Triple J’s annual music poll has shifted in the type of music played and the number of acts featuring women

Triple J can’t seem to broadcast a Hottest 100 without accruing a series of complaints. Aside from the perennial cries (too much electronic music! Australian hip-hop is terrible!), a few people expressed moderate outrage at pop artists placing in the top 100.

Beyoncé, Guy Sebastian, Kanye West, Drake and Rihanna all made it into the countdown, either as the primary artist on a track or as a guest vocalist (to say nothing of the Justin Bieber cover by Halsey), prompting the usual hand-wringing from people on social media.

Mr Simeon (@shamsplanet) @triplej triple J does pop now? Getting worse and worse every year

Chris Bawden 🇦🇺 (@bawdz) Just a reminder, Double J play the whole #Hottest100 from 1996 tomorrow. When Triple J were still good. No Beyonce or Beiber 😩

Jamie Mitchell (@JMitchSport) Kanye & Beyoncé in the #Hottest100 - not good, @triplej... Go sit in the corner, listen to the '96 count, and think about what you've done!

But has Triple J really gone mainstream or sold out?



The short answer is probably not, but there have been some interesting shifts in the history of the music poll in terms of both genre and, in a welcome change, gender.



Two years ago I analysed the crossover between the Hottest 100 with the pop charts (in this case the Aria end-of-year top 100 singles) to get a feel for whether Triple J is becoming more mainstream. At that point, I didn’t think there had been any major trend towards more popular music.



I’ve run the same analysis again, with similar results (more details on the methods below):



The result in 2016 is the same as it was in 2015. While it’s slightly higher than it has been in the 2000s, the crossover is still lower than the high point in the late 90s, when the likes of Silverchair, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More hit both the singles charts and the Hottest 100.



It’s also worth noting that some of the artists mentioned as examples of mainstream or pop music, such as Beyoncé, haven’t appeared in the Aria end-of-year list for a while. Beyoncé’s last appearance was 2011’s Best Thing I Never Had (whether this is due to the thematic shift in her work, or her use of different platforms and marketing, I’ve no idea).

So, I also looked at the appearance of artists in the Hottest 100 and checked if they’d ever appeared in an Aria end-of-year chart:



Again, there’s no trend towards the Hottest 100 becoming more mainstream, even taking into account artists who make guest appearances in songs.



But one thing that definitely has changed is the mix of genres. I used Spotify’s API to obtain what it considers to be the top two genres that describe each artist, and then grouped these genres into five broad categories.

There have been two large shifts in genre. The first is the rise of electronic music, and the second is the increasing popularity of hip-hop (grouped here under “urban”):

Music loosely grouped under “rock” (stuff with guitars, bass, drums – this includes everything from metal to indie rock) has ceased to dominate the poll as it did in the early years, but it’s still by far the largest category. I’ve previously done a more detailed breakdown on genres, if you’re interested in specific categories.

Female representation in the Hottest 100 is also improving, with the 2016 result the equal second-highest since 1993 based on figures compiled by BuzzFeed, which I’ve updated here:

This counts any act that has a female artist involved, including as a guest vocalist, and sits at 34% in 2016. Significantly, in this year’s poll seven of the top 10 tracks, and all of the top three, had a female artist involved – which sets a new record for the poll.

Alongside these shifts there has been a big increase in the phenomenon of the guest artist, which is characteristic of both electronic music and hip-hop:



Finally, anyone looking to criticise the inclusion of pop artists in the Hottest 100 should keep the 1994 result in mind, when Kylie’s Confide in Me made it to No 30.



Triple J Hottest 100: does Australia's youth broadcaster have an identity crisis? | Shaun Prescott Read more

Methods

I scraped the Aria end-of-year singles charts and the Hottest 100 lists since the 1993 countdown (which was the first time Triple J restricted the vote only to songs in the previous year). I then compared the crossover between the two by programmatically matching the similarities in track titles and artists (this relies on a threshold for string similarity so might not be entirely accurate in a small number of cases). The same method was used to determine any appearance in the Aria charts.

Genres were assigned using using Spotify’s API and taking the first two genres listed where available. Songs that had no genres listed were discarded. Genres were classified into five overall categories for the final chart.

• Download the Hottest 100 list here

• Please contact me if I’ve made a mistake with any part of the analysis