I decided not to try to extend the holiday mood, because that never really works, and instead of posting a filler album for the week nobody ever downloads music (from me, at least), I thought I’d look back on the year and share ten albums that stick out for me.

To be clear: I don’t share bad music. Or, at the very least, I try not to. My taste is eclectic and my moods can skew it to insanely wonky, or very dark, so not every album is an any day kind of a thing. But every single artist I shared this year is worth listening to.

(And every single one is someone whose work you can use for your own projects, thanks to the Free Culture licenses, excepting the most recent two weeks.)

But I’ve got to select a smaller number than the forty-three that I managed to share in fifty-one weeks. (Wow, I did a much better job than usual working around my bouts of depression!)

So, herewith, my all-time, desert island, top ten free culture albums that I shared with you this year, in the order that I shared them:

A jazz album that tells a cryptic story with no words at all. If you go by the track names, a woman, time travel, and werewolves are involved. And even if you didn’t know that, it’s just a wonderful jazzy piece that all hangs together in a lovely way.

I don’t know why, but I go for these evocative soundscapes in a big way. There is something both cool and ineffably lonely about this album, and I love it.

Romantic Valentine’s Day jazz that works any time of the year. This one still hasn’t gotten old for me.

This pop country album lead off Lyrical April, and while I still like all four albums from that month, this one is so darned catchy and upbeat I can’t put any of the others above it. If you don’t know what I mean, listen to either the eponymous first track, or “Deeper For You”. Or any of the tracks, really, but “Deeper For You” I could probably put on repeat for most of a day and still not be sick of it.

Stellardrone’s first album, and a gorgeous piece of Vangelis-ian cosmic synth, as is all of Stellardrone’s work.

Lourme does Free Culture soundtrack music for anybody to use in videos, but it also works beautifully to put you in the writing mood, particularly this album.

This one haunts me, and I think one of the reasons why is that it doesn’t try too hard. It’s not just one genre, and it doesn’t ever strain to make you go “Cool!” Instead, it suffuses the background and hits all its different moods and genres with deceptive ease, and without any showing off.

Granting that I have a lot of jazz on the list, because I am me, I would argue that this is the best jazz album I’ve shared this year. It’s probably one of the best jazz albums in the whole of the Creative Commons, let alone under a Free Culture license. It’s really very good indeed.

Yes, I share a lot of Jahzzar’s work. But only because it’s so very, very good.

OK, I lied, I’m extending the holiday mood a bit. But that’s mostly because I’m a Torley Wong fanboy.

So that’s the ten that stick out to me today. Another day would yield a different list, more likely than not.

One other note of possible interest: My playlist for all the music I shared this year reports that I shared a day and a half’s worth of music. Thirty-six hours, fourteen minutes and thirty-one seconds, in fact. It’s all free, it’s virtually all free culture. That’s a lot of writing without repeating even one track. And a lot of music, considering the weeks that I missed.