Once year-end suggested some sort of critical consensus. If you read enough of them, you knew the three or four albums that you really needed to hear. As the musical marketplace fragmented—each addressed by its own media—year-end lists have come to seem more and more like a series of stand-alone pronouncements with little relationship or overlap.

Rather than buck the trend, we embraced the chaos and threw the doors open wider. Why limit year-end lists our cit...