2021-01-26-Hottest100 Longlist

Posted on January 26, 2021

Hottest 100 Stats Last time we saw that the diversity of artists in the countdown was not reduced this year and has been reasonably stable over time. A less analysed part of the process is the songs that are offered for selection, which I’ll call the long-list.

This is not readily preserved, but I have been collecting it for several years now, and I found this fun website hottest100.org that also had copies (albeit in pdf. How you can call yourself a ‘database’ and store your info in pdfs is a rant for another day).

We see that from 2013 to 2015 there was a doubling of the number of songs and artists on the long-list. Interestingly, at first I only made this for the last 5 years and was going to write that about the huge decline in the amount of choices offered. But with 10 years of data, it now looks as if its returning to historically normal levels (eyeballing years <2010 it seems as though they had ~1200 songs too).

I don’t know Triple J’s reasons for changing the length of the longlist, or even if there is one, but comparing to our last graph it doesn’t seem to have had an impact on the number of unique artists in the top 100.