The 100 Best Prog Rock Albums Of All Time According To Rate Your Music

By Diego Camargo

Rate Your Music (or RYM) is an online collaborative metadata database of musical and non-musical releases and films which can be cataloged, rated and reviewed by users.

Two years ago exactly we posted a series of lists named 'The 100 Best Prog Rock Albums Of All Time According To Rate Your Music' and our views went through the roof. Till this very day these posts have our highest page views.
When I first posted those Lists my intention was revisit them one year later. Because of many different things that wasn't posible so I decided to revisit it now, 2 years later.

This was the explanation about RYM from the first lists, because nothing really drastically changed, I decided to include the same text here too:

The main idea of Rate Your Music is to allow the users to add albums, EPs, singles, videos and bootlegs to the database and to rate them. The rating system uses a scale of minimum a half-star (or 0.5 points) to maximum five stars (or 5 points). In this manner, Rate Your Music bears resemblance to a Wiki, as all of the databases content is generated jointly by the registered user community (artists, releases, biographies, etc); however, the majority of new, edited content must be approved by a moderator to prevent virtual vandalism.

They have a massive amount of users and RYM's charts are the most faithfull I've seen and far away from being biased or snob in any kind. They also have a very efficient tool that doesn't count users that are not present in the website for a long time or users that are too new. They also control very well users that rate too many records with 0,5 stars or too many 5 stars, which controls the whole system very well.

Almost all the albums have more than 1.000 ratings which makes this list very solid, and differently than Progarchives, for exemple, reviews doesn't have any weight, so albums that are not reviewed don't get lost along the way, which is a better way of doing things. To understand how they calculate their ratings please take a look HERE.

More info about RYM on Wikipedia HERE, or create your own profile and start using the website HERE.

I'll divide this article into parts, 15 albums each, and in the final the top 10. I'll also put a song of each album that's considered to be their best or simply my favorite ones.

PS. Of course that every day that goes by the ratings change a bit, but the overall result will take some time to change. Maybe in one year I'll re-visit this list and update it.

Here's the links to all other parts:
PART 1 / PART 2 / PART 3 / PART 4 / PART 5 / PART 6 / FINAL

So, here it is the the first part:

100. Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)