While the public discussion around Triple J’s influence on Australian music continues (with everyone from Whitley and Cherry Bar’s James Young weighing in on the topic), the station is winding its way towards its most iconic event: the Triple J Hottest 100.
While Aussie bands make humorous plays for votes in the annual countdown (see: Sticky Fingers’ ocker propaganda spoof and Illy’s ‘undercover’ exposé) as the polls on “the world’s biggest musical democracy” draw to a close on Monday 20th January, one question still hovering is: ‘will the makers of the Warmest 100 return to crack this year’s Hottest 100 results?’
The two young Brisbane-based IT experts behind the Warmest 100, Nick Drewe and Tom Knox, managed to accurately predict a large number of 2012’s Hottest 100 – including the #1 position – ahead of the traditional Australia Day airing, becoming digital-era folk heroes for spoofing an Aussie music institution, but also villainous spoilers in the minds of the youth broadcaster and bookies around the country.
But there’s some bad news if you were hoping for a return from the controversial alternative countdown this year.
“Unfortunately, It looks like the Warmest 100 will be a one-off,” Nick Drewe tells Gizmodo, indicating that Triple J and its ABC bosses fulfilled their promise of making changes to the Hottest 100 voting system. “Clearly Triple J weren’t too happy about the whole thing, and were keen on making it hard for a similar prediction to happen again.”
“Triple J have changed the social sharing features of their voting system this year so that voters can’t easily share their votes out to Twitter or Facebook, which is where we collected a majority of the votes that we used for last year’s Warmest 100 prediction,” explains Drewe.
The Brisbanite and his fellow programmers managed to crack social media algorithms that analysed Hottest 100 votes submitted to Triple J via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest for their Warmest 100, which eventually accurately forecast 92 of the 100 songs on the final chart, even nailing the Top 3 positions with 100% accuracy (as this handy graph demonstrates). Even more impressive (and worrying to the radio station) given that they only represented 2.7% of the total entries submitted to the 2012 poll, analysing just 35,081 votes from 3,602 entires.
Reflecting on the swift attention they received for their social experiment and its impact, Drewe says the responses were mixed.
“Most people I spoke to loved the Warmest 100, but I got the feeling that the mood within Triple J was a bit different, they were perhaps the only people in the country that knew we had a fairly accurate prediction,” he says.
While Triple J were initially demure about the Warmest 100’s accuracy of its flagship poll, Drewe says the station eventually took steps to ensure the Hottest 100 wasn’t ‘cracked’ a second year running.
“Triple J were completely silent on the whole thing, until a few months after the countdown when I spoke to Triple J’s Manager Chris Scaddan,” recounts Drewe. “Clearly they weren’t too happy about the whole thing, and were keen on making it hard for a similar prediction to happen again.”
“Making sure the results couldn’t be so accurately predicted in the future seemed like a pretty big priority for [Triple J’s Chris Scaddan],” he adds, but cautioned that the reduced social media ‘shareability’ of this year’s Hottest 100 (with voters in the poll receiving one of those ‘Flerm’ memes for their participation instead of last year’s ‘vote sheet‘) could cause some social media backlash.
It’s not the first time that Triple J’s music poll has drawn public scrutiny. The lack of female artists in the results of the 20th Anniversary Hottest 100 mid-year countdown of the best songs of the last two decades was the Biggest ‘Oops’ moment of 2013 (according to Tone Deaf readers) while last year’s winners, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and their ubiquitous thrift-hop hit, ruffled more than a few feathers.
“In light of all the trolling of TIME’s person of the year poll last year, I think it’s only a matter of time until something similar happens with the Hottest 100,” says Drewe. “These sort of online polls are still fairly insecure, it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game.”
While Drewe and his Warmest 100 cohorts aren’t game to tackle a predictive list this year, he says that it is possible that a similar list could be easily replicated from a small voting sample.
“I haven’t heard of anyone creating a similar prediction this year, but that doesn’t meant it’s not happening,” he teased. “Although last year was fun, I’m looking forward to kicking back and enjoying the countdown this year.”
