The Great Box Set Project

Ever wonder what musical legend is truly the best? How would you even go about the task of determining something like that? One way to do it is to create an ideal box set for each of the legends. This box set, which exists only in concept, consists of four hours of the artist's best recordings, culled from his/her/its entire catalog. Once this has been done, the average grade of each box set can be compared. This method of comparison allows career inconsistency. That is, mediocre (or even bad) recordings that don't make the ideal box set are not held against it.

The Beatles catalog is unavailable via sound samples at allmusic.com, but fans have placed the entire catalog on YouTube.

  1. 99.3 Duke Ellington
  2. 97.9 James Brown
  3. 97.3 Mississippi John Hurt
  4. 97.2 Elvis Presley
  5. 96.8 The Rolling Stones
  6. 96.2 The Beatles
  7. 95.6 The Kinks
  8. 95.5 Bob Dylan
  9. 95.4 The Clash
  10. 95.3 Classic Motown (1959 to 1971)
  11. 95.0 Otis Redding
  12. 94.9 Brenda Lee
  13. 94.8 The Who
  14. 94.1 Neil Young
  15. 92.6 Nirvana
  16. 91.8 Bruce Springsteen
  17. 91.5 Frank Sinatra
  18. 91.5 Aretha Franklin
  19. 90.3 The Beach Boys

I've also graded the standard set of rock 'n' roll oldies.
The list is here.