The 2022 triple j Hottest 100 was one of the worst to dance to in almost a decade, an ABC News analysis of audio data has found.
The winning track — Flume's Say Nothing, featuring MAY-A — was also the least-dancey track to win the countdown since Muse's six-minute, prog rock epic Knights of Cydonia in 2007.
Data also shows that the average tempo of the 2022 Hottest 100 was the second-fastest on record since counting began back in 1993.
The findings are based on 30 years of audio data collected from the streaming platform Spotify, and include nearly every one of the 3,000 songs to have been voted into the countdown by triple j listeners.
When a song is uploaded to Spotify, it is analysed and assigned data that helps power the streaming platform's recommendation algorithm.
The algorithm calculates exact data, such as a song's tempo, key and its duration, as well as less-tangible features, such as its emotional valence (a feeling of positivity or negativity), its energy (energetic tracks feel fast, loud and noisy) and how good a track is to dance to (danceability is determined by a song's tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength and overall regularity).
Those data offer a fascinating insight into the musical evolution of the Hottest 100 and, in turn, the changing tastes of young Australians.
In the early to mid-90s, songs in the Hottest 100 were generally pretty average to dance to. Songs were also more likely to feature instrumental sections.
In fact, the 1995 count had the lowest level of "danceability" on record.
Based on these five variables, we calculated the most-average song for each year. If you turn on your audio and hit play below, you can hear these tracks as you scroll down.
This period was heavily dominated by rock music, meaning "energy" levels were at an all-time high.
"Energy" peaked between 1999 and 2001 — an era remembered for the (often-maligned) nu-metal genre. Bands such as KoЯn, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach all featured in the Hottest 100 at this time.
If the 90s was the decade of guitar-driven rock, then the 2000s was the internet era.
As it became easier to find new music, the sonic make-up of the Hottest 100 began to reflect that.
The rise of genres such as pop, rap and electronica meant the count became more "dancey".
Song tempos were also increasing, peaking at an average of almost 132 beats per minute (bpm) in 2007.
A year later, song positivity also peaked.
The next 10 years saw a major shift in the sound of the Hottest 100.
Positivity began plummeting, song tempos dropped and energy levels bottomed out.
But the songs were still getting way better to dance to, according to the data.
Data from the past few years show the Hottest 100 has once again entered another new phase. Danceability has fallen three years in a row — something that has never happened before.
Song tempo recorded its single-largest increase in one year, jumping a whopping 10bpm to an average of 130 in 2021.
And it climbed again in the most recent 2022 count, meaning the 2021 and 2022 counts were, on average, the third- and second-fastest in terms of beats per minute in the Hottest 100's history.
You have to go back 15 years to 2007 to find a higher average bpm. That year it hit an all-time high of 131.78 — when acts such as Bloc Party, Muscles and even Daft Punk were all making waves.
The last time ABC News ran this analysis was at the start of 2019. At the time, it found triple j listeners in a moody spot.
Songs were sad, they were as slow as they'd ever been, and energy levels were down, but songs were the best they'd ever been to dance to.
However, since that time, there have been some intriguing changes.
Along with the skyrocketing tempo changes, valence — the measure of positivity — increased every year between 2019 and 2021.
The countdown of 2021 was the most-positive year for the Hottest 100 in more than a decade, and the number one song for that year — a Wiggles cover of Tame Impala — was one of the most-positive songs to ever top the countdown.
Jadey O'Regan is a lecturer in contemporary music at the University of Sydney who specialises in the analysis of pop music.
Dr O'Regan — a confessed music data nerd — said that, while there were many variables that could influence the sound of music at any given time, it was hard not to speculate on the impact a global pandemic had on music in the 2020 and 2021 Hottest 100s.
"Music doesn't exist in a vacuum, it lives in a place at a time in a society and is listened to and made by a particular bunch of people at any given time," she said.
"I wonder if that's a reflection of wanting to hope for things to feel better."
Dr O'Regan also suggested the impact of COVID-19 on music might be felt for years to come because many artists chose to delay releases because of the devastating impact of lockdowns on the music industry.
Is the guitar band back?
One of the clearest trends to have emerged in the analysis is the diversification in the types of music featuring in the Hottest 100.
The countdowns of the 90s were dominated by rock music. According to our analysis, which filtered the genres of each track collected in the Spotify data into six broad musical categories, almost three-quarters of the songs that made it into the count in the 90s were classified as "rock".
You only need to look at the most-popular acts in Hottest 100 history to see how much guitar bands have dominated countdowns.
However, as tastes changed — and the ability to discover and share music through the internet emerged — the genres began to diversify.
More dance tracks began to feature among people's favourite songs of the year, indie music began to boom and, as the stigma of pop being a dirty word began to fade, it too began to dominate as a genre.
This diversification of modern music is a trend that can be traced back to the late 70s, according to Dr O'Regan, when rock music began splintering into all these different genres.
"We started to get disco and punk, and new spaces to allow for different kinds of music to be made as part of either the mainstream or not the mainstream. And, I think, that's absolutely continued, almost on a micro level these days."
Like all good trends, it seems the trusty old guitar may well be making a bit of a comeback.
Looking at the genre data, we're able to see rock music hit a low in 2018 and 2019, with just six songs from that genre making it into the count in those years. However, since then, it has been steadily creeping back in. In this year's Hottest 100, there were 11 rock songs.
Genre data alone, however, does not tell the full picture. These days, the line between what is rock or indie or even pop is blurry, and bands that play rock music can easily be classified in another genre.
Digging a bit deeper, it helps to look at Spotify's measure of a song's "energy". Songs that are high in energy "feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy", according to the streaming platform's own documentation.
To get a sense of what that sounds like, the song in the 2022 Hottest 100 with the highest energy reading was The Smith Street Band's I Don't Wanna Do Nothing Forever. On the other end of the spectrum was Billie Eilish's mournful acoustic track The 30th.
So the higher the average energy score, the more likely a Hottest 100 is to feature rock 'n' roll songs.
We can see a clear uptick in energy over the past couple of years. In fact, 2022 was slightly more energetic than the inaugural count back in 1993.
Current triple j Mornings presenter Lucy Smith said it was clear that listeners still loved guitars.
"I just think this countdown, in particular, shows that bands — and particularly guitar bands — are still reigning supreme," she said.
So what does it take to be number one?
To get an even more granular look at the data, we analysed the audio features for all the songs to make it to number one since polling began.
We plotted them on the chart to help compare each song over time. The further away from the centre, the more prominent that feature is for that track.
The player below lets you hear the song to get a sense of how the different audio footprints sound.
Two interesting trends emerged: Number one tracks these days are more likely to be better to dance to, and the songs of the past decade are more likely to fall within the three- to four-minute range.
However, perhaps the strongest pattern to emerge from flipping through 30 years of number one songs is that there isn't really a pattern to what makes a winning track.
Al Newstead is triple j's music news producer and, since 2018, has been writing analyses of the number one track. He said the lack of a clear trend made sense because the Hottest 100 winner tended to be an outlier in its year.
For a song to win, it needed to be more than just a great piece of music, it needs to have an X factor, he said.
"In every example in the last few years, you can see there's a few different strands that push it right up the top, as opposed to it just being the best song of the year," he said.
Today, that might mean going viral on TikTok, or tapping into the rich vein of nostalgia — like The Wiggles did in 2021 — or flourishing in a passionate Minecraft subculture, such as Glass Animals did the year before that.
"It's got to be some sort of weird subcultural push. It's got to be some sort of dominance of keeping it in people's minds. If that means touring, if that means TikTok remixes, all that kind of stuff makes a huge difference," Newstead said.
Credits
Reporting: Mark Doman
Development: Katia Shatoba and Thomas Brettell
Notes about this story:
The figures in the stream graph show a calculation based on the average of each of the five variables for that year. For each variable (tempo, danceability, etc), the average was then converted into percentage, based on where they fell between the minimum and maximum value for each year.
Spotify's audio features data contain an "instrumentalness" feature, which predicts whether a track contains no vocals. In our stream graph, we inverted this measure to create the vocal variable. We then performed the same calculation listed above.
To obtain the genre data, we wrote a script to scan the genre data from Spotify for the words "rock", "pop", "electronic", "indie", "rap" and "folk". If there was no match or multiple matches, we listened to the artists and entered the genre manually.
You can learn more about Spotify's audio features on the streaming service's API reference guide.
