What is it about?
The study examines voting results of two distinct but related long-running music polls conducted by Australia’s public-owned youth radio station, Triple J, known as the "Hottest 100". We document a number of stylised patterns displayed in the data related to song survival, rank ordering, movements, entry age and exit age across the five all-time Hottest 100 instalments. We also use the annual Hottest 100 data to provide empirical evidence that the radio station itself played a significant role in results of the 20-year poll via the annual release of CDs featuring subsets of songs from each year’s annual poll (1993–2012).
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Why is it important?
Our primary objective in undertaking this study was to understand better how aggregate preferences for music change and evolve through time. This can help give us some insights into more fundamental questions about how people respond to music, like: "What makes a song an enduring hit"?. Given the quantifiable link to the important economic outcome of sales in this significant industry, this makes perfect sense.
Perspectives
On Australia Day 2007, I was adamant that Eskimo Joe was going to be crowned number 1 in the Hottest 100 with their song "Black Fingernails, Red Wine". Much to my surprise they were beaten into number 2 by Augie March's "One Crowded Hour", and I'd started wondering whether this was the case merely because Augie March had the advantage of having a band name that began with the letter A and whether they attracted a lot of votes merely because a lot of people who went in to vote browsed the list of songs alphabetically by artist's name and subsequently voted for that particular song because that was when they were most susceptible to ticking a box. Some time later, I noted a controversial incident in the 2009 Hottest 100 of All Time poll where no solo female artist appeared in the Hottest 100 and a lot of listeners were outraged that this had occurred. And that also got me thinking about the possibility of a gender bias with respect to artists. After that, Jordi McKenzie and I got talking about these issues at a conference dinner, and as someone who had done a lot of work previously on modelling box office revenues from the motion picture industry, he was a natural collaborator for this kind of project. This paper is the ultimate product of our natural curiosities - and work - on the 'Hottest 100' topic.
Dr Liam J A Lenten
University of Adelaide
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Times They Are A-Changin': On the Ephemeral Nature of Music Polls, Economic Record, October 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4932.12370.
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