Australia Day usually means barbecuing, a few too many beers, and since its 1989 debut, listening to the Triple J hottest 100 countdown; and with so many fantastic songs and releases in 2012, it seems voters had more choice than ever.
Considering Aussie artists have taken the top spot for the last three years, it seemed likely to many fans of the radio station’s poll that 2012 would see a domestic winner too. Especially given that the past 12 months have seen Australian acts conquering the world, from Gotye and The Rubens, to Flume and Tame Impala (all of whom were voted for in our 2012 Readers’ Poll).
While everyone has their predictions for who’s going to top the Hottest 100 countdown this year, Brisbane-based online marketer Nick Drewe wasn’t content just playing the guessing game.
Using statistics gathered from Facebook and Twitter posts about Triple J’s music poll, the maths wiz claims to have predicted the winners of the 100-song countdown with approximately 90% accuracy. Calling it ‘The Warmest 100’, Drewe makes the whole equation seem as simple as pie.
In an interview with The Vine, Drewe states, “I was on Facebook on Sunday night two weeks ago. A few of my friends had posted their votes on the Hottest 100. I was just browsing through, having a look at them, and I noticed the URL structure of each of those pages had the same pattern.”
After figuring out that each URL had a different identifier, Drewe took to Twitter and employed a variety of different search terms and gathered the data from over 35, 000 voters. From there, he put the data into a spreadsheet and said that after that it was “a pretty simple process to calculate a prediction or estimate of what the Hottest 100 is going to be.”
The maths wiz claims to have predicted the winners of the 100-song countdown with approximately 90% accuracy. Calling it ‘The Warmest 100′”Drewe was insisted that his Warmest 100 project was merely a prediction, and not a confirmed leak of the final list. Emphasising that the social media posts are merely a sample of a larger voting pool, and that even then, they’d have to reflect voting habits and listening trends of a wider audience. But considering the statistics behind his research, Drewe does want to warn those investigating his prediction that “they might ruin their Australia Day… We think it’ll be quite indicative of the final list,” says Drewe.
Last year, over one million Aussies voted in the Hottest 100, and if we assume that just as many people voted this year, Drewe’s 26,000 make up over 2% of the total, which is nothing to sneeze at. The final results of the all-important Top 10 from Drewe’s predicted list (which you can view below) shows some interesting figures.
Namely, only 40% of the artists in the top 10 are Australian compared with last year’s results which saw seven out of the top ten slots being taken by local acts.
Considering how easy Mr. Drewe has made tabulating the results, it begs the question, why did Triple J think it okay to publicly publish people’s results prematurely? Our guess is they didn’t anticipate that anyone would actually be assed to take the time to search for, collect, input, and calculate the data. Lesson learned, Triple J.
“It’s going to be an exciting thing for us, sitting there with our own list, ticking it off as each song comes on,” says Drewe. “We’ll only have one shot at this – Triple j won’t do the same thing twice, letting people freely publish their votes online in such a public manner.”
Perhaps the Annandale Hotel should take a look at the Warmest 100, considering they are bribing persuading punters to vote for Sydney band Sticky Fingers, saying they’ll honour the band and voters with a $15,000 bar tab if their breakout single ‘Caress Your Soul’ makes it to the #1 slot.
So if you’ve got your bets already placed you may want to look away at what could be some potential spoilers below, if Drewe’s statistics are to be believed. If however, you’re the gambling sort and looking for an easy win, you could do a lot worse than playing Drewe’s net-based statistics.
For the full results of Drewe’s Warmest 100, visit warmest100.com.au.
Scroll down for the top 10 results.
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Warmest 100 Top 10 Results
10. The Rubens – ‘My Gun’
9. Tame Impala – ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’
8. Major Lazer feat. Amber Coffman – ‘Get Free’
7. Mumford & Sons – ‘I Will Wait’
6. Flume – ‘Holdin’ On’
5. Tame Impala – ‘Elephant’
4. Frank Ocean – ‘Lost’
3. Alt-J ∆ – ‘Breezeblocks’
2. Of Monsters & Men – ‘Little Talks’
1. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Wanz – ‘Thrift Shop’
