SPIN hit a milestone this year: our 30th birthday. To celebrate, we caught up with some of the artists behind our past picks for Album of the Year, held a readers' poll, reminisced with former staffers, and now, we've ranked the 300 best albums of the past 30 years.
Drawing on ballots from more than a dozen contributors, the editors whittled a roster of just under 1,000 nominees to a list of undisputed masterpieces, longtime pleasures, and new favorites — all of them classics (well, according to us).
Before we get started, some ground rules: To prevent certain artists from having a stranglehold on the countdown (Radiohead and Kanye West come to mind immediately), we decided that no single act could have more than three entries on the list; studio albums were eligible, of course, as were EPs and live albums; compilations qualified only if the songs featured were most closely associated with said collection.
