This study examines voting results of two distinct but related long‐running music polls conducted by Australia's public‐owned youth radio station, Triple J, known as the Hottest 100. We document a number of stylised patterns displayed in the data related to song survival, rank ordering, movements, entry age and exit age across the five all‐time Hottest 100 instalments. We also use the annual Hottest 100 data to provide empirical evidence that the radio station itself played a significant role in results of the 20‐year poll via the annual release of CDs featuring subsets of songs from each year's annual poll (1993–2012).