If albums seem quaint in the iPod era, year-end top-10-album lists are even more so. Maybe that's why this year's model was so hard to figure out.

Usually the top pick is an easy call, the next half-dozen fall into place, and only last few spots are a struggle to determine. But there was no clear choice for this year's top spot, no "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" or "Smile." The rest of the list was no easier.

There was plenty of great music out there, mind you, maybe more than ever. But much of the most notable music took the form of incredibly cool online artifacts -- the amazing OK Go video with the treadmills, the Boston/Beatles mash-up bootleg called "Christmas in Boston," tons of hilarious James Blunt parodies and the hysterical Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg "Saturday Night Live" sketch "Special Christmas Box" (the uncensored YouTube version).

What follows is a traditional list of top-10 albums, plus a top-10 for viral music, which spread like flu via the Web.

Albums

In rank order:

1. Bob Dylan, "Modern Times" (Columbia). I've given up trying to convince myself that "Modern Times" is overrated. It's the best-sounding blues album ever recorded with enough quirks (lyrics cribbed from obscure Civil War poet Henry Timrod?) to make it worth pondering for years to come. A decade from now, it should still sound as simultaneously new and old-as-the-hills as it does right now.

2. The Hold Steady, "Boys and Girls in America" (Vagrant). Against all odds, old-school arena rock lives on in this century. Like spiritual kin Drive-By Truckers, the Hold Steady evokes the sounds, sights and smells of rock in a 1970s-vintage hockey arena so precisely that you can darn near smell the Zamboni exhaust fumes.

3. Girl Talk, "Night Ripper" (Illegal Art). Calling these 16 tracks of studio wizardry "mash-ups" seems insufficient. They're more like "cram-ins," as each track is packed with pieces of songs cut, warped and melded together into a seamless pastiche. They leave you breathless.

4. Weepies, "Say I Am You" (Nettwerk). So when was the last time you played an album start to finish and liked every song so much you hit the button to repeat it all over again? "Say I Am You" is a capital-A Album, a terrific collection of grown-up acoustic pop full of hooks and atmosphere.

5. TV on the Radio, "Return to Cookie Mountain" (Interscope). If you've ever wondered what Peter Gabriel would sound like singing apocalyptic art-metal from the bottom of a tunnel, wonder no more. "Cookie Mountain" takes awhile to sink in, but it's time well spent.

6. Cat Power, "The Greatest" (Matador). Chan "Cat Power" Marshall teams up with Al Green's old sidemen to make an easygoing masterpiece of smooth downer soul. Beautifully sad.

7. Ani DiFranco, "Reprieve" (Righteous Babe). After years of making self-consciously fussy records, DiFranco swings from the gut on "Reprieve." In doing so, she connects with the rhythms of the universe for the best record of all about Hurricane Katrina -- even though it was recorded before the storm even hit.

8. Rosanne Cash, "Black Cadillac" (Capitol). If you think you've got father issues, consider Johnny Cash's daughter. Out of the pain from his passing (as well as the deaths of her mother, Vivian Liberto, and stepmother, June Carter Cash), she wrought this stunningly beautiful elegy. "The World Unseen" might be the most powerful song that 2006 produced.

9. Ghostface Killah, "Fishscale" (Def Jam). A decade ago, few people would have singled out Ghostface as the Wu-Tang Clan member most likely to. "Fishscale" sets his inimitable rasp to beats that recall the old school without a hint of staleness, thanks to Ghostface's peerless wordplay. You keep listening just to see what strange, freaky thing he's going to say next.

10. Beck, "The Information" (Interscope). The good stuff is on the first half, the weird stuff on the second. And the good stuff is really good, while the weird stuff is really, really weird. But it grows on you, given time.

Viral music

In rank order:

Hyperlinks are imbedded in the online version of this story at www.newsobserver.com (key word: arts).

1. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy." The single of the year in so many ways, starting with how it seemed to escape rather than be released. Bootleg versions turned up online in late 2005, and in March, its official release online drew enough downloads in Britain to make it the first song to hit No. 1 with no sales of physical copies. Once the "St. Elsewhere" album came out, "Crazy" became as ubiquitous as Outkast's "Hey Ya" and Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" in prior years -- and just as hip to cover. Everyone from Nelly Furtado to Billy Idol made versions, as did seemingly every deconstruction-inclined deejay on Earth.

2. Neil Young's "Living With War Today." For all its fiery intentions, "Living With War" was hit or miss. But it inspired a huge debate on Young's Web site (www.neilyoung.com), where other artists could post their own songs about the Iraq war. After six months, the count was more than 1,000 songs.

3. OK Go, "Here It Goes Again." The Chicago band first gained notice with the wonderful backyard choreography of last year's "A Million Ways" video. The group somehow topped itself with "Here It Goes Again," featuring the quartet slidin', glidin', bouncin' and pouncin' on a series of treadmills. By year's end, the video had been viewed more than 9 million times on YouTube.

4. "When Album Covers Attack." This fascinating, deeply disturbing video features several dozen album covers trying to kill one another. If the "Monty Python" crew tried to make a 2 1/2-minute gangster epic starring album covers, this is what they'd come up with.

5. Banksy punks "Paris Hilton." The British prank-artist made an "alternative" version of celebrity pop-star Hilton's album, complete with a booklet of digitally doctored nude photos and a disc of music by Gnarls Barkley deejay Danger Mouse. Then Banksy slipped 500 copies into 42 British record stores the week "Paris Hilton" was released. The discs are now collector's items, but the video of how Banksy pulled it off is out there for anyone to see.

6. George W. Bush and U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday." Maybe the slickest visual crash-up of the year, in which sound bites from President Bush are manipulated to "sing" the U2 song "Sunday Bloody Sunday." A similar treatment shows British Prime Minister Tony Blair doing The Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go."

7. Ryan Adams. After last year's three-album outburst, the Raleigh expatriate didn't technically release a new record in 2006. But he still had a busy year. He produced an album for Willie Nelson and got into online dust-ups with fans and detractors. And he posted more than 100 new "songs" (many of them freestyle stream-of-consciousness rants less than a minute long) on his Web site, grouped into "albums" with titles such as "Hillbilly Joel" and "Slef Portrait."

8. Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher with Rickie Lee Jones, "Have You Had Enough?" Maxwell and Mosher teamed up with Jones to revive their old Squirrel Nut Zippers song "Put a Lid on It," rewritten as an anthem of political change. The new version became a campaign ad for numerous Democratic candidates across the country, and Salon.com named "Have You Had Enough?" the second most influential campaign video of the 2006 election (behind Michael J. Fox's spot for stem cell research).

9. Faith Hill at the Country Music Awards. A camera was trained on Hill when Carrie Underwood was named Female Vocalist of the Year at November's awards ceremony. Hill reacted by screaming, "What?!" and storming off. Joke or diva hissy fit of epic proportions -- watch it on YouTube and decide for yourself.

10. Fun with "Charlie Brown." Inspired by an earlier online crash-up that paired footage from "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with Outkast's "Hey Ya," artists this year produced imaginative variations including "A Charlie Brown Heavy Metal Christmas," "Charlie Brown: Jihad Christmas" and the special performed by the cast of "Scrubs."