In December last year, I was at Portside Festival, a festival in Newcastle with a majority of local artists. Although I had the best time, a tinge of sadness crept up with the thought that this could be one of the last festivals to spotlight Australian artists. That felt eerily prescient, because cut to January, and the 2024 Triple J Hottest 100 had the lowest number of Australian songs since 1996, with only 17 Aussie artists and a total of 29 songs, according to Airing Your Dirty Laundry. There was just one Indigenous artist in the top 100 (The Kid LAROI).
