beyoncee as artist of the year

It beat David Bowie's elegiac swansong Blackstar, which was released two days before his death in January.

Third place went to Frank Ocean's Blonde, a sprawling, impressionistic take on art-soul.

The top 10 albums of 2016

Beyonce's sister Solange also fared well. A Seat At The Table, her soulful, thoughtful portrayal of the struggles faced by black women, both historically and in 2016, came fifth.

The full top 20 looked like this:

Best albums of 2016 - poll of polls
Artist	Album	Score (out of 500)
1) Beyonce	Lemonade	376
2) David Bowie	Blackstar	341
3) Frank Ocean	Blonde	309
4) Chance The Rapper	Coloring Book	278
5) Solange	A Seat At The Table	256
6) Kanye West	Life Of Pablo	204
7) A Tribe Called Quest	We Got It From Here	192
8) Radiohead	A Moon Shaped Pool	191
9) Angel Olsen	My Woman	188
10) Mitski	Puberty 2	169
11) Leonard Cohen	You Want It Darker	163
12) Rihanna	Anti	144
13) Anderson .Paak	Malibu	116
14) Bon Iver	22, A Million	101
15) The 1975	I Like It When You Sleep...	94
16) Anohni	Hopelessness	92
17) Car Seat Headrest	Teens of Denial	84
18) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds	Skeleton Tree	83
19) Christine & The Queens	Chaleur Humaine	81
20) Kaytranada	99/9%	7

The results were compiled from 25 "album of the year" polls, published by the most influential magazines, newspapers and blogs in music - from specialist publications like Billboard and Q Magazine to more mainstream outlets, such as Cosmopolitan and Digital Spy.

The records were assigned points based on their position in each list - with the number one album getting 20 points, the number two album receiving 19 points, and so on.

There was a huge diversity in the critics' picks, with 145 albums cited across the 25 polls surveyed by the BBC.

However, Beyonce's album featured in all but one of those lists, and was ranked number one nine times.

"Lemonade sums up everything that Beyonce is about," said The Independent. "She delights in the power of her sexuality, of her swagger, and her sheer genius of innovation. That's without getting into how she tackles police brutality, capitalism, and standards of beauty for black women."

Her album "feels larger than life yet still heartbreakingly intimate," added Rolling Stone, "because it doubles as her portrait of a nation in flames."

The 25 "best of" lists appeared in: The Atlantic, The AV Club, Billboard magazine, Consequence of Sound, Cosmopolitan, Digital Spy, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The i Newspaper, Mojo, NME, NPR, Paste, Pitchfork, Q Magazine, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Stereogum, The Times, Time Magazine, Time Out London, Time Out New York, Uncut and Vice.