A proposal to make the JJJ hottest 100 more inclusive

The rules used for calculating the triple J hottest 100 directly lead to results which are not as inclusive as they could be and don't actually reflect what people are doing when they vote for best song. In particular, I would contend that voters in the JJJ hottest 100 vote for artists, rather than particular songs.

This is why the 2009 hottest 100 had a top 10 song list which only included 7 artists. That was a good result for big fans of MGMT, The PreSets and The Kings Of Leon but was very anti-climatic for the rest of the population - especially for those fans of the 3 bands that just missed the top 10 (Ladyhawke, PNAU and The Herd).

Given that people actually do seem to block vote for their favourite artist, rather than favourite songs, I think a much better system would be one that did the following:

• allowed people to register votes for their top 10 artists
• for each artist, allow a small number of songs to be voted for.

To produce a ranking, the top 100+N songs would used to select the top 100 artists, but each artist would appear at most once in the list in the order of their most popular song.

This will improve the diversity of the list and make the top-10 countdown genuinely entertaining, rather than the anti-climax it is now.