Warmest 100 Back On For 2014

It’s on. Again. Triple J looks set for another summer upset in the coming week thanks to Nick Drewe and his band of merry men. Against all odds, the Warmest 100 is back on for 2014. Here’s what they think will be in the top 10.

The Triple J Hottest 100 is an institution. On Australia Day, most young Aussies gets together with some beers and a barbecue to listen to the 100 best songs of the last 12 months counted down on their radios. That institution was spoofed last year when some clever programmers realised they could predict the countdown based on everyone’s social sharing, and managed to nail a high percentage of the tracks, including the number one position. Triple J cracked it at the programmers, and cracked down on social sharing to the point that the Warmest 100 seemed impossible this year.

Or at least it was, until yesterday.

His name is David Quach. He’s an economist who helped with the Warmest 100 last year, and yesterday he told Nick he’d seen a lot of people sharing their vote confirmation emails via Instagram.

When somebody voted in the Hottest 100 last year, Triple J would send out a little social share sheet of everything they had placed. Using Twitter and Facebook hashtags, the Warmest 100 were able to pick almost every single song that would be in the countdown.

Triple J killed the share sheet this year because of the actions of the Warmest 100 team, but the radio station still decided it was a good idea to send out confirmation emails showing people what they had voted for in order from 1 to 100.

The Warmest 100 crew in fact owe their upcoming success in 2014 to Instagram- and Twitter-using Triple J listeners, who photographed their entries and shared it on the social networks.

From there, rather than hard code every single one of the almost 1700 entries, Nick Drewe and his team used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull out the raw data. Because each image was more or less in the same format, the process was relatively painless and simple.

The Warmest 100 crew told us previously that they don’t need a massive sample size to predict the winners. Last year they collected 3600 entries to tabulate the winners. This year they have half that, and still Nick believes it’s ample enough to predict the winner.

Here’s the top 10 as it stands in the Warmest 100 (spoilers, duh):

  1. Vance Joy – Riptide
  2. Arctic Monkeys – Do I Want To Know
  3. Flume & Chet Faker – Drop The Game
  4. Arctic Monkeys – Why’d You Only Call Me When I’m High
  5. Violent Soho – Covered In Chrome
  6. The Preatures – Is This How You Feel?
  7. James Blake – Retrograde
  8. Lorde – Royals
  9. Rufus – Take Me
  10. London Grammar – Strong

The message from Nick to Triple J?

“You can’t stop people sharing.”

Good luck to the boys in this year’s countdown. Check out the full list here. [Warmest 100]


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