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Put away the knives. It's not worth the fight. No matter how much you really like that new album by Beyonce, the annual arguments about the very best track or album produced during the past 12 months has grown increasingly frenzied, harried and pointless.

It's not that the music isn't as good. And it's not that a few consensus favorites don't begin to emerge from the murk, but the suffusion of genres (is that a Sino-electro beat I hear behind the grungy chorus?) and explosion of available music has created a mess.

While the pre-Internet era relied heavily on radio to distribute music - thus creating a de facto consensus of what DJs want to play, which thus became popular - the new distribution system of the Internet allows niche listening to expand as it never could before.

NPR's Bob Boilen, of "All Songs Considered," has it right. The end-of-year listmania serves a very good purpose, but it's not the one it's designed for. These lists, provided by pontificators from Rolling Stone to The New York Times, no longer create any sort of social consensus.

Instead - and this still is a crucial role for each of these list-happy publications - it raises awareness of the music that listeners might have missed or skipped over during the year.

When I first listened to TV on the Radios' "Dear Science," I gave it a skim and let it lie. It was what I expected from TV on the Radio - vocals careening from falsetto to a smooth baritone - and it did not immediately strike me as an outstanding recording.

Then, when I saw it got on every year-end top 10 list by my favorite critics, I gave it another listen. Hey, that's not half bad. In fact, it's catchy and fun. It was worth another listen, and it has grown on me.

The critic catchall metacritic.com also helps to make sense out of the multitude of reviews. For music releases, they compile scores from 49 different publications to give a composite score. For the end-of-year list, the Web site authors compiled the top scores of the year with at least seven reviews.

What may be most surprising is that method does not favor huge bands. Sure, TV on the Radio scored the fourth spot, Bon Iver was seventh and Fleet Foxes eighth, but the top album this year, the scores determined, is "Welcome to Mali," by Amadou & Mariam.

Who?

And that's the point. I'm going to go give it a listen.