26 Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life (1976)
This influenced virtually every modern soul and R&B singer, brimming with timeless classics like 'Isn't She Lovely', 'As' and 'Sir Duke'. The 21-tracker encompassed a vast range of life's issues - emotional, social, spiritual and environmental - all performed with bravado and a lightness of touch. No other R&B artist has sung about the quandaries of human existence with quite the same grace.

Without this ... no Alicia Keys, no John Legend - contemporary R&B would be empty and lifeless.

27 Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced (1967)
Looking and playing like a brother from another planet, Hendrix delivered the most dramatic debut in pop history. Marrying blues and psychedelia, dexterity and feedback trickery, it redefined the guitar's sonic possibilities, while beyond the fretboard pyrotechnics burnt a fierce artistic vision - 'Third Stone From the Sun' made Jimi rock's first (and still best travelled) cosmonaut.

Without this ... countless guitarists and cock-rockers might not have been (Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lenny Kravitz, even Miles Davis owes him), but most of all, without Experienced, there'd be no Jimi experience.

28 Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain (1984)
Prince had been plugging away with limited success for several years when the man in tiny pants reinvented himself as a purple-clad movie star. Like Michael Jackson, he felt that the way to gain crossover appeal was to run the musical gamut: in this case, from the minimalist funk of his earlier albums to the volume-at-11 rock of Jimi Hendrix. The title track is a monumental, fist-clenching rock ballad that, perversely, whetted our appetites for far worse examples by Christina Aguilera among others.

Without this ... no Janet Jackson, no Peaches, and certainly no Beck.

29 Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Sounds like it was pretty tough to be in Pink Floyd in the early 1970s. You had all the money you could spend (ker-ching!) but you thought that was vulgar. You didn't get on with your bandmates because they all had superiority complexes. You couldn't enter the recording booth without having an existential crisis. Piper At The Gates of Dawn, their debut with the late Syd Barrett, turned out to be influential in a more positive sense (David Bowie, Blur).

Without this ... there'd be no Thom Yorke solo mumblings, and much less prog rock (if only ...).

30 The Wailers - Catch a Fire (1973)
Alongside The Harder They Come (movie and soundtrack), Catch a Fire changed the perception of reggae from eccentric, lightweight pop to a music of mystery and power. Dressed in a snappy Zippo lighter sleeve, and launched with rock razzmatazz, it delivered a polished, guitar-sweetened version of what Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer had made when white audiences weren't listening. By turns militant, mystic and sexy, it helped make Bob Marley the first Third World superstar.

Without this ... no Aswad or Steel Pulse, no native American or Maori or African reggae bands.

31 The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (1989)
Until the late Eighties, Manchester was thought to be a forbidding, dour place where the ghost of Ian Curtis still clanked about. The Stone Roses' concatenation of sweet West Coast psychedelia and the lairy, loved-up rave culture was as unforeseeable as it was seismic. Ecstasy pulled the sniffy rock kids away from their Smiths records and into clubland; the result was an album whose woozy words and funky drumming sounded as guileless as it did hedonistic.

Without this ... well, a bit of the Roses remains in the DNA of every British guitar band since.

32 Otis Redding - Otis Blue (1965)
Until Stax Records and Otis Redding arrived, the Southern states were a place you had to leave to make it (unless you were a country singer). Recorded weeks after the death of Redding's idol, Sam Cooke, the album cast Otis as Cooke's successor, an embodiment of young black America with white appeal - alongside Cooke's 'A Change is Gonna Come' was the Stones's 'Satisfaction'. With terrific backings from the MGs and the Markeys horns behind Otis's rasping vocals, it defined 'soul'.

Without this ... no Aretha Franklin singing 'Respect', no Al Green, and no Terence Trent D'Arby.

33 Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)
It definitively wedded jazz to funk and R&B, and did it with such joyful confidence that it launched a whole new, open-minded approach to the music. Equally important was the use of electronic keyboards, then in their infancy, which vastly expanded the range of available textures. Head Hunters kickstarted the stylistic and ethnic fusions that have enlivened jazz for 30 years.

Without this ... suffice to say, almost everything in the jazz-funk idiom can be traced back to this.

34 Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (1970)
A mere 30 minutes long, this was none the less the album where heavy metal was first forged. Its ponderous tempos, cod-satanic imagery (bassist Geezer Butler was a Roman Catholic and Dennis Wheatley fan), Tony Iommi's sledgehammer guitar riffs and Ozzy Osbourne's shrieking vocals all went on to define the genre and shaped most arena rock of the Seventies and Eighties.

Without this ... no Spinal Tap, no grunge or Kurt Cobain and, of course, no Osbournes.

35 The Ramones - The Ramones (1976)
'Fun disappeared from music in 1974,' claimed singer Joey Ramone. To restore it took he and his three 'brothers' just one album and 16 tracks, all under three minutes. Brevity was the New York punk rockers' first lesson to the world, along with speed, a distorted guitar thrash and a knowing line in faux-dumb lyrics. In an era of 'progressive' rock pomposity and 12-minute tracks, the Ramones' back-to-basics approach was rousing and confrontational.

Without this ... no fun.

36 The Who - My Generation (1965)
Alongside the equally influential Small Faces, The Who were the quintessential British mod group. Long before they recorded the first rock opera, Tommy, they unleashed a stream of singles that articulated all the youthful pent-up frustration of Sixties London before it started to swing. Their 1965 debut album, My Generation, included the defiant and celebratory 'The Kids Are Alright' and the ultimate mod anthem, 'My Generation', with its infamous line, 'I hope I die before I get old.' Angry aggressive art-school pop with attitude to burn.

Without this ... no Paul Weller, no Blur and, God help us, no Ordinary Boys either.

37 Massive Attack - Blue Lines (1991)
Obliterators of rap's boundaries, Massive Attack pioneered the cinematic trip hop movement. After graduating from one of Britain's premier sound systems, the Bristol-based Wild Bunch, Andrew 'Mushroom' Vowles and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall joined forces with graffiti artist 3D. Massive Attack's debut LP spawned the unforgettable 'Unfinished Sympathy' and remains a modern classic.

Without this ... no Roots Manuva, no Dizzee. In fact, there would be no British urban music scene to speak of.

38 Radiohead - The Bends (1995)
In parallel with Jeff Buckley, Radiohead's Thom Yorke popularised the angst-laden falsetto, a thoughtful opposite to the chest-beating lad-rock personified by Oasis's Liam Gallagher. Sounding girly to a backdrop of churning guitars became a much-copied idea, however, one which eventually coalesced into an entire decade of sound.

Without this ... Coldplay would not exist, nor Keane, nor James Blunt.

39 Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)
Pure, startling genius from beginning to end, Michael Jackson and producer Quincy Jones seemed hellbent on creating the biggest, most universally appealing pop album ever made. Jones introduced elements of rock into soul and vice versa in such a way that it's now no surprise to hear a pop record that mashes up more marginal genres into a form that will have universal relevance.

Without this ... no megastars such as Justin Timberlake or Madonna, no wide-appeal uber-producers such as Timbaland or Pharrell Williams.

40 Run DMC - Run DMC (1984)
Before them came block-rocking DJ Grandmaster Flash and the Godfather, Afrika Bambaataa, but it was Run DMC who carved the prototype for today's hip hop MCs. Their self-titled debut - the first rap album to go gold - was rough around the edges and catchy as hell. As Rev Run spat, 'Unemployment at a record high/ People coming, people going, people born to die', the way was paved for conscious and political rap.

Without this ... no Public Enemy, Roots and Nas.

41 Chic - Chic (1977)
The Chic Organisation revolutionised disco music in the late Seventies, reclaiming it from the naff Bee Gees and ensuring the pre-eminence of slickly produced party music in the charts for the next three decades. Its main men Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards patented a sound on their 1977 debut that was influential on bands from Duran Duran to Orange Juice. They also created a hit-making formula that mixed dance beats with monster hooks.

Without this ... no Destiny's Child.

42 The Smiths - The Smiths (1984)
Yearning, melodic, jangly, and very northern, The Smiths' first album was quite unlike anything that had gone before. It helped that Morrissey was a one-off and that Johnny Marr had taken all the best riffs from Sixties pop, punk and disco and melded them into his own unique style. But there was something magical about their sound that endless successors have tried to replicate.

Without this ... there'd be no Belle and Sebastian, no Suede, no Oasis, and no Libertines - at the very least.

43 Primal Scream - Screamadelica (1991)
Thanks to producer Andrew Weatherall and some debauched raving, this former fey indie outfit enthusiastically took on dance music's heady rushes. It was a conversion bordering on the Damascene, but one being mirrored in halls of residence, cars, clubs and bedsits all around the nation. Screamadelica brought hedonism crashing into the mainstream.

Without this ... no lad culture - it was no accident that a mag founded in 1994 shared its name with Screamadelica's defining single, 'Loaded'.

44 Talking Heads- Fear of Music (1979)
There's something refreshingly jolly about the modern-life paranoia expressed by chief Talking Head David Byrne on this album that moany old Radiohead could learn from. Opening track 'I Zimbra' splices funk with afrobeat, paving the way for Byrne and Eno's mould-breaking My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album a few years later.

Without this ... Paul Simon's Graceland might never have been made.

45 Fairport Convention - Liege and Lief (1969)
The birth of English folk-rock. Considered an act of heresy by folk purists, this electrified album fragmented the band. No matter, the opening cry of 'Come all you roving minstrels' proved galvanic.

Without this ... no Celtic revivalists like the Pogues and Waterboys or descendants like the Levellers.

46 The Human League - Dare (1981)
Until Dare, synthesisers meant solemnity. Phil Oakey's reinvention of the group as chirpy popsters, complete with two flailing, girl-next-door vocalists, feminised electronica.

Without this ... and Oakey's lop-sided haircut, squads of new romantics and synth-pop acts would have been lost.

47 Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)
You might argue Nirvana's landmark album changed nothing whatsoever. All their best seditious instincts came to nothing, after all. And yet Nevermind still rocks mightily, capturing a moment when the vituperative US underground imposed its agenda on the staid mainstream. Without this ... no Seattle scene, no Britpop, no Pete Doherty.

48 The Strokes - Is This It? (2001)
Five good-looking young men hauled the jangling sound of Television and the Velvet Underground into the new millennium, reinvigorating rock's obsession with having a good time.

Without this ... a fine brood of heirs would not have been spawned: among them, Franz Ferdinand and the Libertines.

49 De La Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
Ten years after hip hop's arrival, its original joie de vivre had been subsumed by macho braggadocio. Three Feet High made hip hop playful again, with light rhythms, unusual sound samples and its talk of the D.A.I.S.Y. age ('Da Inner Sound Y'all') earning the trio a 'hippy' label.

Without this ... thoughtful hip hop acts like the Jungle Brothers and PM Dawn wouldn't have arrived.

50 LFO - Frequencies (1991)
Acid house was sniffed at as a fad until it started producing 'proper' albums. Frequencies was its first masterpiece. Updating the pristine blueprint of Kraftwerk with house, acid, ambient and hip hop, it made dance music legitimate to album-buyers.

Without this ... no success for Orbital, Underworld, Leftfield, Chemical Brothers or Aphex Twin.