The vote is open again
This site is the relaunch; eleven years after the original voting site started.
Alongside the archive: https://vote.user18081971.com/. Same idea as the 2014-2019 site: vote your top 30, optionally mark “loved” and “can’t get into”, with additional tracks since posted on user18081971’s SoundCloud pulled in. The historical results are frozen in /results and /explore; the new instance is a fresh ballot. Eleven years and a stack of official releases later, do the picks shift?
If you voted in 2015, vote again. If you didn’t, now’s the chance; let’s see if the preferences have shifted.
The reveal
The hidden polls were meant to come out from behind the curtain when the compilation shipped. That was the original plan:
The compilation didn’t happen, and the hidden data sat in the admin database for years, visible only to me and Richard. The reveal that should have happened then is, more or less, this archive: the hidden counts now sit alongside the public counts for every track, ten years late.
Why have I done this
Every so often I notice a thread on Reddit, or someone posting on WATMM or keyosc asking about the voting site. Posts about tracks from the dump are still regular, and it was always my intention to publicise the results.
And I find myself unexpectedly with time to do it. After an intense stretch as a software engineering manager I find myself again, out of work, and recovering from major shoulder surgery. Between both they’ve given me something I haven’t had in a long while: a clear stretch of unscheduled time, with a body that’s mostly only good for sitting at a computer.
It’s a bit déjà-vu given the situation that enabled the original site. The 2014/15 version got built because I was between roles, figuring out my next steps. The recurrence reads, eleven years on, as a slightly grim joke about how I get this kind of work done, only when life’s cleared the calendar for me.
What the explorer is for
I didn’t want to write a four-years-of-voting blog post and call that the archive; there’s a lot of interesting parts of this journey which don’t seem to be known. Most of what’s interesting about the dataset isn’t a paragraph, it’s a sortable table. The explorer (/explore) does that work: sort by top-30, loved, not-loved, upload date; pull up an individual track and see its vote history; flip between the public view and the full reveal that includes the hidden polls. The chapters wrap the dataset, not the other way round. I’m particularly excited to bring in new votes a decade later, and see how they compare to the original preferences.
A note on the messages from Richard
The DMs from Richard quoted throughout this archive were private when sent; he did indicate a number of messages could be shared, but I’ve still had to make a judgement call on some of it. The call I’ve made is that the campaign and the dump are now over a decade old, water has long gone under the bridge, and I’ve not shared all messages. If I have made any wrong calls here, I apologise.
Takedown and corrections
The site is anonymised at the data layer; there’s no ranked-by-username view here, no “who voted for what”, only the partial list of some people who have signed up. If you find something on the site you’d rather wasn’t, or something you think is wrong, or a link that’s broken or pointing somewhere it shouldn’t, the contact route is on the /about page. I’m reachable at ryan.verner@user18081971.com and any track-level reference can be removed on request.
The notable-signups list in “Who showed up” identifies a few hundred 2015-era voting-site accounts by name, with links out to the public artist/discogs/personal pages they already maintain. I have made the judgement that being a closet Aphex fan isn’t a thing, but if you’re here and you don’t want to be: again, I apologise; contact me and I will remove the entry.
The chapters aren’t finished
There are still pieces of this story I haven’t verified from primary sources: exact dates that depend on a Wayback snapshot I haven’t found, attributions to forum users whose handles I half-remember, and my recollection of a number of events. If you were on WATMM in 2015, if you voted, if you have a snapshot or a screenshot or a forum post I’ve described from memory, get in touch via the /about page.
What this is, in the end
A frozen archive of a four-year fan-voting campaign for an unreleased SoundCloud dump, plus a fresh ballot that brings later user18081971 uploads into the same voting frame. 123,779 historical vote-events. 268 tracks in the original archive. One database export.
And, to be direct: I really really really would love to see a vinyl release of this material. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but I hope it does, and I hope this site might help it happen.
If you’ve not listened to the tracks in a long time, I encourage you to go to the results page and hit play. The catalogue is full of gems.
The fans never stopped wanting them on a record.
Voting’s open again. Thanks for reading.
xf, May 2026