It’s tough to look back on a whole year of news, reviews, opinions, rants and raves and find out what you, the readers, seemed to like best. So instead of assigning the thankless task to some starry-eyed intern, we programmed an ultra-fast mainframe computer at DCist HQ to scour the year’s content for the posts that were widely read, commented, tweeted and liked. Here’s what it found.

Arguably, live shows define a year in music more so than albums. It’s possible to discover or rediscover an album well after its release date. If the album is truly one of the best of that year, it will transcend the year or even the decade in which it was released. Live shows, on the other hand, are absolutely tied to the two-hour block of time in which they occur.