For the second year in a row, the boffins at The Warmest 100 tried their hardest to spoil Australia Day. But did they actually spoil anything?
Nick Drewe and his Warmest 100 team — including Tom Knox, Andy Thelander and Jack Murphy — had some success predicting last year's Hottest 100, accurately predicting 92 of the 100 songs in the Hottest 100 (and the first three in the correct order).
This year, they had a smaller base to work from, after Triple J made it harder for punters to publicly share their votes via Facebook. They did manage to collect over 17,800 votes via Twitter and Instagram, giving them roughly 1.3 percent of the total count to work with (and the confidence to brag about "spoling" the Hottest 100 again).
First thing's first — they did accurately predict that Vance Joy's 'Riptide' would come in at the number one spot while the rest of the nation was busy prematurely crowning Lorde, so if you took their advice, your bookie has a solid beef with them.
The Warmest 100 team will no doubt hang their hat on predicting that upset and congratulate themselves on another job well done. But it's worth noting that, overall, their accuracy dipped significantly from last year.
After nailing 92 of 100 tracks in 2013, The Warmest 100 accurately predicted 'only' 85 tracks this year. Not a bad result, especially when you take the smaller sample size into account, but not necessarily a slam dunk, either. (Only four of those 85 tracks placed in the spots predicted for them — including, of course, Vance Joy's 'Riptide'.)
The most dramatic errors were the placement of Lorde's 'Royals' (number eight in the Warmest 100; number two in the Hottest 100) and Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky' (number 15 in the Warmest 100; number three in the Hottest 100).
It's not just that those tracks placed higher than the Warmest 100 predicted; it's that everyone knew they would — when your barely informed guess ends up trumping the statistical analysis of 17,800 actual votes, the status of that analysis as a 'spoiler' is surely called into question.
Hindsight is everything, of course. While it's easy to say now that you totally knew Vance Joy would take out the number one spot, let's be real here — you didn't know. You thought it was going to be Lorde. Everybody did.
Except the guys who put together the Warmest 100.
