The music that charts in Australia has changed considerably over the past couple of decades – rock is out, country is in and old tracks are new again.
But some trends remain – like the slow decline in the Australian appetite for Australian music, from as much as 30% of the annual chart in the early 1990s to low single digits.
There were only five Australian artists in the annual Australian Recording Industry Association Top 100 singles chart last year. This is actually a slight improvement from a few years ago; in 2023, just three Australians made the annual Aria chart.
Music charts have a long history in Australia, since the first national one appeared in 1966 in the newly formed Go-Set magazine. When the magazine closed in 1974 a journalist named David Kent took over, with the Kent Music Report continuing in various iterations until Aria started calculating its own charts in 1988.
These older charts were informed by sales of physical music in stores – but over the past decade this has largely given way to music streams. That’s not the only difference: Australian culture has changed a lot and so has how we discover new music.
In the early 2000s, an Australian Idol contestant topped the annual charts three years in a row. In the two-and-a-half decades since then, a lot of the ways we used to discover music have declined or disappeared – such as music magazines and dedicated websites, TV shows, community media, record stores and even some festivals.
At the same time, experts say the music industry itself has globalised and Australian music has become less influential.
“It’s pretty hard for the Australian record industry to influence the charts these days, compared to the 90s when they were the ones who sent the music videos to Video Hits so that people could listen to it, when they were the ones having to put singles in the shops so people could buy it,” says Dr Timothy Byron, who studies music and psychology at the University of Wollongong.
‘Australian music is fighting to be heard’
Analysis of more than 30 years of Aria charts shows this slow decline, from Australian music making up as much as 30% of the charts in the 90s to just 5% in the last couple of years.
The number of Australians who feature is a somewhat fuzzy metric, as musicians and bands can identify or be associated with multiple nationalities that are not always publicly stated. You can explore all of our data and find more about our methodology below.
Australian representation on the charts matters, not just for the artists themselves, or the industry, but also because what breaks through influences the kinds of stories being told – just as Bluey’s global success has taught a generation of US kids to speak ’strayan.
“We have great music here in Australia that talks about how we are, and what we’re like, and the things that we deal with, and the way that we feel about things,” says Dr Jadey O’Regan from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. “And it is a real disappointment that that music is fighting to be heard in a way that maybe in previous decades it wasn’t.
“It’s very hard to get a voice through the noise of that kind of globalised industry. So [now] we’re more shaped by that than we are [by] what’s happening at home.”
Fewer Australian artists, lower rankings
The peak of Australian representation came in 1992, when the charts featured 15 Australians out of 50 (the Aria chart was a Top 50 until a few years later) – including Love Is in the Air by John Paul Young (released in the 1970s), a compilation featuring John Farnham and a comedy track from The 12th Man.
The next peak is about a decade later, after the chart had grown to 100: 2004’s No 1 was What About Me by Shannon Noll, who was joined by multiple Australian Idol contestants, as well as the likes of Missy Higgins, Delta Goodrem and Jet.
And it’s not just that there are fewer Australians in later years. They also aren’t ranking as highly as they once did. There were three straight Australian No 1s from 2003 to 2005 but the highest ranked last year was 62 – and it was 24 the year before that.
O’Regan says some of this is due to changes in the cultural landscape. The loss of modes of discoverability, including street press and music blogs, and a fracturing audience that’s no longer glued to the same TV screen or radio station, make it harder to build a profile or to get your work stuck in everyone’s head through a ubiquitous commercial. Radio stations including Triple J, RRR and FBi have quotas that guarantee Australian music will be played but fewer people are tuning in, favouring Spotify, YouTube and TikTok instead.
“For an Australian artist to get a No 1 single, it’s very rare that it isn’t attached to some other thing,” says O’Regan, referencing collaborations with bigger stars or spots in hit shows or video games. “It’s very rare that it’s just an artist that’s doing their own thing and carving out their own career.”
It’s Riptide all the way down
The charts are also becoming more concentrated and repetitive. For each of the last five years there have been more than 30 tracks that appeared the year before. This has increased over the past decade – there were just 10 repeats in 2014, five in 2000, and two on average between 1988 and 1999.
It’s become so bad that the Aria has changed the rules to stop the likes of Vance Joy’s Riptide coming around year after year. It will now only count tracks that have been released in the past two years or haven’t been in the Top 100 for 10 years. The aim is to “support the discovery and celebration of great Australian music”.
The changes were necessary because while the charts used to be based on purchases of records, CDs and cassettes, they now include digital downloads and streaming, which account for more than 70% of industry revenues. Streaming has risen more than 50% in Australia in the last five years but the share of streams that are Australian content has fallen 31% over the same period.
As O’Regan and Byron argue in their research, the shift from physical to digital also changed what was being measured. Aria is now tracking engagement – so if you listen to the same track over and over on Spotify, that counts in a way it didn’t with a CD.
“[Buying a] 7-inch single will only contribute to the charts once,” they write, “while the streaming service plays might contribute to the charts for months or even years.”
That’s why Sunflower by the US musicians Post Malone and Swae Lee appeared for seven years in a row from 2018, after it featured in a Spider-Man movie; and why Stay by the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber – one of the few Australian tracks to make the charts in 2023 and 2024 – has appeared for four years straight.
Even older tracks are making comebacks. Dreams by Fleetwood Mac was released in the 1970s but is once again charting thanks to “a TikTok during Covid of a guy drinking juice on a skateboard”, O’Regan says. Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls has become a mainstay on the charts more than 20 years after it made its debut – also thanks to, in part, its popularity as background music for TikTok and Instagram videos.
At the same time as we are seeing increased repeats in the charts, the type of music that’s dominating has changed. Pop music – admittedly an expansive category that includes everyone from Kylie to BTS to Billie Eilish to Sam Smith – has remained steady throughout the last couple of decades. But rock music has fallen away significantly from its highs in the late 1980s and 90s, when Midnight Oil, Silverchair and Spiderbait were charting.
“Rock music had its 50-year run,” Byron says. “Rock music is very much about electric instrumentation. And we don’t live in the electric age any more; we live in an electronic age.”
Country has had the opposite story, increasing from just a few, if any, songs every year for much of the last 30 years to more than a quarter of the charts. The peak appears to be in 2024, when there were a bunch of crossover hits, including country albums from Beyoncé and Post Malone.
Just like country of origin, genre is a fuzzy metric, and not everyone will agree on the classifications we’ve used. We’ve had to split some hairs – between hip-hop and R&B, or pop and electronic, for instance. You can see our methodology in the notes below. But as Byron notes, genre is inherently subjective.
“There is an academic literature about what genre is,” he says. “[It’s] a set of musical characteristics that people kind of arbitrarily decided to go together. So people have arbitrarily decided the punk is loud guitars, fast … Genres are never objective.”
If you want to explore the data yourself – find your favourite artist, filter by country or genre, and have a play with the interactive below.
Notes and methods
Annual charts for each year were sourced from the Aria website
Each artist and song combination was matched against the MusicBrainz database to obtain country and genre details
If the song was a collaboration, the country reflects the first named artist
Artist country may be the country they are most associated with, rather than the country where they were born or started their career
Song genres were double checked against Spotify’s database, then manually rechecked
More than 130 unique song genres were categorised into one of eight “parent” genres: pop, electronic, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, country, rock and other.
