How to read Best of Month, for Redditors!

 Hello! If you’ve come to any of the four Best of Month posts from Reddit you’ve hopefully found your way here. I figured for this exact occasion having a link at the top of an article was most in Reddit’s spirit.

Most of AsterTracks traffic is through Reddit, yet its users are the ones who understand the point of this blog the least! So, ahead of any year-end festivities I wanted to write you a little explanation to how December will go down before you leave any unnecessary comments.

“This isn’t an explanation of why this is on your year end list, OP.”

Actually, yes, it is.

I got this comment a lot last year and I think what a lot of you meant was it wasn’t a review or explanation of why that record was present over something else. This was our most active year in terms of actual reviews. In fact, we reviewed around one-hundred records this year! And those are just the ones we posted! That’s quite a bit for a team of two!

That being said, Best of Month is where I, Claudia, the sole writer by the way, get a little personal. These records were a part of my year, art is supposed to make you feel something so I’m going to write about stuff that impacted me on a personal level. If you want to know how I feel about the record critically, don’t worry, we’ll provide a link where you can do just that.

“[Artist] isn’t [genre.]” “r/lostredditor” etc.

This is our most frequent comment and something I usually just clown around about in the replies. So, here’s your official response from both of us.

Yes. Artist is genre. We are not lost.

A lot of you like to point out how I’ve been caught saying “genre is fake,” which is true. But what I mean by that is genre is what you make it. To let you peek past the curtain a bit, our selection process is pretty basic. We go to RateYourMusic and look at the genre tags for the record (not artists, because artists change, believe it or not.) and discuss between each other what we feel fits or does not. Sometimes there’s nothing or not enough to go off of so we have to wing it. Some of these inoffensive calls have made some Redditors very upset, but it’s often clear they haven’t actually heard the album in question. Also, keep in mind, these are calls based on the record, not the artists. Is Kesha an ambient artist? No! Is her new record ambient? Yes! Is Paramore a post-punk band? No! Is their new record a post-punk record? You get the idea.

We’ve actually never gotten a complaint like this for a male led project, I wonder why that is?

Anyway! Now that you’re here we hope you enjoy Best of Month! We put a lot of work into it, like every year, so I hope you discover something you didn’t know about, get something out of this, or just enjoy the ride!