{"id":596,"date":"2025-03-13T16:07:28","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T16:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/?page_id=596"},"modified":"2025-03-13T16:13:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T16:13:06","slug":"ranking","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/ranking\/","title":{"rendered":"Ranking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I started this exercise (as a Bluesky thread<\/a>) I already knew that Ranking the Beatles’ songs was not a very realistic thing to attempt. In several places in the original thread, and here on the blog site, I have explained some of the issues and why I still carried it out, but in essence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ranking songs<\/a> or any kind of art is not just difficult, it\u2019s crazy. The whole point is to make something unique and original. To rank them is to miss that point. <\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still it\u2019s useful to deal with things one at a time and the ordering creates a bit of mystery and tension.<\/mark><\/strong> (Bluesky thread, November 2024)<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So I decided to rank the songs – it will be more interesting than a random sequence. But as I know, deep down, that any ranking is inherently flawed, I have not attempted to optimize the scheme for accuracy; it’s just a preliminary practical step to sorting the songs so that they can be considered one at a time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a bit nerdy and for various reasons (for example, choosing songs to cover or learn for an open mic) I’d already set up a spreadsheet with all the Beatles’ songs and various ratings in it. It was a pretty crude way to identify what I liked about different songs, and includes things like “lyrics”, “melody”, “performance” and optional bonus points for things like “bass” and “harmonies”. I later<\/a> added in some old MP3 “star” ratings I’d used to help choose songs for playlists. Then I came up with a very crude way to combine the points into an overall score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results do give some kind of rough ordering, but don’t even reflect my own taste very accurately, never mind representing an objective evaluation of the merit of each song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some other pages where I talk about ranking if you are still interested:<\/p>\n\n\n\n