Ranking my Good Music Composers:

Now that we have this completed music hall of fame, interesting data can be gleaned from the database.  For instance, which composers have contributed the most good music to the world, how much, and in what order?

So let's just take the artists who have managed 49+ songs out of the 4286.  That should cover all the elites.  From most prolific to least, you get:

1.  Motoi Sakuraba: 684.

2.  Nobuo Uematsu: 630.

3.  Hitoshi Sakimoto: 202.

4.  Yasunori Mitsuda: 168.

5.  Paul Romero: 131.

6.  Naoshi Mizuta: 115.

7.  Junichi Nakatsuru: 103.

8.  Masaharu Iwata: 98.

9.  Sarah Brightman: 93.

10.  Yoko Shimomura: 85.

11.  Yuki Kajiura: 60.

12.  John Williams: 55.

13.  Loreena McKennitt: 50.

14.  Russel Brower: 49.

As you can see, the 14 best composers in the world are all modern day.  11/14 of them are video game composers.  9 are from Japan and 5 are from Europe/America.  Sarah Brightman, Yoko Shimomura, Yuki Kajiura and Loreena McKennitt are female, the rest are male.  This goes to show that yes, men are the best at everything; but yes, women still have a lot of intellectual firepower to contribute to the world and definitely shouldn't be held back from producing great things like these four have.

13/14 of the composers (everyone but Yuki Kajiura) predominately rely on classical/folk music styles and classical instruments.  So yes, classical is best, but modern classical is far superior to the ancients.

These fourteen composers are responsible for the lion's share of the music Hall of Fame.  2545 songs out of 4286. (60%)  Just the top two are responsible for ~33% of the music(!).  So even though this is a hall of fame celebrating all the good music from everyone across all time, mostly it's just a celebration of these 14 guys and gals.

Some composers aren't as prolific but still pack a lot of punch per song, but it's hard to quantify that type of strength so it just sucks to be them.  The people who fall under this category would be Jun Maeda, Shinji Orito, Isao Mizoguchi, Randy Edelman, Mitsuo Hagita, Garbage, The Cranberries, Glenn Stafford, Shinji Hosoe, Toshiro Masuda and yozuca*.

P.S.  Speaking of Toshiro Masuda, I found a great youtube playlist of Naruto Unreleased Tracks, songs Masuda composed in the anime but were never released in a convenient ost form.  This allowed me to upgrade the quality of one song already in my hall of fame, 'Juin,' to edit out the voices talking during the song, and get four more songs I didn't have at all but deeply desired (Predator, Haku's Theme, Predicament and Walking on the Path of Hatred).  Most especially Haku's Theme.  That brings the total hall of fame up to 4286 songs, and Toshiro Masuda's contribution up to 30 entries.