Our analysis of the crossover between the popular music charts and the hottest 100 addresses the oft-heard complaint that Triple J is selling out

It’s almost hottest 100 time again in Australia, and with comes it all the associated discussion.

Questions like: is there too much electronic music? Will the winner be a bland, middle-of-the-road rock act? Was it all better 20 years ago? Is Richard Kingsmill part of some Illuminati-like secret society dedicated to preventing my band from achieving greatness?

We may never know the answer to some of these questions. But we can look at one question that has popped up after seeing the betting odds for the No 1 song, and a campaign to get Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off to No 1 – is the hottest 100 getting more commercial?

The short answer is no, it’s probably not.

I’ve previously analysed the proportion of genres in the hottest 100 by year, and more recently have looked at aspects of the Aria top 100 singles charts. With both datasets to hand, it was relatively easy to look at the crossover between the two and determine how often a track appears in both the Aria annual top 100 (or top 50 for pre-1997 charts) for a given year and the Triple J hottest 100 for the same year.

The Aria singles chart counts sales, so should represent generally popular, commercially successful music.

Here’s the result:

The peak for crossover between the commercial charts and the Hottest 100 was 1997, with 17 tracks appearing in both. The second-highest year was the year following, 1998, with 16.

If the hottest 100 was becoming more aligned with commercial radio and popular tastes we’d expect it to be increasing in more recent years, but that doesn’t appear to be happening.

Another measure we can look at is the proportion of songs classified as pop in each year. Pop as a genre is generally associated with commercial radio, so we might expect it to be increasing if the hottest 100 is becoming more mainstream.

You can read my previous blogs on analysing music for how I classify the tracks in each year, but here are the results:

Although the proportion of pop in both the Aria charts and the hottest 100 seem to be trending upwards from 1993, in the past two years it has also dropped sharply. The linear trend for hottest 100 isn’t particularly indicative, either (with an R2 value of 0.16 for the statistics-minded out there).

There are also a number of tracks that appear in the Aria charts the year after appearing in the hottest 100, such as the Offspring’s classic Self Esteem, and Flume’s Holding On. It’s not possible to infer if one group is influencing the other however, as songs that appear in the hottest 100 must have been released in the twelve months from 1 December of the preceding year (though oddly, another Offspring track Gone Away seems to break that rule).

Finally, we can take a look at the agreement between each charts’ ranking of songs by plotting the Aria chart position against the hottest 100 position (now excluding Aria charts prior to 1997) of songs that occurred in both charts:

Mostly, success in the hottest 100 doesn’t equate to a track doing well on the Aria chart. If it did, we’d expect the dots to be clustered around the diagonal line up the middle. Here’s an interactive version with tooltips so you can see individual song names.

Update

Here’s the full list of songs that have appeared in both the hottest 100 and Aria chart of the same year.

I’ve added a few more songs which my song-matching program missed the first time around, the first graph has been updated to reflect this. The overall trend hasn’t changed. Thanks to commenter Williamjohnn for pointing this out.