A Follow Up on my Hottest 100 Predictions

  • By: Alfie Chadwick Date: January 31, 2024
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    • In my last post I ended by planting my flag and making my predictions for the Hottest 100 for 2023. And on first glance, I’m pretty happy with myself, picking not only the top song, but a good chunk of the top 20. So today I just want to do a quick follow up on how I did.

    Top 20

    Song Artist Predicted
    paint the town red doja cat 1
    the worst person alive g flip 55
    saving up dom dolla NA
    rhyme dust mk 72
    prada cass 90
    adore u fred again 40
    what was i made for? billie eilish 3
    rush troye sivan 10
    lovin on me jack harlow 17
    chemical post malone 14
    vampire olivia rodrigo 2
    rumble skrillex NA
    kill bill sza 9
    atmosphere fisher NA
    nanana peggy gou 5
    sprinter dave 4
    back on 74 jungle NA
    eat your man dom dolla NA
    therapy budjerah NA
    sorry instead spacey jane NA

    The top 10 seems okay, but i did miss a lot of the top 20 completely. I seemed to be undervaluing Australian artists such as Dom Dolla, Spacey Jane, and G Flip, as well as EDM as a genre, which made up a much greater portion of the top 20 than I predicted.

    Snubbed Songs

    Song Artist Predicted
    love type poolclvb 6
    super ego babe rainbow 8
    adored royel otis 15
    lost without you san cisco 21
    super-vision dice 22
    blak britney miss kaninna 24
    ruthless hooligan hefs 26
    attention doja cat 27
    james dean tash sultana 28
    do it again benee 33
    i wish you roses kali uchis 35
    dash of speed rum jungle 36
    too much the kid laroi 37
    eyes ahead dice 38
    pets and drugs the rubens 42
    into your room holly humberstone 44
    up lee 46
    pegasus arlo parks 47
    exploding angie mcmahon 48
    calling metro boomin 50
    must be nice ruel 51
    better love eliza rose 52
    your funeral maya 53
    don’t let me down gus dapperton 54
    conceited lola young 56
    messed up holy holy 57
    lost in the rush telenova 58
    candle flame jungle 59
    prescription remi wolf 63
    change laurel 64
    angel pinkpantheress 65
    sinner the last dinner party 66
    midwest vacations 67
    pretty girl ice spice 68
    i wanna dance royel otis 71
    make up your mind cordae 74
    viper room thornhill 75
    weightless arlo parks 76
    can’t play myself skepta 78
    black mascara. raye 79
    feel alive cat 80
    tied up! genesis owusu 81
    mrs. hollywood gojo 84
    am i dreaming metro boomin 85
    comma’s onefour 86
    lola maya 87
    it’s cool to be in love greta stanley 88
    since i have a lover 6lack 89
    lil boo thang paul russell 91
    going kokomo royel otis 93
    all my life lil durk 94
    brain freeze northeast party house 95
    healing molly millington 96
    sticky kito 97
    rakata the jungle giants 98

    So there were 55 songs in my predictions that didn’t make it into the countdown, including 3 of my top 20. Funily enough though, a lot of my predictions seemed to line up with peoples opions online with Love Type, Super Ego and Adored all being mentioned as snubs from the hottest 100.

    Surprise Songs

    Song Artist rank
    saving up dom dolla 3
    rumble skrillex 12
    atmosphere fisher 14
    back on 74 jungle 17
    eat your man dom dolla 18
    therapy budjerah 19
    sorry instead spacey jane 20
    be your man g flip 22
    take it off fisher 23
    rich baby daddy drake 25
    rough g flip 26
    dance the night dua lipa 28
    say yes to heaven lana del rey 29
    not strong enough boygenius 30
    get him back! olivia rodrigo 34
    baby again.. fred again 35
    boy’s a liar pt. 2 pinkpantheress 36
    laced up hilltop hoods 37
    scary movies the rions 40
    pedestal lime cordiale 42
    popular the weeknd 43
    sweetheart old mervs 47
    padam padam kylie minogue 48
    australia g flip 50
    ten fred again 51
    i used to be fun teen jesus 52
    lookin’ out king stingray 53
    more than you know blink182 54
    all-american bitch olivia rodrigo 56
    darkside bring me the horizon 57
    lost bring me the horizon 58
    a&w lana del rey 60
    fall at your feet peking duk 64
    real life g flip 65
    leaving the light genesis owusu 69
    snooze sza 70
    speedracer teenage dads 74
    nobody gets me sza 75
    sofa king royel otis 76
    i don’t wanna be … ruel 77
    bleed the kid laroi 78
    video killed the … teenage dads 79
    7 days g flip 80
    like a girl does peach prc 81
    exes tate mcrae 82
    the summoning sleep token 83
    midnight driving teenage dads 88
    nightmare polaris 90
    did you know that… lana del rey 91
    strawberry daydream pacific avenue 92
    no bad days the terrys 93
    welcome to the dcc nothing but thieves 95
    stay blessed genesis owusu 97
    cool about it boygenius 98
    i miss you slowly slowly 99

    With 55 snubs, we are going to have 55 surprise songs. There doesn’t seem to be a massive trend here. G flip only made it into my countdown twice, so 5 of their songs are in this list. Its also interesting seeing which conventionally popular songs are part of this list. Boy’s a liar pt. 2 by Pinkpantheress and All American-Bitch which peaked at 2 and 10 on the aria charts were left out in my predictions, even though it predicted similar chart toppers in the top 10.

    Looking at these plots, it seems that the chart data for these songs didn’t correctly join with the play data from triple J. After cleaning the names, I was hoping that there wouldn’t be too much of a discrepancy. However, in the ARIA charts, “all-american bitch” is listed as “all-american b**ch,” and “boys a liar pt. 2” is listed as “boys a liar”. This kind of discrepancy is probably present throughout my dataset and may have led to some major inaccuracies. However, it is also just part of life when dealing with text data.

    Did I do better than Warm Tuna?

    Part of my mission when setting out to make these predictions was to outperform 100 Warm Tunas, who utilize a compilation of social media posts to formulate their predictions.

    Song Artist rank warm_tuna my_rankning
    paint the town red doja cat 1 9 1
    the worst person alive g flip 2 11 55
    saving up dom dolla 3 18 NA
    rhyme dust mk 4 5 72
    prada cass 5 19 90
    adore u fred again 6 6 40
    what was i made for? billie eilish 7 4 3
    rush troye sivan 8 1 10
    lovin on me jack harlow 9 49 17
    chemical post malone 10 28 14
    vampire olivia rodrigo 11 14 2
    rumble skrillex 12 3 NA
    kill bill sza 13 20 9
    atmosphere fisher 14 23 NA
    nanana peggy gou 15 15 5
    sprinter dave 16 22 4
    back on 74 jungle 17 13 NA
    eat your man dom dolla 18 59 NA
    therapy budjerah 19 8 NA
    sorry instead spacey jane 20 21 NA

    Straight away, I can see that warm tuna did better than me, but by how much?

    So, I made up a quick statistic to see how far off our predictions were. This is the sum of the magnitudes of the differences between the predicted score and the actual score. If a song didn’t make the top 100, it’s given the equivalent rank of 101. I then divide this by 100 to get the average deviation for each prediction.

    my score: 36.28 
    warm tuna's score: 26.5

    So from these statistics, we can see that my predictions were, on average, about 10 places more off than warm tuna’s.

    Next Year?

    I reckon this method still has promise, but I need to sort out the name joining issue to ensure that my method is working at its maximum potential. I also want to include genre and artist country into it since it seemed to be an important factor in the final rank that I didn’t account for.