If you follow music news at all, you probably understand the excitement of December as end-of-year list season, a month where outlets like NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, MTV and countless others give their writers’ ranking of the definitive songs of last year.

Sure, I look at these lists for validation to some degree. It’s nice seeing an album you have at the top of your personal rankings hitting a similar spot on your favorite music site’s list too.

But what I really love about end-of-the-year lists is that they give great recommendations for album listens. That’s what they’re meant for, after all.

These lists cause far more controversy than they’re worth sometimes. More cynical music fans (something I might be once in a while) argue that these end-of-year lists only serve for listeners to validate their own tastes by comparing them to so-called “experts” at their favorite music publications.

At the end of the day, music publications serve the interests of their readers. Take Rolling Stone: they know a good portion of their readership is middle-aged, so they felt safe putting U2, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen’s newest releases near the top of their 2014 Best Albums list. Sites like Pitchfork whose audience veers younger than Rolling Stone put trendier, newly established artists like Run the Jewels and FKA twigs at the top of their list that same year.

Music discovery isn’t some beautiful organic process like people like to idealize. I don’t randomly run into new music through some meticulous hunt through a record store for a cutting-edge electro-psychedelic rock album. I see big publications I follow talking about new music, and if it looks appealing enough to me, I’ll give it a listen.

As closely as I follow music news, great albums fly over my radar more often than I’d ever admit. The album “Have You in My Wilderness” by Julia Holter, which I entirely missed when it came out this past September, ranked highly on some early end-of-year lists. So I was motivated to check it out, and I was almost instantly captivated. Moments like these — when you find an album that just clicks — are the kind that these rankings help you to reach.

Just because these publications give you their own opinions shouldn’t mean you can’t make your own contrasting ones. As obvious as it might sound, it’s not wrong to like something that other people don’t like (or vice versa). As well as your preferences might match up with your favorite music site, don’t feel obligated to tell everyone you love an album you don’t.

Your tastes are your tastes, not some music blogger’s — but that doesn’t mean you can’t take some inspiration from the so-called experts on your own personal rankings. One of the biggest things people look for in these outlets is the opportunity to discover music they’d never otherwise see, and these lists are the purest form of this purpose. With all the information and music coverage we run into every week, month and year, it’s easy to miss out on a great release.

Besides seeing how well your favorite albums did in a retrospective view, discovering a new favorite album or two is one of the best experiences you can get from all the end-of-year hubbub. (But self-validation never gets old, of course.)

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. He can be reached by email at bweisers@syr.edu or by Twitter at @brettws.

Published on December 1, 2015 at 8:14 pm