Pazz & Jop

Pazz & Jop is an annual poll of musical releases compiled by American newspaper The Village Voice. The poll is tabulated from the submitted year-end top ten lists of hundreds of music critics. Pazz & Jop was introduced by The Village Voice in 1974 as an album-only poll, but was expanded to include votes for singles in 1979. Throughout the years, other minor lists have been elicited from poll respondents for releases such as extended plays, music videos, album re-issues, and compilation albums—all of which have since been discontinued. The Pazz & Jop albums poll utilizes a points system in formulating list rankings. Participating critics assign a number value, ranging from five to thirty, to each of the albums on their top ten list, with all ten albums totaling one-hundred points. Singles lists, however, have always been unweighted.