Entry Form
The link to the entry form needed for your entry can be found under the Completing Your Entry section a little further down this page. BUT before heading straight there, please ensure you read all of the information contained on this page. Some is just guidance but some sections are rules that you'll need to be aware of to ensure your submission is valid.
Eligibility
This is an invitation only exercise, where we seek submissions from established and regular customers, supporters of the shop and other people we have asked to take part due to their involvement in the world of new music (people in the industry, and so on). Please do not share the link.
Submissions Guidelines [IMPORTANT]
1. You can submit either a Top 20 or Top 10 albums of the year, depending on which you feel is a more confident list. The minimum requirement for your entry to count is a Top 10
2. A Top 20 is great. But a solid Top 10 is preferred to an unsure Top 20. I.e. if you feel like you’re just “making up the numbers”, 10 is better than 20.
3. The same is true of a Top 10. If you're struggling for 10, it might be better to bow out of the exercise for this year.
4. It's either a Top 10 or a Top 20. Any number in between is an invalid entry.
5. IMPORTANT. Please note the below requirements for any entry that you include:
a. A nominated album must have been released between December 2nd 2023 - December 1st 2024. Please double check before submitting if you’re not sure.
b. Albums must be new music. No reissues, best-ofs, live albums or compilations allowed
c. No EP’s or singles allowed
d. So-called “mini albums” (at least 7 tracks) are allowed
Scoring
Happily you don’t need to do anything whatsoever regarding scoring - we take care of that. But you might be interested to know how it works all the same. Points are awarded for each position in your Top 20/10, as follows:
Bonus Points
Additional points are awarded for recurring entries.
For example, Album X appears in someone’s Top 5. That same album then appears in someone else’s Top 5. For this, the album receives 2 bonus points. It will subsequently receive 2 bonus points every time it appears in another person’s Top 5.
If Album X appears in someone’s Top 10 and then that same album appears in someone else’s Top 10, the album receives 1 bonus point. It will subsequently receive 1 bonus point every time it appears in another person’s Top 10.
Lost Points
If someone includes an album in their Top 20 that no other participant nominates by the end of the voting, the points for that nomination are halved. For example, Person A submits Album X as their 1st favourite album. By default, the album receives 40 points. When all votes are counted, no one else has submitted Album X in their Top 20. Album X loses half its points, reducing to a total of 20 points.
This is to counterbalance what would be an over-inflated appearance of that album as a best-of-the-year album. Continuing the example, Album X is nominated just once - as above - and receives a total of 40 points. A different album, Album Y, is nominated a total of 5 times across the board by 5 different people, in positions 8, 12, 15, 18, 20. It accumulates a total of 38 points. With the frequency of nomination for Album Y, it is fair to assume it is objectively the more popular album as a group. Therefore reducing points on single nomination albums levels out that imbalance.
Completing Your Entry
Head to this link to start completing your entry:
https://form.jotform.com/243094909821361
To complete the online form, you need to add the ARTIST and ALBUM TITLE in the empty fields.
Some guidance for completing your list:
1. Have a good think about it. There’s no rush; the deadline is a few weeks away
2. Please ensure both the Artist and Title are correct and in full. If we can’t easily decipher who or what you mean, it might well be scrapped.
Click on the submit link when you’re done. Note that once it’s submitted, that’s it. No going back.
Deadline
The deadline for submissions is Sunday, December 1st. Due to getting the final results ready we cannot allow any stray from that so any results not in by then will not count. The results will be revealed at our live event on Thursday, December 12th. At the time of writing we are still working out how to manage the countdown on social media this year.
Tickets
Tickets to the live countdown are available in-store at Record Culture. This year tickets are not available via our website but tickets can be temporarily reserved so that you can secure them and collect/pay at your leisure.
Thank you
That's it! Thanks to everyone who takes part and for supporting us through another year x