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Last.FM and the True Eurovision Song Contest 2008 Winner

Posted on July 23, 2008
Filed Under Digital Music, Multimedia |

Time to revisit Eurovision 2008, for no reason whatsoever, and to snipe at this “isn’t the block vote horrible, isn’t meant to be a Song Contest?”

OKay then, let’s see what the better songs from this year were. And I shall use the highly scientifc method of searching for the songs on Last.FM and seeing the number of people that are actually listening to them. Yes it’s a small sample, but any survey is. And it’s not specifically looking for Eurovision, it’s looking at people playing music in general.

How I’m working this - I find the song on Last.FM, note down the total number of listeners, and the number of unique listeners, to come up with a number of ‘how popular the song is’ charts. The big winner is, strangely, France. There’s a good spread from 25th to 2nd (127 uniques to 4452 uniques) and then bang! Sebastien Tellier pulls in a massive 21,425 unique listeners! The discrepancy leads me to think something outside of Eurovision is going on, such as a Last FM player on his website or something. I’m calling it an experimental aberation, shoot me in the comments.

It’s a similar story on total number of listens to a song, but it’s broadly the same as unique listeners, so I’m focussing on that.

Ignoring Tellier (after all… it’s French), let’s have a look at the next five places. Lo and behold the winning entry (Dima Bilan of Russia) is in there, as is second place Greek Ani Lorak and fourth place Sirusho from Armenia. Hold on a minute, am I suggesting that the songs that were popular on the night have continued to be popular?

Yes I am - and Sweden riding high in the playing charts simply backs me up, because it was regarded as a cracking song by pretty much everyone who talked about the entries before the final. Of course, Charlotte Perrelli looked rather… er… scary on the night, and that was picked up by chatrooms the world over. She lost votes down to the performance, not the song.

So to my first question, did a good song win the song contest? Yes.

My second question is a bit trickier. And that is should the UK be happy with last place, or “wuz we robbed?‘ I think the answer is ’slightly, but it’s our own fault.’ Certainly when you look at the unique listeners and play count on Last FM, Andy Abraham is lifted up to 16th and 18th respectivly, as opposed to the 25th (or 23rd equal) place he achieved in Belgrade. Mind you, if you look only at the listens to the song from just those listening to the Eurovision album (ie the hardcore Eurovision fans) then his 23rd only moves up one place to 22nd. Sorry people, but the UK sent a poor song from a relativly unknown act, and we suffered because of that.

Dima Bilan had one of the best songs, had one of the best performances on the night with an Olympic Gold Medal winning skater and a classical violinst playing a genuine Stratdivarius beside him, and he reaped the benefits. Russia took the competition ultra-seriously, and sent the best.

We sent a binman.

Addendum: Those looking for the spreadsheet can find it here.

Comments

2 Responses to “Last.FM and the True Eurovision Song Contest 2008 Winner”

stroppycow on July 23rd, 2008 19:42

Tellier is an established recording artist, with an existing fan base, a recording contract and some albums under his belt, the others aren’t. That would probably explain the number of individual listeners (hey the guy was even on the main stage at Lovebox, admitedly early on but still that’s an audience the others weren’t likely to reach).
Add to that that the French population in London is around the 300K mark and the 21.5K individual listeners don’t seem so outlandish.
The Festival, the Olympics and broadband bother - Scottish Roundup on August 20th, 2008 1:28

[…] Ewan Spence looks at Last.fm to see who should have won the Eurovision Song Contest. […]

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