I like Album stats and I'm an album player. Obviously there are some good tracks out there but really I like to just play an album start to finish. Or an EP.

Last.FM don't really care about albums much but they do have a good API so you can use their stats to your heart's content, although they don't have the best control over dates, meaning you can only request a 12 month period, you can't specify 1st Jan 2011 - 31st Dec 2012, for example. The term 'album' in Last.FM is really a release, meaning it can apply to a single or an EP.

Because an album is ranked purely by the number of plays against it, the list is misleading, as albums with lots of tracks (particularly short albums) will rank higher than albums with few tracks, so this is an attempt to reorder the albums in terms of full album plays, by dividing the number of plays by the number of tracks on the album. It's also dividing them up by year so that you can see what was most popular from a given period.

Since the data is collected only over the last 12 months it will change every time you recollect data. I plan to collect the data in December to work out what albums from that year I liked best. Sad but true.