When it airs on Saturday, the 32nd Triple J Hottest 100 countdown will cap off a whirlwind year for the youth radio station.

There have been soaring highs: just last weekend, the station marked its mammoth five decades on air with a celebration attended by former and current presenters – as well as Anthony Albanese, who lauded the “extraordinary achievement”.

But over the past 12 months, Triple J has continued to wrestle with its greatest existential crisis: how to engage young audiences as listenership declines steadily. The station captured just 4.3% of broadcast audiences in 2023-2024, down from 4.6% the previous year and 5.5% before that – with the majority of listeners older than Triple J’s core 18-24 demographic.

“Under 25s all around the world are used to consuming entertainment on demand, curated for them by algorithms which ensure they only see and hear stuff they probably already like,” said one record label manager who asked not to be named.

In the last year, the station has also generated controversy with several high-profile departures. This will be the first Hottest 100 without the influence of Richard Kingsmill: the kingmaker and longest-serving Triple J presenter, who left the ABC in late 2023 in a rumoured redundancy after 35 years at the station.

Several other senior staff also exited at a similar time as part of a restructure of Triple J intended to “evolve” its offerings.

It may no longer be the anti-establishment bacchanalia of its earliest days, or the alternative tastemaker of its peak in the 2000s and 2010s. But the station’s countdown still draws gargantuan voting numbers – over 2.3m last year – and sends group chats ablaze with predictions and arguments. So how is this year’s Hottest 100 shaping up?

Viral sensations

Triple J’s target audience may no longer be tuning into the wireless – but they are lapping up its online content: the station has increased its following on all social channels in the past year. One song in particular went gangbusters when it was posted last January: Royel Otis’s Like a Version cover of Murder on the Dancefloor, which transposed Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s original into a sunny blast of indie rock that now has 7.5m views on Triple J’s YouTube and 3.9m on the station’s TikTok – plus an additional 14m TikTok views when the Australian band posted it to their own account.

If Royel Otis’s cover wins, it will be the second Like a Version to take out the countdown after The Wiggles’ 2021 rendition of Elephant by Tame Impala. It’s more likely, though, that this year’s top spot will go to another utterly inescapable earworm: Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!, a deeply camp poison-pen letter to a former lover complete with coruscating synths and a soaring, karaoke-hostile chorus sung entirely in falsetto.

Countdown prediction site 100 Warm Tunas currently has Roan tipped to win, with Royel Otis coming in behind. The site began scraping voting data from social media posts in 2016, though its accuracy has somewhat waned over the years as “people are now posting less and less to Instagram … and instead favour more ephemeral means of sharing, like stories,” says 100 Warm Tunas creator Nick Whyte.

Even so, tipsters would do well to believe his predictions: Whyte has correctly picked three of the last five winners, and this year’s data is even more promising. Good Luck, Babe! (Roan’s only eligible song) appears in 27% of voting slips collected by 100 Warm Tunas and Murder on the Dancefloor in 21% – whereas Whyte says previous years’ top contenders have sat closer to 18%.

Pop and lock it

It has been exactly a decade since the Taylor Swift debacle where fans started a voting campaign for the megastar’s track Shake It Off – which was later disqualified from the countdown. The hubbub now seems curiously old-fashioned in the face of genre-agnostic audiences and a Triple J playlist that includes a healthy dose of pop.

“The music in the Hottest 100 is more varied nowadays,” says Triple J music director Nick Findlay. “We’re seeing more voters celebrate a much broader musical taste in general with their votes split across different artists and genres.”

To no surprise, the countdown will be inundated with songs from Charli xcx’s Brat and its remix album, last year’s pop phenomenon which saturated the world (and certain political campaigns) in radioactive green. The British dance doyenne is slated to appear eight times in the countdown according to 100 Warm Tunas, with two tracks in the top 10. Her highest ranker is Guess, a squelching, lascivious collaboration with Hottest 100 favourite Billie Eilish – who has placed in the top 10 four times in the last five years and will probably appear at the pointy end again with her lovesick declaration Birds of a Feather.

Other pop stars likely to join the fray include Taylor Swift protege Gracie Abrams with That’s So True, a motor-mouthed kiss-off to an ex that became a fan favourite on TikTok; Tove Lo, with her Dom Dolla collaboration Cave; and Addison Rae, whose swooning single Diet Pepsi catapulted her from TikTok influencer to bona fide pop insider last year.

But what about the Australians?

Sharp-eyed pundits may notice a lack of original Australian songs in this year’s predicted top 10. Joining Chappell Roan, Royel Otis, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish in the top spots are Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us; British singer-songwriter Lola Young’s snarling break-up anthem Messy; Irish punk act Fontaines DC’s four-minute panic attack Starburster; DJ Fred Again’s fleet-footed Places To Be ; and another Charli remix – Girl, So Confusing, with Lorde.

Only one local track appears alongside them: One Bad Day, a howling plea for deliverance by Perth band Spacey Jane.

Data from 100 Warm Tunas, though, does have a bevy of Australian peers clocking in just behind the top 10, including Dom Dolla, Amyl and the Sniffers, The Rions, G Flip – with a cover of Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer – and Hottest 100 mainstays Ball Park Music, who have appeared 13 times in the countdown to date.

Australian music has suffered on Australian charts of late. In 2024, just five out of 100 songs on Aria’s year-end charts were Australian – and the highest-ranking was Vance Joy’s decade-old Riptide. Last year, the number of local songs in the Hottest 100 was the lowest it had been in 10 years, at 52 tracks.

Findlay says Triple J does “consistently play well over 50% of Australian music every week” – above its mandated quota of 40%. And, he says, “8 out of the 10 most played artists on Triple J were all local acts”.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times: a confluence of streaming domination and cultural cringe. Or maybe we just really loved Brat.

• Triple J’s Hottest 100 will be broadcast from midday on Saturday 25 January