Obstinately objective

Following on from the last post on the Hottest 100, I received a few tweets from @mjdart demanding a deeper dive into the data. One of his questions was

Of artists charting in at least 5 yrs, are Oz artists higher represented?

I decided to broaden the questions to look at artists with at least five tracks in Hottest 100s (so artists with two tracks in one year and one track in three other years would be in). On this criterion, Australia still comes out on top.

Number of artists with at least 5 “Hot” tracks

In the last post, I complained that 2010 data is currently missing from Wikipedia. It seems that this is because Wikipedia is yet to get permission from the ABC. I have decided to risk the wrath of Auntie and have posted the full chart in the table at the bottom of the post. Having pieced it together, I have updated my original chart to include 2010.

As you can see, 2010 was a good year for Australian artists. It also turns out that the artist with the most Hottest 100 tracks is also Australian: Powderfinger. Here are all the artists with at least 10 Hottest 100 tracks.

UPDATE:

@mjdart asked another question which I thought I should also answer:

@stubbornmule If you assign 100 pts for #1 thru 1 pt for #100 each year, is Oz proportion higher/lower? eg Oz filling out top or bottom 50?

To answer this, I assigned 100 points for the top spot, 99 points for the second and so on down to one point for last place. I summed the score for each country and then scaled it by dividing by 50.5. This odd choice arises because 100 + 99 + 98 + … + 2 + 1 = 5050 and so dividing by 50.5 would give a score of 100 for a country that managed to win every spot in the top 100. This makes the score directly comparable to a simple count of places in the top 100. So, how does this weighted score compare to a simple count? The answer, evident in the chart below is not much! So, each country’s artists must be fairly evenly spread through the top 100 over time.

Finally, here is the complete listing of the 2010 Hottest 100, including country of origin. If you are feeling brave, you may wish to update Wikipedia. Just keep in mind, the list may be deleted again if the ABC does not provide permission for the list to be published!

{ 1 comment }