Music News

Sorry, Bieliebers: Bieber tops list of worst music of the century (so far)

Once the numbers were crunched and the data analyzed, it seems that “My World” wasn’t worth sharing. 

The 2009 release from Justin Bieber has been crowned the worst album of the century so far, with his second album, “My World 2.0” a year later coming in second. 

Using 90,000 reviews posted on Metacritic, the crew over at TopRatedCasinos analyzed reviews, comments and other data to determine the worst music of all time, if “all time” constitutes the 21st Century so far. 

“From the rise of Maroon 5 to the children’s hit-turned-notorious-earworm ‘Baby Shark,’ the music scene of the past 20 years certainly has a lot to answer for,” the analysis team says. “But is it possible to determine the line between tunes that might get on our nerves a little, and those that are just plain bad?”

According to this data, Biebs tops the worst albums list for the past century, in the top two slots, followed by Chance the Rapper’s “The Big Day,” Logic’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Scorpion” from Drake, “Father of All Motherfuckers” from Green Day, “Tha Carter IV” from Lil Wayne, “Divide” from Ed Sheeran, “Honestly Nevermind” from Drake and “Red Pill Blues” from Maroon 5 rounding out the top 10. 

For what it’s worth, based on data collected and analyzed, 2012 has been the worst year for music in the past 100. This is the year that gave us both “Whistle” from Flo Rida and “Gangnam Style.” Coming in second was 2007, followed by 2013 and 2011, tied for third worst years for music, then 2006, 2008, 2015, 2009, 2017 and 2014 to round out the top 10. 

As for the worst genre of the past century, pop/rock takes the spoiled and crumbly cake. That’s right, the genre that gave us some of the greatest and most important and powerful songs of several generations’ worth of childhoods…the Beatles!!!….basically sucked the life out of the party after the ‘60s and ‘70s. Probably the ‘80s too. Why and how did pop/rock fail? Looking at you, Maroon 5. As for the rest of the top 10 worst genres, rap comes in second, followed by regular ol’ rock, then pop, grunge, indie, Britpop, electronic, dance and….country.
How was all this determined? 

“TopRatedCasinos.co.uk scraped Metacritic for all album reviews from the years 2000-2022, including the artist, release year, genre and user reviews. Results were grouped into albums, genres and years, separately. 

“A list of negative words was obtained from the most common bad reviews and from it was derived a count of how many appear in reviews. The portion of user reviews that are negative was calculated…The final score is based on the overall user score and the percent ranks of the proportion of negative user reviews, proportion of negative words in reviews. The worst album/artists/genres/years were determined by the lowest score out of 10.”

Amber Healy

I write about music policy and lawsuits because they're endlessly fascinating.

Amber Healy has 517 posts and counting. See all posts by Amber Healy

Let us know what you think!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.