After weeks of listing our choices for the music that defined our year in music, we figured that just before the new year, we should let our readers get the final say. So, with two and a half weeks of voting and many thousands of ballots cast, you have chosen your collective favorite songs and albums of 2016 — and the results are finally in.
For album of the year, your choice was as clear as it was for us here on staff: Beyonce’s Lemonade, which easily dwarfed the competition, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the overall vote on its own. Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper‘s Coloring Book and The 1975‘s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it all put up worthy fights as runners-up, but were ultimately no match for the Queen.
For song of the year, you were a little more conflicted, with Ariana Grande‘s “Into You” and Rihanna‘s “Needed Me” both putting up valiant campaigns that might’ve taken top honors in a lesser year. But no surprise that the Harmonizers came out in full force to elect Fifth Harmony ‘s “Work From Home” — the group’s biggest hit in their original incarnation — as the overall champion, claiming 18.8 percent of the final vote. (Rae Sremmurd?’s “Black Beatles,” our own choice for No. 1, attracted less than 1 percent of the vote.)
Thanks for voting in our year-end polls, and here’s to even tighter (and more star-studded) races to come in 2017!
