Hottest 100 day is the most important day on the radio calendar
Saturday was the most important day on the radio calendar. It had nothing to do with icy cold cans of Coke or rooftop concerts – although icy cold drinks were consumed en masse, and there was plenty of dancing on rooftops.
Cheap wine was also definitely be a main ingredient, although Barnesy probably wasn’t. It was a no-repeat no-work day. And the only commercials heard on air were for backyard parties in Port Macquarie, where you can audibly hear how sunburnt a caller is as they slur down the phone line.
It is, of course, Hottest 100 day. The nation’s official day of sanctioned late-January celebration – and the best example of radio’s power to unite the nation – even if we are all voting differently.
It is also a day of which the ABC can be proud – quite possibly the only one on their 2024 calendar to date.
Your ABC (see how I shifted the blame there) is currently under fire from all directions. Staffers have lost confidence in management; management have lost confidence in staff.
Anthony Albanese endorsed a new ABC chair on Wednesday to replace the outgoing Ita Buttrose – Kim Williams, who the PM dubbed “a renaissance man” and who promises to stir things up at ABC.
It was a bit of ‘look over here’ sleight of hand from Albanese, delivered on the very same day he announced everyone in Australia would get a huge tax cut – bad news apparently, if you listen to the fury.
Albo’s pick for ABC chair worked for Rupert Murdoch for over a decade as a top level executive across two of his most prized companies, News Limited and Foxtel. It’s an odd choice, considering how Ita’s old-school commercial media instincts raised ire throughout her five-year run.
Triple j, the youth arm of the organisation (well, aside from ABC Kids) and long-time purveyors of independent cool, is also at an increased risk of being changed by commercial-minded management. Ben Latimer came across from Nova last year and quickly slayed the King — ending Richard Kingsmill’s quarter-century run on triple j, and casting doubt over the station’s future direction.
Elsewhere at the ABC – an unfair dismissal lawsuit is brewing, management is in constant tussles with the union, and Ita used the term ‘abhorrent’ to describe her own staff’s ideological leanings. And they don’t even re-run Seachange anymore.
But, the Hottest 100. Man, that’s something to celebrate. A true blue, Australian-built institution. Owned by the people, fuelled by the people, debated and discussed and beloved by the people.
That’s our tax dollars at work. That’s our votes actually counting for something. That is Australian democracy in full swing.
And while the supermarkets are arguing over the political ramifications of stocking Aussie flag toothpicks, triple j wisely left the January 26 debate behind back in 2018 by moving the countdown from January 26 to wherever the nearest weekend happens to fall.
It was a smart move, because the Hottest 100 should be a day of celebration, not a day of division. Politics should have nothing to do with it, unless delivered via a hip hop tune.
It’s a day in which all Australians can be proud, because more often than not, Australian artists crowd the top of the Hottest 100. Every year, Aussies are competing for the top spot, and quite often they claim it. And the Hottest 100 is taken as gospel – an inalienable list of the best and most popular songs of the year, in order, voted by the people. Incorruptible.
The Hottest 100 is so unimpeachable that when a trollish internet campaign tried to vault Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off up the list in 2015, the track was swiftly (yup!) banned – with ABC ruling ‘chart manipulation’ with all the staid solemn seriousness of Antony Green announcing the early polling leaders on election day.
Aside from being a day of blow-up pools and beer bongs, the Hottest 100 is also a huge, self-reporting census of the musical trends of the most sought-after demographic in Australia. With 2.4 million votes cast last year, and 85.5% of those voters under 30, this is a sample size on par with the entire population of Brisbane. For a non-commercial station, that’s some valuable data right there.
Each year, ARIA publishes a chart of the top 50 singles of the year.
Last year, not one Australian song made the Top 50 of the year. Not one. Therefore, it can be definitively stated that Australians don’t like Australian music. End of story. See yourself out, Flume.
The Hottest 100, however, suggests otherwise. This is valuable data.
Since 1999 – for a quarter of a century – Australian songs have made up the majority of the list. That’s thousands of Australian songs.
Last year, six of the top ten were Australian tracks, with Flume topping the list (come back in, Flume).
The year before, Aussies commanded half of the top ten. Half a decade after #Taylorgate, The Wiggles took the top spot with a song about an elephant (or, more accurately, someone who feels like an elephant) and nobody gave a big red car about it. In 2020, Aussies made up seven of the top ten.
This year, Melbourne muso G-Flip landed seven songs in the chart (a record), including the #2 position, Aussie producer Dom Dolla took third and fourth place, and Troye Sivan’s Rush took the #8 spot.
Even Kylie Minogue landed in the top 50 with Padam Padam, making her the artist with the longest stretch between Hottest 100 entry — she last entered in 1997 with Did It Again.
In short: Aussie Aussie Aussie.
Why the huge disconnect between the charts and the Hottest 100?
Back in the 1990s, it was obvious. Music played on commercial radio was almost never played on triple j, and vice versa. When a band crossed over from triple j to Triple M – the former usually dropped them. The ARIA charts represented mostly what was played on commercial radio, in high rotation, between Franklins and Fosseys ads. Nowadays, the Hottest 100 sees Billie Eilish and Doja Cat in the top ten dancing alongside scruffy indie bands from Brisbane. The furore over Taylor Swift polluting the indie ideals of the Hottest 100 now seems quant. Genres don’t exist anymore. Time is a flat circle, and all that.
There’s other reasons, too. Back before music was treated as a utility not unlike water or gas, it cost money. CD singles cost at least $9.95 (for which you were often rewarded with four remixes of the same song) and the end-of-year ARIA charts were based on sales – a descending list of the highest-selling singles of any given year.
Nowadays, the list is basically the most streamed songs of the year, with a few of your uncle’s MP3 downloads tossed into the mix. This may seem like a mere format technicality, like the leap from VHS to DVD, but it isn’t.
Buying a song and streaming a song are two completely different things.
Case in point: Khloe Kardashian could release a single tomorrow, and pure curiosity would ensure that it is streamed tens of millions of times around the world. Now, she has a number one single. Khloe is a successful pop artist. Go, Khloe! But she isn’t a popular one. Nobody actually liked this hypothetical single; they just wanted to hear it. And it was as easy as typing it into a search engine, playing it until the chorus, and then never thinking about it again. But she has a number one single.
But if Khloe’s song, which I am now titling Basketball Wife Blues, was voted into the higher reaches of the Hottest 100, that would be proof positive that people like the song.
Considering that paying for music is no longer du jour, the most reliable factor of a song’s popularity is, nowadays, for someone to actively cast a vote declaring it as one of their very favourite songs of the year.
Over a thousand Australian songs have hit the Hottest 100 over the past two decades. That’s quite an achievement, and shows that when a radio station supports local music, the listeners not only support it, but vote for it, barrack for it – and may even pay money for it. This is yet another argument for local content quotas.
Saturday was a day of celebrating Australian diversity, Australian achievement, Australian stories told by Australian artists, and to enjoy the spiritual lift of knowing that millions of fellow Australians are celebrating in much the same way as you are, at the same time, on the same continent, listening to the same songs. All burning under the same sun. All tuned into the same frequency.
If it sounds utopian, then I guess that’s because it is. Maybe we should give this day of national good vibrations and backyard pool parties an official name.
‘Australia Day’ has quite a nice ring to it – and I hear that name will be up for grabs soon.
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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