We love to pick apart our ranking in the multitude of lists on which our fair city appears. A new one came out today: StubHub, the online ticket marketplace, has compiled a list of the 20 “Most Rockin’” cities in America for 2008, based on summer ticket sales. Out of 90 cities in the ticket sellers’ database, D.C. came in 18th. Not too bad, we suppose, and all the cities that came in ahead of us are pretty major markets. With the exception, perhaps, of Richmond, of which the story has this to say:

Richmond, Virginia took the biggest leap in this year’s rankings moving up from number 17 in 2007 to number 9 in 2008. The live concert ticket market in the area was bolstered by performances from Jimmy Buffett, Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen, Jonas Brothers and Dave Matthews Band — the majority of which took place at Nissan Pavilion. Many fans from surrounding areas traveled to Richmond to see these bands since they did not schedule performances in Washington, D.C.

Now, we admit that we’ve had our gripes about Nissan Pavilion in the past. And while it might be tempting to wash our hands of the venue and let our neighbors to the south lay claim, the fact is that Bristow is 100 miles from Richmond, and only 40 miles from D.C. It’s our venue to complain about, not Richmond’s. And while we’d be perfectly happy to say that the Dave Matthews Band or the Jonas Brothers didn’t schedule D.C. dates, that’s just not true. And aside from all that, StubHub’s error in elementary geography has cost us major Rockin’ Points, and that just will not stand.

Luckily, this isn’t actually a CNN story, but rather a StubHub press release that CNN has reprinted. And really, the methodology here is clearly suspect at its very core. A world in which the amount of tickets sold for concerts by Kenny Chesney and Jimmy Buffett determines how hard a city “rocks” is not a world we’d want to live in. But for the sake of argument, consider this our attempt at setting the record straight. We rock harder than Richmond. Case closed.

Photo by Flickr user angela n., used via a Creative Commons license.