NOSTALGIA, NATIONHOOD, AND THE COUNTDOWN
Triple J’s Hottest 100 Australian Songs of All Time campaign was a marketing masterstroke- and it might’ve just saved the station’s cultural relevance.
The Triple J Hottest 100 has been appointment listening for music lovers for decades.But in the last five years, listeners have drifted from radio. In general yes, but especially from Triple J - who typically have relied on under-25's as their core listener base.
Gen Z has been lost to algorithm-driven passive listening practice, and the convenience of skipping straight to what they already know they like. Triple J have dropped the ball and failed to swim with the turning tide.
However, over the last few weeks what started as a 50-year anniversary celebration of Triple J and Australian music has quickly turned into a full-blown nostalgia trip, fuelled by TikTok edits, millennial artists begging for votes, and Gen Z unearthing bangers their parents probably (definitely) hooked up to…if not on the d-floor then 💯 in the back of Dad’s 2002 Toyota Camry 🚗.
Voting in the 2025 Hottest 100 Australian Songs of All Time countdown has hit every emotional trigger and the prevailing rhetoric has been just how bloody hard whittling down 50 years of Aussie music to just ten votes has been.
And then there was the internal battle over what your voting strategy should be. Do you go the classics route? Do you choose based on the nostalgia metric - and if so - which era of your life do you prioritise? Mid-90’s hits from primary school? Coming-of-age classics from your teens? Or do you fill your top ten with the electro-house soundtrack of your early twenties?
What about the newer artists - doesn’t the future of Australian music deserve a spot too? Can they even hold their own against INXS or Cold Chisel?
No matter which way you slice it, it’s been a reminder of what Triple J used to be: a loud, proud champion of Aussie music. And for those of us who’d long tapped out of the station (and radio, full stop), it’s been a beautiful reminder of why we ever cared.
And then Ben Lee entered the chat and said the quiet part out loud: give the global countdown to commercial radio (Kyle & Jackie O can go nuts), and let Triple J focus on what it was built for - supporting Australian music.
It’s not just a spicy take, it’s a legitimate challenge to the ABC.
Because when you’re taxpayer-funded, you 100% should and do have a responsibility to invest in the culture that pays your bills.
That means backing emerging local artists and re-establishing Triple J as the place where the next generation of Aussie musicians is discovered - not just once a year in a Hottest 100 countdown, or once every 50 years for an anniversary countdown.
This campaign proved there’s still deep love for Australian music when it's given a platform and a story. Whether that story is the joy and validation of hearing your experience reflected in song when you can’t find the words, or that feeling of knowing you’re not alone in the world, or the soundtrack your teenage summers, first kiss, heartbreaks, house parties and hometown gigs on the air again.
The past few weeks has shown us that when Triple J leans into its roots, we all come out of the woodwork to advocate for Aussie music.
For elder millennials, it’s been a powerful reminder of how soundtrack-defining the Triple J heyday (mid‑’90s thru late-2010's) really was, restoring that magnetic pull and affection we once felt for the station. And in a trend-cycle where everything 90's and early 00's is cool again, Gen Z suddenly give AF about radio. And even their Gen X parents voted too.
Ahh music, the great uniter.
So, if that’s that case, then Ben Lee is right: let’s give the bangers back to the commercial stations, and let Triple J do what it does best - platforming the homegrown heroes who make this country (literally) sing.
And whilst I know we’ll all be tuning in on Saturday. The question is, will we keep tuning in come Monday?
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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