RANKING DOCUMENT IS LINKED HERE. It is also linked below with more information. Please do not engage in fan-war behavior, I’m not trying to be controversial or toxic here; I’m just a nerd who likes ranking things.
This post is the second in a series; the first, extremely-poorly-formatted one can be found here. As was stated in the first post, this post series was inspired by (ripped off) a similar post series by u/GripenHater (hereafter referred to as OOP), the YG equivalent of which can be found here. I will be changing my formatting in this post, since it went so poorly the first time. Instead of copy-pasting a spreadsheet into Reddit and hoping things look remotely presentable, I’m just going to start with linking the ranking document here and having the breakdown and methodology explanation below. So please click on the bolded link above or at the top to see the actual ranking, and then come back here to yell at me for being insane and putting [Song 1] above/below [Song 2] and that I must be smoking crack rock by the ton. There is no true TL;DR outside of the ranking document itself because I’m horrible at summarizing and I tend to be overly verbose and explain too much, as you will inevitably see.
First, how to read the spreadsheet. The very left side of the sheet has a list of which groups I included and how many songs I have included. Directly underneath that is a small cheat sheet of how I rated songs. Put simply, I assigned a value from 1-10 rounded to the first decimal place (e.g. 7.2) where a 1 is the worst and a 10 is the best. This somewhat belies my slightly atypical rating structure. The main section of the spreadsheet has all the songs ranked* worst to first. However, note the asterisk. My formatting is going to be a little different than normal rating posts (including OOP’s, though I am stealing from them a little) in that the actual numerical values of the rankings are virtually meaningless, as I will not be directly ordering most of the songs. Instead, I am treating this more like a highly divided tier list, with divisions at each decimal. So while I am not ranking the 7.2s, any 7.2 will automatically rank higher than a 7.1 and lower than a 7.3. I think this is enough of a differentiation to create a general feel for a true ranking. Within tiers, songs will be arranged alphabetically by title, as that’s how I had them arranged before I sorted them by rating. With that said, I am properly ordering all songs with a 9+ rating. In other words, only pay attention to the rating value (e.g. 7.2) instead of the ranking number (e.g. #325) until the 9s. Once again, the only times the left-most column is actually important is on any song with a 9+ rating; otherwise, I am just letting the colored box speak for it. A semi-complete data summary of the average scores of both the company and individual groups, as well as their standard deviations (basically, how much does an individual score usually vary from the average) is at the bottom of the list, after first place. Additionally, if you want to compare directly, I left the tab with the SM rankings attached at the bottom, though it has not been updated since the previous post with any new songs or different rankings as I have revisited some of the songs.
Anyway, onto the methodology. For the actual ranking process, the YG ranking was significantly less stressful than the SM one. The YG dungeon has one advantage, and that is that this ranking was so much shorter than the last post because the entire discographies of multiple groups totals to two TVXQ!’s (I’m being literal on that; TVXQ! is up to like 98 title tracks, and 2 x 98 = 196, which is one fewer songs than I had to rank for YG). As with the SM post, I got the list of title tracks from the Wikipedia articles about each group, including everything that was classified as a “single.” Some groups may have had additional tracks included (Babymonster is the most notable of these) due to the prominence of particular b-sides; basically, if the b-side had a music video, was promoted on music shows, and is colloquially treated as a title track, I probably included it. As for figuring out which groups to include, I added all idol groups that debuted under YG or The Black Label (because it added like twelve songs and TBL is treated like an arm of YG). This means that Epik High, who both did not debut under YG and is not an idol group, was not included in my list, nor are other groups who did not meet both qualifications. The singular exception to this is Big Mama, who is not an idol group, but is a group who debuted under YG that I wanted to shout out because I love their music. I also did not include soloists, so Lee Hi and the like are also excluded from the list. A full list of groups and number of songs included is on the ranking document in the top left.
In summary, YG’s overall production is supremely low, especially in comparison to SM, but the quality control is still there. I know the goal of YG was to let the songs come to them, rather than chase songs just to have regular comebacks, and that methodology did result in a pretty high average. However, at least for me, this was heavily carried by three or four mostly self-composed groups: BigBang, iKon, AKMU, and Big Mama. And while the average was pretty high, it often felt like I knew about what ranking each song was going to get entirely based on who was making the song. This consistency is sometimes good, but if it means that mid groups always make mid songs, that isn’t a good thing. And I don’t know how to say it, but this ranking felt sauceless when compared to SM. While I tried to keep the rating consistent across labels, I got the feeling as I was rating that I was really harsh on SM fairly consistently to try and keep the average lower. I do not believe I held true to that commitment by the end of my SM ranking and it is in this more lenient state that I rated YG. So it’s possible YG’s numbers are a little inflated in comparison to SM. To be entirely fair to YG, I’m not a huge fan of the YG sound, which they remain remarkably consistent to, while I know others are. This almost certainly had an effect on my feelings about this whole affair. Obviously my tastes are my own and are not some objective truth about music (no matter how much I may act otherwise), so I fully expect others to disagree with this conclusion. Anyway, I hope people can at least appreciate the effort, even if you disagree with my takes. Please let me know what you think in the comments. I’m sure I missed some details in my explanations, so if you have questions, feel free to ask.
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