In an age that provides too much entertainment choice, end-of-year lists are more important than ever

Around this time, virtually every culture desk at every publication around the world begins compiling the dreaded end-of-year lists. I say dreaded because often they can feel like a chore on top of everything else you have to do before the year is out. They’re such a big thing that some publications actually make lists of the best end-of-year-lists, which seems ever so slightly over the top.

Working on our “of the decade” lists, however, has made me think about how the way we consume culture has changed in the past 10 years. When Adele’s 21 was released in 2011, for instance, Spotify’s logo was still that awful shade of lime green and the service had only just launched in the US. Netflix had taken a large dose of criticism after its chief executive, Reed Hastings, hiked the service’s prices and lost 800,000 subscribers as a result, and it would be a while before it recovered and became the entertainment behemoth that it is today.

As for me: I went to the cinema regularly with friends, I bought CDs, I watched regular scheduled television, and I listened to whatever chart hits were being pumped out of the car radio because Bluetooth was limited to hands-free.

Now it’s as though there’s almost too much culture. We’re drowning in it. Every morning a hundred emails land in my inbox announcing a new single, a new artist, a new album. Netflix unveils plans for a new show practically every week, and there are more TV shows on my Netflix and NowTV accounts than I could ever want to watch in a lifetime. When you’re writing about this every day, for hours at a time, you start to wonder if you can even tell the difference between what’s good and bad anymore. I imagine readers feel the same.

So while the end-of-year list is nothing new, it’s now, in 2019, that they seem most useful. Compiling them involves many a drawn-out discussion, where our writers and contributors get together and talk about what we loved the most this year and why. We go back over all of the reviews we’ve published and ask ourselves whether our opinions have changed now we’ve had longer to consider that film or this album. And when the lists are published, (hopefully) there are readers out there who will see something they like the look of, and maybe even discover a new favourite.

Yours,

Roisin O’Connor

Music correspondent