using Excel.

Edit: Yikes, this will give detail to the song level, need to delete all columns except artist/album and remove duplicates. Blir, is there any easier way?
[/quote]
No, but it's not really that hard. You just edit down to album and artist columns like you say. There will be multiple instances of albums (reflecting each song from the album), so that's you make that your first column in the first pivot. You then the second column from that pivot (the band, which will appear only once per each album), then do a pivot count of how many times the band appears. Simple! [:o)]

And I figure this really isn't to do any sort of accurate album count but exhibit how much mania you might have for a particular band - albums, singles, boots, etc should all count.

[quote]Originally posted by Blir
[br]
everything but the girl 15


[/quote]


Holy Crap! That shows my lack of musical knowledge, I didn't know they had 15 [i][b]songs[/b][/i] let alone 15 albums.

Quite surprising when I checked mine:

R.E.M. 20
Devo 16
Colourfield 15
Replacements 14
Several 13

[quote][i]Originally posted by coop41[/i]
<br>Several 13
[/quote]
They were great...but not really new wave.

Top 50
Depeche Mode 55
The Beautiful South 45
New Order 44
The Smiths 43
Morrissey 43
The Cure 37
Echo & The Bunnymen 36
The Fall 35
Prefab Sprout 34
The The 33
Thompson Twins 29
Gene 29
R.E.M. 28
The Jam 27
The Chameleons 27
China Crisis 27
The Church 26
A Flock of Seagulls 26
Duran Duran 26
The Psychedelic Furs 24
Tears For Fears 24
James 23
Interpol 23
XTC 22
Ultravox 21
The Fixx 21
ABC 21
Placebo 21
Culture Club 21
Aztec Camera 21
Mercury Rev 20
Cocteau Twins 20
Belle & Sebastian 20
U2 19
Spandau Ballet 19
Heaven 17 19
Soft Cell 18
New Model Army 18
The Stone Roses 17
The Human League 17
The Alarm 17
Talk Talk 17
Madness 17
The Boo Radleys 16
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark 16
Men At Work 16

Interesting that there are several bands that I'm not really keen on, but they seem to show up on a lot of my compilations....

BTW - I found out my version of Excel has a remove duplicates feature [:)]

<font size="1">[b]Favorites of 2008 (so far):[/b]
Beach House - Devotion
British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
Crystal Stilts - Crystal Stilts

</font>

I couldn't tell you numbers, but my Waylon Jennings vinyl outnumbers my entire Motorhead collection.

[quote][i]Originally posted by SwampThing[/i]
<br>
The Beautiful South 45
Prefab Sprout 34
James 23
Aztec Camera 21
Belle & Sebastian 20
The Boo Radleys 16
[/quote]
Such the popmeister Swampy!

I don't have everything cataloged, but it goes something like:

Coil
Melvins
Controlled Bleeding
Sonic Youth
Depeche Mode
Foetus

w/ The Fall, Mike Patton, Legendary Pink Dots, Swans and The Church not too far behind.