what is triple j hottest 100

The Triple J Hottest 100 is a big annual music poll and radio countdown run by Australian youth station Triple J, where listeners vote for their favourite songs of the year and the top 100 are played in a marathon broadcast.

What it actually is

• It’s a listener-voted poll: people pick their favourite songs released in the previous year, usually via an online ballot before New Year’s.

• Triple J then counts the votes and plays the songs from 100 down to 1 in a full-day special broadcast.

• It’s been running since 1989 and has become a kind of annual snapshot of what younger, alternative-leaning audiences are into.

When it happens

• In the early years it bounced around different dates in January–March.

• From 1998 it settled on Australia Day (26 January), then moved to the fourth weekend of January from 2017 to avoid the Australia Day controversy.

Why people care

• The Hottest 100 has become a cultural event in Australia, with “Hottest 100 parties” where friends gather, throw on the countdown, and argue about the ranking.

• Artists can get a huge visibility boost from placing high, and songs that win often become tied to that year in people’s memories.

Variations and special polls

• Triple J sometimes runs special versions like the “Hottest 100 of All Time”, where people vote for favourite songs from any year, not just the last 12 months.

• They’ve also done themed counts like “Hottest 100 of Australian songs”, focusing only on tracks by Australian artists.

Recent context

• The 2024 Hottest 100 was topped by “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan, which also set a new record for the most votes received by a winner.

• Recent countdowns have sparked discussion about how streaming and social media (like TikTok) are shaping which songs dominate the list and whether it still reflects Triple J’s core audience.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.