Congratulations to Sweden’s Loreen for her victory in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest! And to Liverpool for being the best of host cities. And thanks too to the Eurovision statisticians on posting the (almost) complete voting data for Liverpool 2023 on their website within 24 hours of the result!
This post looks at the detailed voting results. It refers back to previous analysis, particularly in this article.
Continue reading →Transcript of a presentation given at the RSS Merseyside Group’s event “A Stat for Europe: Statistics of the Eurovision Song Contest” at the University of Liverpool on 26 April 2023. It is partly based on my article in Significance (April 2023).
A video of the live version of this presentation is available here.
I’ve called this talk “The Joys of Eurovision Scoring” partly because I’m a bit of a nerd and Eurovision is an excellent source of statistics, but also because it is a clever scoring system, where everyone can have their say but there is guaranteed suspense and excitement up until the end of the show. It also reflects the Eurovision countries and how they relate to each other.
I’d like to cover three topics – what we can learn from the scores of individual jury members; why the public televote has more influence than the jury scores; and finally looking at the question of voting clusters.
Continue reading →I’m delighted to have an article “Eurovision Voting: a game of two halves” published in this month’s (April 2023) edition of Significance magazine.
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Concert-Diary has been advertising classical concerts since 2000, mainly in the UK, and (unlike some listings websites) allows you to go back and look at historic data. Concerts can be classified under several headings – one of which is “Christmas”, so I thought it would be interesting to look at this century’s Christmas concerts.
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The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a powerful tool for analysing historical text data. It uses the enormous corpus of books scanned by Google to analyse the frequency of words and phrases over time. An n-grams is just a combination of words – so a single word is a 1-gram, a pair of words a 2-gram, etc. The Google viewer has data up to 5-grams.
This has potential uses in many fields – including musicology. Here we will use the ngram viewer to analyse the rise and fall of ragtime music.
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My article on Desert Island Discs from April 2020 has been, by some margin, the most popular page on this site, in terms of number of visitors. Last year, I was approached by some researchers from the Alan Turing Institute about sharing the data with them so that they could do their own analysis. I was delighted to see this Turing Data Story appear on their website in March this year – they have updated my dataset, added further information from Wikipedia and Spotify, and looked at some different questions. Excellent stuff!
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In this article from the end of 2020 – The Impact of Covid-19 on Concerts in England – I used data from concert-diary to investigate the impact of Covid restrictions on classical concerts in England. Many had been cancelled or postponed, and the market then shifted mainly online, with total activity being substantially down on the previous year. One year on, here is the updated analysis, using concert-diary data to the end of 2021.
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The UK Number One Christmas single is a hotly contested honour – presumably representing a substantial number of sales for the lucky artist. Looking back at the Christmas charts reveals some interesting patterns.
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In the annual Eurovision Song Contest, it is well known that countries often tend to be generous in their votes for the songs of their neighbours. This article looks at the evidence for this in the 2021 competition, and uses it as an opportunity to illustrate the technique of “bootstrapping” to assess statistical significance.
Continue reading →As in several recent Eurovision Song Contest finals, this year’s competition in Rotterdam ended with a cliff-hanger, with the result being uncertain right up until the last few votes were revealed. The Italian group Måneskin finally triumphed with their song Zitti E Buoni. In this article I will discuss how the Eurovision voting system is very likely to result in uncertainty until the very last minute.
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