Did you listen to or see the triple j Hottest 100 countdown? Did something feel off? Maybe you couldn't put your finger on it. Maybe you just weren't excited by the tracks. And then you think: "maybe it's me?"

Or maybe not. The numbers tell a different story, and while I haven't yet had time to properly dive in and run a more comprehensive breakdown - here's a start I've made, with some commentary. Take it for what it's worth.

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Let's get the obvious bit out of the way - this year's Hottest 100 is a terrible showing for Australian music. Here's a comparison of a few years of the poll results to illustrate:

Only 18 Australian artists made the countdown this year, and that's the lowest we've ever seen in the end-of-year poll. Pretty cooked for a station whose main charter is to promote Australian culture! Unfortunately, it gets worse.

While I was trying to understand what was going on with 2024, I started making a note of when the countdown's Australian artists first became active (usually the year of their first recording). It looked like this:

Here's where things get really messed up: the average distance of time from the poll to the artists' first release was 10.39 years. So, the 18 acts that were lucky enough to chart in the Hottest 100 have been recording and releasing music for an average of more than 10 years.

Doesn't feel very "youth" or contemporary to me, but what do I know?

Let's look at some historical trends:

That's insane.

Some notes:

• The average number of years since the artists' first release in 1996 was 5.25 years - but that includes AC/DC and Midnight Oil, both acts that started releasing music 20 years earlier! This negates any arguments about Missy Higgins being an outlier in the 2024 poll.

• In 2014, in amongst a huge year of 60 tracks from 38 Australian artists, a whopping 6 artists released their first-ever track in the previous year - brand new acts getting a placement in the Hottest 100.

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A few thoughts

• Let's just get something out of the way: as a cultural influence, triple j doesn't matter anymore. It hasn't mattered for years. It's not a matter of opinion: their ratings have been in freefall for years, with the last few years recording some of the worst ratings ever seen for any contemporary music station in Australia. I encourage you to browse the last year worth of surveys to take in just how fucked the station is - it's well and truly on the bottom of the ladder, and it used to be a credible force on all Metro surveys (to varying degrees). When HIT 104.1 (2DAY FM) is kicking your arse in the Sydney market, you know it's a bad time.

• The Hottest 100 isn't really a commentary on triple j's programming or even the station's own listeners, and it hasn't been for quite some time. The station began losing audience to radio stations like Nova in the 2010s, and that was shown in the poll's results, which frequently saw excellent showings for tracks that weren't era-defining hits on the station but played well in commercial media and on the ARIA charts. I don't have playlist data going back this far, but (for example) tracks like Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" and Tones & I's "Dance Monkey" both jump out as being anomalies for the station's audience at that time. (Always happy to be proven wrong on this.)

• Despite that, interest in the Hottest 100 as a cultural event increased significantly over the years, even while triple j's audience was being eroded. With the previous point in mind, the poll's results were always going to be significantly influenced by people outside of triple j's listener demographic.

• In conclusion: all we can take from the Hottest 100 is information about the people that voted in the Hottest 100. So this is about the voting population - self-professing music fans - and where they're at.

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So what does it all mean?

2024's Hottest 100 result tells us that Australian music is no longer significant in our cultural conversations

A huge aspect about what defines modern culture is shared moments - the ones that find a significant audience and create a moment, one that's shared and creates a cultural touchstone for that point in time, for what was happening in that time.

Our big shared cultural moments are now defined through social media - the "Apple" dance! the "Hot To Go" dance! Saltburn becoming a TikTok phenomenon! - and reinforced through streaming. This has created a dramatic shift in listeners' tastes.

Australian artists are - more than ever - competing against a global pool of "content", and if we're going to play a numbers game like that, Australian music is going to lose. We're seeing that every day through reduced engagement with Australian music.

It's the ecosystem, stupid

This whole problem is bigger than triple j. The 2024 Hottest 100 result scares the shit out of me, but the problems don't begin or end with triple j's programming or the station itself. At the end of the day, they're just collateral as part of a major cultural shift - and the effects have been far more wide-reaching.

All of our local music media has been eroded or destroyed. Street press provided critical infrastructure to talk about local acts and give them an identity. Online blogs and culture publications gave amplification to niches. We had more music on TV, which people actually watched once upon a time. And there was arts journalism in major mastheads.

Live music as a total industry in 2025 is big, but local live music is a shadow of what it was 20 years ago, in terms of volume and turnouts - this is being obscured in the industry-wide numbers by big international tours, which keep breaking records. None of this is making a comment about quality - underground art is as phenomenal as it's ever been, as I say over and over again - but in terms of what's being fed, nurtured, and given airtime - it isn't finding its way to people like it used to.

So what caused all this?

Online platforms killed triple j and the rest of media, and now everyone's hooked up to the same feed

triple j's a sad story of yet another media entity being cannibalised by tech platforms and spat out. I've watched it happen over and over again - for my sins - while I worked for many of Australia's larger media companies, where I got front row seats to watch their influence and capital get eroded by tech.

I don't think Big Tech has always wished for the death of media, but they definitely didn't care what happened to media as long as their own platforms ultimately came out on top. Their tactics were underhanded: for example, Facebook lied about the performance of short-form video - and my team was in charge of delivering a media company's adoption of video thanks to this exact farce - and, like with nearly every company that followed the same path, dozens of journalists lost their jobs, a lot of money was wasted, and media lost valuable time that should have been spent competing with social media rather than making it their most important audience driver.

In the 2010s, media companies were generally too agog and far too comfortable to respond to the changes and curveballs that were being thrown at it, or even necessarily aware that Big Tech wasn't their friend and might actually try to eat their lunch. Media companies were stable, multi-decade businesses, and tech disrupted the whole game in the space of a few years. That was an industry that never got on top of the shifting sands - plus this new wave of Silicon Valley culture was exciting, intoxicating, and we were all addicted to their platforms ourselves.

triple j lost audience because platforms and record labels found a far more efficient way to define culture - through algorithms. People now consume music more and more through what's pushed to them through feeds. Whether that's a TikTok FYP, a Spotify playlist, your Instagram feed, it's more likely that your attention is going to be with those sources rather than anything else - a centrally brokered feed.

The thing is, record companies don't care where you're getting your music from as long as they have a solid share of the revenue. And if they can invest in 5 blockbuster international artists rather than a complex, changing local ecosystem - they can, and will, and do. Yes, A&R for local artists still exists, but don't kid yourself. The labels go where the money is - and we've just seen a sickening blow get dealt to investment in local artists if this trend holds.

This is urgent

How do we make it so that local art is a valued part of popular culture? It's a problem that everyone needs to take an interest in, and if we don't answer the question, this trend won't stop here. This is a serious problem that listeners and facilitators need to wrestle with.

I don't think we can look at streaming and social media as a necessary evil any more - I genuinely believe they are corrosive devices that are watering down community engagement and culture at every turn. The forces that makes stuff play well on an economy of views, clicks and streams is one that favours some types of culture over others. It doesn't make the stuff that does well bad, but it does raise the question of what you're missing - Australian music, for example.

I've been thinking about these problems for a long time - it's why I created SydneyMusic.net: to provide a completely missing truly local view of what's happening in my city without the information being obscured by a game of chance with an algorithm.

If we don't start having serious, engaged, rational conversations about the effects of this outsourcing of cultural facilitation, so much that we love about what makes Australian music great could disappear - just like Australian media did.