Colophon
Credits, rights, and what isn't here.
This site publishes a personal journal about other people's records. Below is who owns what, where the surrounding material came from, and what has deliberately been left out.
What's mine
The journal text, later commentary, and design of this site are © 2013–2026 Alan Vaughn. All rights reserved.
Quote a line with attribution and a link if it is useful to you. Please ask before republishing an entry in full.
The list
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time is Rolling Stone's editorial work, and "Rolling Stone" is its trademark.
This site is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Rolling Stone or its publisher. It is not a republication of the list. It is a personal record of listening through one edition of it, entry by entry, and the commentary is the point.
The ranking used here is the 2012-updated edition. It was taken from the annotated Genius transcription and checked against the listing on rollingstone.com. Album titles, artists, and years come from that canonical list rather than from my 2013 typing, which is why they are correct even where my notes were sloppy.
Cover art
Album cover artwork is © its respective copyright owner.
The site references images served by the Cover Art Archive rather than maintaining its own collection of cover files. Release identification comes from MusicBrainz.
Covers are shown at thumbnail size in connection with personal commentary and criticism. No ownership, license, or endorsement is claimed or implied.
The Cover Art Archive does not license the archived artwork. The images remain the property of their respective owners, and their appearance here should not be treated as permission to reuse them.
Metadata
Release identities, editions, track listings, and running times come from MusicBrainz, whose core data is released into the public domain. The credit is a courtesy rather than an obligation, and is gladly given.
Privacy and redaction
Names have been changed or removed. Friends and family appear throughout the original notes. They did not ask to be on a website, so the published text is redacted.
The unredacted originals are not published anywhere on this site.
Gaps and unfinished work
Only part of the countdown has been published so far. The published entries currently run from #500 through #481, and more is added a band at a time.
Ten albums have no journal entry: #11, #23, #38, #177, #178, #179, #180, #377, #398, and #500. Those entries were never written in 2013. That was confirmed against the canonical list; they were not lost during reconstruction.
The project itself was never finished. The 2013 journal runs from #500 into the low 90s and stops there. There is no entry for #1 because I never wrote one.
Editorial method
The prose is published as written in 2013: typos, bad calls, and all.
Where a note had been attached to the wrong album, its attribution has been corrected and the correction recorded. The writing itself has not been tidied up.
How it was rebuilt
The journal survived as a single self-addressed email thread, with each reply quoting the entire thread beneath it.
Reconstructing a clean copy meant isolating only the new text at the top of each message. Dates, running times, and album identities were added afterward from the sources described above.
Site privacy
This is a static site. It has no analytics, cookies, trackers, or accounts, and I do not log what visitors do here.
Cover images are requested from the Cover Art Archive by your browser, so those requests are visible to that service.
Contact
If you own something published here and would like it removed or credited differently, email me and I will take care of it — no lawyer required.