It was more complicated than I expected to determine the Top Yacht Rock artists. My first thought was to simply average the Yachtski score all of a particular artist's songs and choose the top 10, 15, 20, whatever. But then I realized this method didn't factor in the number of songs by an artist had that had been classified as Nyacht Rock. It also didn't account for an artist's contributions to other artists' songs. So I devised a system to account for that, as well as total number of YR songs and essentials. Like the Yachtski Scale, it provides a score out of 100. If an artist is above 50 they are classified as Yacht Rock. The higher they are above 50, the more YR they are. That's how I ended up with 16 artists, instead of the more traditional multiple of 5. (If I had rounded up to 20, the remaining four would have been Nielsen/Pearson, Ray Parker, Jr., Robbie Dupree, and Bobby Caldwell, but all fell just below the 50% threshold). * Something that strikes me as...
I've wanted to write about Yacht Rock for awhile now, but I was spurred into action by a 2024 Paste article that the site recently re-shared in it's daily newsletter. When I saw the title "The 25 Greatest Yacht Rock Songs of All Time," I clicked on it without delay. Then, with growing dismay I scanned through the author's choices. At that time I wasn't terribly well-versed with the Yachtski Scale, but I knew enough to know that something was wrong. I don't want to dwell too much on this, but the author of that piece, like so many others, had expanded the definition of YR much too far, egregiously so. Of the 25 songs listed, only 9 were designated as YR on the Yachtski Scale, and only 3 of those 9 were on the essentials list. Thirteen of the remaining were scored as Nyacht Rock, and three weren't even considered. As a reminder: Here are the general parameters for a YR song: High or "clean" production values Jazz and R&B influences Use o...