

Eurovision statistics analysis, and an apology to the people of Malta - mewo2
http://mewo2.github.com/nerdery/2012/05/27/eurovision-statistics-after-the-final/

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rospaya
> I don’t think anyone west of Vienna truly understands turbo-folk as a
> musical genre.

Even on the other side we try not to.

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hetman
I think there's another variable the model can't really account for (and I'm
surprised wasn't mentioned much in the article, though perhaps it was already
covered previously). People actually do like some songs better than others.

I expect that what friendships actually do is strongly modulate this
like/dislike for particular songs. Based on the kind of music favoured in
Europe that would probably go a long way explain why Sweden did so well and
Norway did so terribly.

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mtts
In earlier articles the "quality" of the song was in fact accounted for - if a
song did better in the semi finals than its position within the network of
countries giving each other points by default warranted, it was considered to
be a better song.

That said, while the predictions had Sweden on top, it also had Norway in
third place. Obviously the effect of a song being good isn't as strong as this
model thinks. The top three had two countries that have lots of friends,
Russia and Serbia, that had not-too-terrible songs that therefore managed to
scrape away points even from countries that aren't friends.

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forza
Somewhat awkward that Sweden had already won after 35 of 42 countries had
presented their votes.

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aluhut
What I always find interesting was the differences between "the charts" and
the results of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Like this time, we saw the "charty" songs somewhere in the middle while really
strange stuff came up.

How does this happen? Do only people call there who do not like the chart
stuff coming from the US or sounding like the usual mainstream? Or do maybe
really less people like the music that is played on the radio?

For me, I don't call for any shows on TV. In this case I would have propably
called for the russian babuszkas because they were funny. I don't like the
stuff that german mainstream radios play here and most of the songs on the
usual chartlists are crap in my eyes (or ears). So I can't really make up a
solution by myself.

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sschueller
I'm sorry but that song by Sweden was just awful. Ok, not as bad as the
singing grannies from Russian but still awful.

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ColMustard
Here in Sweden it has already been played way too much on the radio, so
imagine my horror when we won :( Now they'll play it even more...

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mjwalshe
you just need to do what Ireland did in 2008 and do a Swedish version of
Dustin the turkey with "Irlande Douze Pointe"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mogesoyp8HY>

