We love the Rock 2000. So we counted all of it.
Every September, New Zealand's rock station hands its playlist to its listeners and plays the two thousand songs they voted for, from the bottom up. This is a fan-made archive of that countdown: every song, every rank, every year we can get our hands on.
Just take me to the musicThe 2026 season
The Rock
The Rock is New Zealand's rock radio station. It started life on 1 December 1991 as a single Hamilton frequency, The Rock 93FM, opening with Are You Ready? by AC/DC. In hindsight that was a statement of intent, and it has been broadcasting riffs nationwide ever since. It's part of MediaWorks NZ, and it streams in the rova app.
We have nothing to do with any of them. We just listen.
The Rock 2000
Once a year the station stops choosing the music. Listeners each pick between five and twenty songs, the votes are counted, and the result is a ranked list of two thousand rock songs. Then The Rock plays the whole thing: number 2000 first, then around a hundred songs a day, weekdays only, for four and a half weeks, until one song is left standing. Its fans call it Bogan Christmas, and they are not joking. MediaWorks put the 2023 vote at more than a hundred thousand people.
It didn't start at two thousand songs. It began as a 500, doubled the following year, went to 1500 in 2016, and only reached a full 2000 in 2020, which is why the archive below has a staircase in it.
The countdown is older than our data: the public archive we work from starts at 2002, and the event itself had already been running for a few years by then. We'd love the earlier lists if they ever surface.
Every number one
What Rock Analytics is
Twenty-four countdowns is a genuinely lovely dataset: public, opinionated, two decades deep, and argued about every year in every workshop and worksite in the country. So we pointed the tools we use for a living at it, and put the results here for anyone who wants a poke around.
The archive
Every countdown since 2002, rank by rank, and each song's full history in one place.
Compare
Put songs side by side and watch their fortunes cross over the years.
Trends
How the tracks age, which genres rise and fall, and where they come from.
Six Degrees
Pick two acts; we'll walk the shortest chain of musicians who played in both.
Vote Helper
Name a few favourites and it digs up songs you'd forgotten you love, in time to vote for them.
My Ballot
Keep your picks, then watch them land, or not, while the countdown airs.
2026 Predictions
A model's best guess at this year's list. It will be wrong somewhere, and that's half the fun.
Live
During September, what's just aired and the story so far: debuts, big movers, and how our predictions are holding up.
Where the numbers come from
rova's Votetrackr
The official countdown archive: rova publish every year's rankings, and they are the last word on what placed where. We keep a local copy so we can do arithmetic on it, and we fetch it politely.
The Rock's own airwaves
A record of what the station has played, logged every few minutes.
MusicBrainz
Band line-ups, credits and release dates, contributed by volunteers. Six Degrees is entirely their doing: every hop between two acts is a real person who played in both.
Spotify
Cover art and thirty-second previews, so you can hear the song you're arguing about.
Why this exists
We're DATAMetrics, a small New Zealand business-intelligence outfit. Building dashboards for a living is a fine way to spend a career, but nobody has ever gathered around a laptop to argue about a sales pipeline. People will absolutely argue about whether Everlong should have beaten War Pigs.
So this is the work we'd do for a client, aimed at something we actually love. It cost us some evenings and a corner of a server. There is nothing to buy here, no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, no newsletter and no account to make. If you get something out of it, the only thing we'd ask is that you go and vote in this year's countdown. The list is only as good as the people who fill it in.
Fan-made, and firmly unofficial
Not affiliated
Rock Analytics is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to The Rock, rova or MediaWorks NZ. The countdown (its name, its rankings, its artwork and its general magnificence) remains entirely theirs.
Nothing is being sold
No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, no paid tier, no data for sale. The hosting comes out of DATAMetrics' own pocket, and that's the whole business model.
No accounts, barely any data
There's nothing to sign in to. A saved ballot is a random eight-character code and the songs you picked. We don't ask who you are, and we couldn't tell you if we wanted to.
We'll have got something wrong
Two decades of song titles have been matched up by hand and by machine, and some of it will be off. If we've credited the wrong band or mislaid a song, let us know and we'll fix it.
