Who will win triple j's Hottest 100 of the 2010s?

Gotye & Kimbra

Picking a winner in triple j's upcoming Hottest 100 of the decade is not going to be easy. It's sure as hell going to be harder than picking a winner in an annual countdown. I'm no mathemagician but it's at least going to be 10 times more difficult. Yay, maths!

So how can you predict a winner in this race (which takes place on Saturday March 14) or even a top 10?

Well, there are lots of things you can take into account. Such as....

What we know so far

Over the past week, triple j has been counting down from 200 to 101, which has taken some surprising songs out of the Hottest 100 (goodbye Uptown Funk). All of the #1s are still in the race, but two #2s are gone (Flume's Rushing Back and Little Red's Rockit). There are also two #3s, four #4s, and three #5s out of contention, with 2010 the most pilfered year so far. That theoretically leaves 39 songs that made it into previous top fives still in contention, which is a pretty good place to start building a top 10.

The full list of 200-101 can be found here.

What is fascinating so far is the randomness of it all. G Flip's Drink Too Much finished #6 just months ago behind Tones & I's Dance Monkey (#4), yet in this countdown G Flip was higher (#166 vs #182). Also 16 songs that didn't feature in a previous Hottest 100 have landed between 200 and 101. Twelve of those songs have been hip hop tracks, including two Frank Ocean tracks, and two Kanye West songs. Make of that what you will. So far the most successful acts between 200 and 101 have been Ruel, Lana Del Rey, Thundamentals and Frank Ocean, with three songs each.

Past winners

Theoretically speaking, the top 10 songs of the decade will be the ten winners of the Hottest 100 from each of the ten years, right? While the popularity of songs ebbs and flows over the years, this is actually not a bad idea for getting at least a few guaranteed* correct guesses in your top 10 (*note: there are absolutely no guarantees). The best and most informative precursor to this decade countdown is triple j's Hottest 100 Of The Past 20 Years, which took place in 2013 to celebrate two decades of the Hottest 100 being a yearly countdown.

In the top 11 songs of the 20 Years poll, there were five songs that had won a previous Hottest 100. Perhaps surprisingly though, not all of the 20 previous winners made it into the top 100. For the record, five #1s that didn't make the list - Denis Leary's Asshole (1993), The Offspring's Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) (1998), Alex Lloyd's Amazing (2001), Bernard Fanning's Wish You Well (2005), and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' Thrift Shop  (2012).

The Hottest 100 of the first 20 years

In fact, 2013's 20 Years countdown is full of fascinating data that could be useful for predicting a top 10. For example, there were eight songs that made the 20 Years countdown that are eligible for this decade's poll - alt-j's Breezeblocks, Gotye & Kimbra's Somebody That I Used To Know, Matt Corby's Brother, The Black Keys' Lonely Boy, Of Monsters & Men's Little Talks, Lana Del Rey's Video Games, Angus & Julia Stone's Big Jet Plane, and Foster The People's Pumped Up Kicks, none of which landed between 200 and 101.

Even more telling is the fact that in the 20 Years poll, 64 out of the 100 songs had appeared in the top 10 of a previous Hottest 100. In other words, almost two-thirds of the list could be found in the top 10 per cent of previous lists. Sifting through previous top 10s would at least narrow your choices down to 100 songs, not 1000.

It is worth noting though that there are always great songs that don't make the Hottest 100 each year, as I wrote about in this piece I helped put together for Tone Deaf. So how many songs made it into the 20 Years poll without gracing an annual Hottest 100?

The answer is six songs. One of those was Foo Fighters' Everlong, which made it into the top 10 in the 20 Years poll, despite failing to get voted into the 1997 (or '98) countdown (note: an acoustic version was voted into the 2006 Hottest 100). If this doesn't effectively demonstrate that anything could happen in the Decade countdown, then nothing else will.

The bookies

There are at least three betting agencies (Sportsbet, Unibet and Betfair) were taking money on the upcoming Hottest 100 up until recently (although Betfair has either closed its books or dropped out). Initially all three had Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know as favourite and after that the odds varied wildly, but with a day to go things have settled down. Gotye is still favourite followed by RUFUS' Innerbloom, Arctic Monkeys' Do I Wanna Know?, and Violent Soho's Covered in Chrome. After that things get a bit messy.

But buyer beware - Sportsbet had the shortest odds on the eventual Hottest 100 winner in 2017 and 2018, but got it wrong in 2019. So don't treat the bookies as gospel. Also, they had Uptown Funk in their top 20 favourites, and that ship has already sunk.

100 Warm Tunas

It's also a matter of caveat emptor for social media aggregator 100 Warm Tunas. In its four years of existence it has a 50 per cent success rate of picking the overall winner. This time around, it looks even less likely to be able to pick the #1. This is because the number songs being voted for is probably going to be higher, which means its limited sample size will come into play. At the time of writing it had sampled just over one per cent of the likely possible total number of votes.

But what is Warm Tunas predicting? At the time of writing the Warm Tunas top five is reasonably close to what the bookies are saying, although it puts Violent Soho's Covered In Chrome at #1. In the past, picking a top 10 that mingles Warm Tunas with Sportsbet has been a solid way to find a top 10.

Patrick Avenell

If you want to know what's going to be in the top 10, ask this guy. He's on Twitter (@patrickavenell) and he's really good at it.

Most popular bands of the decade

It seems likely that acts that have polled well in Hottest 100s over the past decade will do well in the Hottest 100 of the decade. Right? So I did some digging, made a spreadsheet, and here's what I found. (Just a note - this counts total appearances, including featured spots on other people's songs and remixes)

16 appearances - Flume
12 - Kanye West, The Wombats
11 - Hilltop Hoods, Illy, Kendrick Lamar, Tame Impala
10 - Flight Facilities, Florence Welch (Florence & The Machine), Lorde, RÜFÜS/Rufus Du Sol, Scarlett Stevens (San Cisco), Thundamentals
9 - Ball Park Music, Billie Eilish, DMA’s, Florence And The Machine, Peking Duk, San Cisco, Sticky Fingers, The Amity Affliction, Vance Joy

Cover bands

The songs that do well in the Hottest 100 of the decade will be the ones that have lived on beyond their release. They will have become staples on people's playlists, been flogged on other radio stations, turned into festival favourites, or perhaps found a new lease of life on TV and film soundtracks. Or they may have found their way into the setlists of cover bands.

This is a strange theory, and maybe it's a really regional thing, but hear me out. Back in 2013 when the Hottest 100 of the past 20 years happened, I noticed that a lot of the top songs had featured in the set list of a lot of local cover bands (including my own) at one point or another. And they were the songs that went off, without fail. Wonderwall, Seven Nation Army, Mr Brightside, These Days... even Last Goodbye and Everlong if the cover band was a little more adventurous. This isn't foolproof, but if your local cover bands have added some post-2010 triple j-friendly songs to their setlists, give some thought to what those tunes are.