The times they are a-changin': On the ephemeral nature of music polls

This study examines voting results of two distinct but related long-running music polls conducted by Australia's public-owned youth radio station, Triple J, known as the Hottest 100. We document a number of stylised patterns displayed in the data related to song survival, rank ordering, movements, entry age and exit age across the five all-time Hottest 100 instalments. We also use the annual Hottest 100 data to provide empirical evidence that the radio station itself played a significant role in results of the 20-year poll via the annual release of CDs featuring subsets of songs from each year's annual poll (1993–2012).