Australian artists 'falling off a cliff' in annual poll

It's an Australian summer musical tradition that's been starting and stopping barbecues since 1989 - but increasingly, something is missing.

The 2024 Triple J Hottest 100 featured just 27 Australian artists, the lowest level of Australian representation in the annual poll since 1994.

It's a steep drop from the years 2014 to 2022, when Australian music made up more than 50 per cent of the playlist.

And while there's some hope of a correction for the 2025 Hottest 100, to be revealed on Saturday, a new analysis shows the longer-term outlook for Australian music is grim.

Data gathered by the Australia Institute showed the decline in Australian artists in the Hottest 100 mirrored the decline of local representation in global streaming services.

"It's really fallen off a cliff in the last couple of years," the institute's Rod Campbell said.

He said streaming algorithms differentiated by language, not geography, meaning Australians were effectively treated as English-speaking music fans.

The result was that Australians were given English-speaking music without geographical considerations.

Campbell said it meant Australian musicians were at a huge disadvantage to American and British artists working in far bigger markets with global publicity machines behind them.

"It's not that Australians don't want to listen to Australian music, or that Australian music is not as good as it was three or four years ago," Campbell said.

"It's really the increasing dominance of streaming and social media like TikTok.

"That's how people are getting their new music, but the algorithms are not giving them Australian music to sample."

In 2025, Triple J held a mid-year poll, the Hottest 100 Australian Songs - a celebration of Australian music, that appeared to act as a nostalgic corrective to the 2024 result.

More than 2.5 million votes were cast, with INXS's Never Tear Us Apart taking top spot.

There is also some hope of a rise in Australian representation in this year's countdown, with songs by Tame Impala, G-Flip, Keli Holiday and Spacey Jane all likely to feature.

But Campbell said Australian music would continue to suffer without further government support.

"We're far below countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Germany in terms of the funding that we put into culture in general, and music in particular," he said.

Unlike Australian radio stations, streaming services are under no obligation to play Australian music. There are no quotas.

Ben Eltham, a lecturer in media and communications at Monash University, said "the cliff had been coming for a while".

"The entire architecture of cultural regulation in this country was written for the 80s for an analogue world," Dr Eltham said.

"Regulators and politicians have done nothing, even as the internet's completely upended our cultural life."

Triple J will count down the 2025 Hottest 100 on Saturday from midday AEDT.