Last year we finally took the step of doing the thing that so many other websites do this time of year in asking our dear readership their thoughts on the best music of the year. It went pretty well!
So we’re doing it again! From today through the end of 2021, you can vote in this year’s poll, embedded in the Google Form below. This year’s poll track very closely with last year’s, mostly because it seemed to go over well. There are some new questions at the end with some overlap. Whereas last year I was interested mostly in questions related to Covid as well as gathering feedback on changes to the site we had made, this year I am more concerned about the ideas of mental health and community.
It’s no secret that many of us here have struggled with and continue to struggle with a myriad of mental health issues, and in my experience the best way to deal with a lot of it starts with feeling comfortable talking openly about it. That is a large part of what we have attempted to achieve with our Facebook community group (and to a lesser extent with our Discord group, which we’re working on!). But I want us to be able to go further and build out our community and support network to include more people who might be in need of it. I’m interested in knowing what the idea of “virtual community” means to you and how we can do a better job in fostering it (within reason).
That’s pretty much it. Once again, I have included the voting instructions on album name formatting so this actually works. I’ll do my best to catch inconsistencies with that stuff, but if you misspell anything or format it weirdly I can’t guarantee it’ll end up counting.
PLEASE READ THE BELOW INFORMATION BEFORE CONTINUING
In order for your entries to count, you MUST do the following when entering albums:
1) Spell both the artist and album “correctly,” meaning as listed by the band. This includes any capitalizations and punctuations.
2) Enter fields as such: Band – Album
Use a hyphen separated by one space on each side to separate the band and album.
3) Enter ALL fields for a section. The only required sections are the below question to ensure you read this and the next 2021 AOTY section, where you will need to enter 10 albums. Everything else is optional, but if you decide to enter any albums for those sections, PLEASE FILL OUT THE AVAILABLE NUMBER OF ALBUM SLOTS (i.e. 5 for genre-specific sections).