Hottest 100 Experts On Who They Predict Will Top This Year’s Countdown

UPDATE: The winner of triple j‘s Hottest 100 of 2016 has been announced.

UPDATE 26/01/17: The Hottest 100 of 2016 has begun! Follow the countdown live right here.

ORIGINAL STORY: It’s Hottest 100 season right now, and that means every man, woman and their statistics-loving dog is trying to predict how the countdown will fall when triple j drops its listeners’ hottest tracks of 2016 this Australia Day.

Luckily, some people take the whole Hottest 100 predictions business very, very seriously, so we’ve spoken to two of them, locked down their top picks and delved into their statistical processes. Neither of them have shared their predictions publicly in previous years, despite tracking the public’s Hottest 100 votes.

So, without further ado, here’s who’s trying to predict this year’s Hottest 100, and what they’re predicting will claim a place on this year’s countdown.

‘The Bean Counter’s 100’

38-year-old Timothy Wilshire from Windsor, Brisbane has been a tax accountant for the last 17 years, and this year’s he’s debuting his latest creation, The Bean Counter’s 100, which has counted over 45,500 of this year’s Hottest 100 votes.

Wilshire reckons Amy Shark’s song ‘Adore’ has the best chance of taking out top spot. He tells Music Feeds that based on his statistical analysis, the song is “70 per cent likely to win the countdown”. He’s also “very confident” that Flume’s ‘Never Be Like You’ will come in second, with Tash Sultana’s ‘Jungle’ poised for third place.

Wilshire has used ballots posted to Instagram for his vote-counting, which has been tracking the #Hottest100, #triplejhottest100 and #triplej hashtags. The votes have been collated into a monster Excel spreadsheet, which auto-tracks the number of votes each song receives. He says the whole thing should be “very accurate”.

“I’m very confident in the songs in the top three, as their vote lead is very large considering the [two per cent] sample size,” Wilshire says. “There will be a lot of close balloting from four onwards, so you can never say it will be in the exact order.”

Wilshire says he successful predicted the top seven songs in last year’s poll, just not in the correct order, and adds that he’s not counting ballots from Twitter or Facebook because “not enough people in Australia use Twitter” and Facebook content is usually kept pretty private.

View The Bean Counter’s 100 prediction for this year’s Hottest 100 top 10 below, and the full list of predictions at The Bean Counter’s 100 website.

The Bean Counter’s 100 Top 10

1. Amy Shark – ‘Adore’

2. Flume – ‘Never Be Like You’

3. Tash Sultana – ‘Jungle’

4. Childish Gambino – ‘Redbone’

5. DMA’s – ‘Believe’ (Cher Cover For ‘Like A Version’)

6. Hilltop Hoods – ‘1955’

7. Violent Soho – ‘Viceroy’

8. Illy – ‘Papercuts’

9. Peking Duk – ‘Stranger’

10. Catfish & The Bottlemen – ‘7’

‘100 Warm Tunas’

21-year-old Computer Science graduate Nick Whyte from the University Of New South Wales is behind 100 Warm Tunas, which is also using Instagram posts to track and count punters’ Hottest 100 votes.

Whyte says he correctly predicted last year’s top three Hottest 100 tracks, but kept the results to himself, so this year he’s taking things up a notch.

“I decided that keeping it to myself was no fun, and thought why not take a crack at putting a website together to showcase my insights into the results. I suppose the reason behind it all is less about the results, but rather as a bit of fun and a learning experiment for myself,” he says.

100 Warm Tunas is built around a Spotify playlist (below), which Whyte is constantly updating as he tallies all the votes he can find. He says this year’s top song “could go either way” between Flume’s ‘Never Be Like You’ and Amy Shark’s ‘Adore’, but he’s confident that his predictions for the top three will be correct, irrespective of their order.

Whyte reckons 100 Warms Tunas is “the most accurate” Hottest 100 predictor, because, as far as he can see, “no one else has done automated vote aggregation on this scale yet for the 2016 countdown”.

Catch Whyte’s predictions playlist (which is without Like A Version tracks, because they’re not available on Spotify), below.

100 Warm Tunas’ Predictions Playlist

Triple j has already teased the results of the 2016 Hottest 100 by releasing a bunch of juicy statistics about the songs on its upcoming countdown.

Earlier this week, self-described “Hottest 100 enthusiast” Patrick Avenell also shared his ‘Ultimate Historical Hottest 100 Playlist’, offering an insight into how the countdown (and our music tastes) have changed over the years.

Voting for triple j‘s Hottest 100 of 2016 closed earlier this week. The results will be counted down live on triple j from midday AEDT this Thursday, 26th January. Find your state’s start time, below.

Gallery: 15 Things The 2015 Triple J Hottest 100 Taught Us About Ourselves

Hottest 100 Of 2016 Start Times

12pm – NSW, ACT, VIC + TAS

11:30am – SA

11am – QLD

10.30am – NT

9:00am – WA

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