Well, here we are, last throes of listmas and just time to publish the annual Kyan Festive 50. It’s been a great year for music, bring on 2010.

So, without further ado here are some of the tunes/tracks/jams (delete as per your sensibilitites) that have gained heavy rotation on the office jukebox over the last year.

In some, but no particular, order …

Read on...

I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!

Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…

“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”

We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.

It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.

Like any office there are a wide variety of musical tastes represented amongst us here at Kyan.

Through our communal jukebox these tastes come together to form a musical backdrop to our time spent working in the office.

A few months back we created a last.fm account, hooked up the Jukebox with the last.fm api and now we are recording a full history of our playlist with some 10,000+ tracks ‘scrobbled’ so far.

Here’s the top 5 artists we’ve been playing the last few months…
1. Lone
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3. Florence + The Machine
4. Little Dragon
5. Gorillaz

Our current top 5 artists of all time are…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2. Lone
3. Mr Scruff
4. The Beatles
5. Röyksopp

That top 5 artists list changes quite regularly, but it’s an interesting snapshot.

Those artists have certainly been helping us drown out the constant drilling from the building work going on over the road from us on Guildford High Street.