The end of the year is a busy time for just about everyone, including us here at XLR8R. Throughout December, we’ve primarily been keeping ourselves occupied by looking back at all the music that surfaced during the past 12 months. More specifically, we spent time creating an entire series of lists devoted to the Best of 2013, for just about every category we could imagine. Over the past month, we’ve tackled our favorite releases, tracks, labels, new artists, and more. We tallied up the top 100 most popular downloads of the year, and we even conducted an official readers poll to see what our audience had to say about the year gone by. In truth, the whole thing was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun; regardless, the holidays have arrived and we’ll be taking a little break for the remainder of 2013. New posts will resume on Thursday, January 2, but in the meantime, we encourage anyone who hasn’t already checked out our Best of 2013 lists to go ahead and do so; to make it easy, we’ve gone ahead and posted links to the entire series after the jump. Apart from that, enjoy the holidays and have a happy new year. We’ll be back in 2014.

XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Top Downloads (100 – 81)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Top Downloads (80 – 61)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Top Downloads (60 – 41)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Top Downloads (40 – 21)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Top Downloads (20 – 1)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Features
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Podcasts
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Labels
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Tracks (50 – 26)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Tracks (25 – 1)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: New Artists
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Gear
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Disappointing Releases
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Releases (30 – 16)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Releases (15 – 1)
XLR8R’s Best of 2013: Readers Poll