In the context of events that involve public voting, such as televised competitions or elections, it has increasingly been recognized that communication data from social media is related to the ...outcome. Existing studies mainly analyse the number of messages and their sentiment, yet the role of different data collection periods has not been examined sufficiently. We collected Twitter data in 2015 and 2016 to examine the relationship between the audience voting of the Eurovision Song Contest and predictors based on quantity and emotions, and compared the results of using data from before and during the event. We found that the choice of time period greatly affected the results obtained. Data collected prior to the event exhibited a much stronger association with the final ranking than data collected during the event. In addition, the model based on pre-event data in 2015 showed considerable accuracy in predicting the 2016 results, illustrating the usefulness of social media data for predicting the outcomes of events outside social media.
This paper explores the interconnection between European crises and the Eurovision Song Contest, the largest non-sports-related TV show on earth, which has run as an annual music competition of ...European countries since 1956. The paper explores the development of the actual show, based on existing audio and video recordings, as well as selected aspects of the respective media coverage. Special focus is paid to the creation of the contest in a post-catastrophic Europe, specifically the first show in Lugano in 1956; the apparent decline of the show’s appeal in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally the contest held in Moscow in 2009, when the global financial crisis had just reached Europe. This research shows that ‘crisis’ is less an objective state, but rather a rhetorical strategy to communicate one’s perceptions of the time, illuminating the significance of the Eurovision Song Contest as an arena for European affairs.
The mere exposure, or familiarity, effect is the tendency for people to feel more positive about stimuli to which they have previously been exposed. The Eurovision Song Contest is a two-stage event, ...in which some contestants in the final will be more familiar to viewers than others. Thus, viewers' voting is likely to be influenced by this effect. Previous work attempting to demonstrate this effect in this context has been unable to control for contestant quality. The current study, which used a novel procedure to analyse the way in which contestant countries distributed their points (a function of how viewers voted in those countries) between 2008 and 2011, showed that contestants did better if they previously appeared in a semifinal that was seen by voters. This is evidence that the mere exposure effect, alongside previously studied factors such as cultural and geographical closeness, influences the way viewers vote in the Eurovision.
We analyze and evaluate the rules and results at the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. We first concentrate on the various voting procedures and explore several alternatives (inspired by classical ...contributions in social choice and game theory) that could make a difference for the results. We also discuss other important issues, such as simplicity, contrast effects and whether experts are better judges than tele-voters. Our findings raise the question of whether the voting procedures used by the Eurovision Song Contest authorities are fail-safe. We endorse instead the use of the so-called Shapley voting procedure for judges as well as tele-voters.
The results of song contests offer a unique opportunity to analyze possible distortions arising from various biases in performance evaluations using observational data. In this study we investigate ...the influence of contestants' order of appearance on their ranking. We found that, in the New Wave Song Contest, expert judgments were significantly influenced by the contestant's running number, an exogenous factor that, being assigned randomly, clearly did not influence the output quality. We also found weaker statistical evidence of such an ordering effect in Eurovision Song Contest finals of 2009-2012.
This article explores volunteering in relation to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which took place in Stockholm in 2016 and in Kyiv in 2017, with the aim of shedding light on volunteering as a ...form of “media work”. Following from this, the article aims to problematize the theoretical concept of free labour and analyse the symbolic exchanges and currencies involved in employing a “free” labour force. Through interviews with volunteers, this article explores what volunteers at huge media events do, how their work is organized, and what motivates them. The empirical basis for this article is an interview study with volunteers and volunteer organizers of the ESC in Stockholm (May 2016) and in Kyiv (May 2017), complemented with a document analysis of volunteer guidebooks and organizational reports. The article shows that eventfulness is an essential part of what volunteer labour brings to an event such as the ESC. It is also a key element in the production of economic value: eventfulness is a currency that expresses the value of the event itself and is a key feature of place branding. Furthermore, eventfulness – along with the feeling of being a part of an event, of something bigger, as it unfolds in time – is a key feature of the motivation for the volunteers who contribute with unpaid labour. As such, eventfulness can also be understood as a form of currency or symbolic capital that forms the main remuneration or “wage” earned by volunteers at an event such as the ESC.
This article addresses the ‘wicked’ problems met by contemporary public service media (PSM) institutions: to address the fragmentation of audiences across platforms; to have a positive impact on ...civil society and societal coherence; to facilitate cultural diversity; and to work with private creative industries and facilitate their growth. These objectives can be reduced to a conflict in producing both public and private value. In this article, we build on the combination of innovation systems theory and public value theory to investigate the interrelationships between the production of these different forms of value. Our case study is Estonia’s national pre-selection competition for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is innovative in terms of its cross-media framing and its approach to working with private partners to facilitate the development of the Estonian popular music system.
The combination of the digitalisation of cultural goods and facilitated cross-border availability through the internet fuels a globalisation process that is often said to cause a homogenisation of ...demand across countries, in particular, for entertainment goods as music and movies. In order to test this hypothesis, we analyse historical voting data of the Eurovision Song Contest, which has taken place annually since 1956, thus covering the timespan (1975-2016) in which digitalisation and Internet availability emerged and evolved into mass phenomena. Consequently, according to the outlined theory of homogenisation of preferences, voting should have become more concentrated on the leading artists and less focused on regional differences in taste during this timespan. For the purpose of detecting concentration trends in the allocation of points, we employ different indicators for measuring concentration. First, we calculate concentration ratios, second, we calculate the Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index, and third, the Gini-coefficient for each year. Furthermore, we test trendlines for statistical significance. The results show that our analysis cannot support the thesis of preference homogenisation. We find no significant trend towards preference convergence. In contrast, some of the employed indicators and methods point towards significant, albeit weak, deconcentration trends in voting behaviour for the contest.
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