#statistical maps

Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to a shortened but hopefully interesting run of statistical maps to commemorate Eurovision 2020.  I can’t offer as many maps or as lengthy an analysis as usual because online teaching is occupying pretty much my every waking moment at the minute, but I wanted to ensure this year and its songs aren’t swept under the carpet as the EBU seemingly would have it.

Our first map is a relatively straightforward one, showing gender of this year’s leader singer(s). At the start of the national final season, many people were complaining that we had a case of RotterMAN on our hands with the influence of two men having won in 3 years weighing strongly on both internal selectors and national final voters. Eventually, the historic tendency for the number of female main singers to outweigh males at ESC prevailed - only twice (2010, 2019) in the past eleven years have there been more male main singers than females, and in both cases, the difference was small indeed.

ESC 2020 was to be performed with 22 female main singers, 17 male main singers and two groups. It’s only the second time since 2014 that the number of male main singers has dropped at the contest - with 54% of principal singers female, that’s also the highest proportion since 2014. What’s extraordinary too is the continued slump in groups with mixed main singers - from a high of nearly 20% in 2015 to only 5% this year and last.

Good afternoon folks, and welcome to this, my first statistical map of the ESC ‘17 season. It’s about something which I consider to detract from the spirit of the competition, and which has provided an unhealthily huge dose of drama this year: the lack of democracy in selecting each nation’s Eurovision representatives.

For once, I’m not talking about internal selections - though I do find it a shame that 17 countries do not engage their citizens in any way in picking the singer that will represent them, and a further two allow them only to pick the singer but not the song through a ridiculous process of elimination that picks the best karaöke singer, but not necessarily the best singer for the song chosen. I’m talking dodgy national finals where the people’s choice ends up secondary. Check out my analysis below:

Hello there, folks! Welcome to my latest Eurovision maps, which combine two of my passions: statistics and linguistics. An ongoing interest of mine is how lyrical content of a song can improve or reduce its chances at winning the grand prize. Today, I look at how repetitive or not this year’s songs are, and how wordy or laconic they are too. Does Europe prefer repetitive songs (whose lyrics, as a result, are easier to remember?) or ones with many lyrical twists and turns?  After the contest, I’ll return to these maps and see if this question can be answered.

How does one objectively judge the amount of repetition in a song’s lyrics? By maths, of course! I took all of this year’s songs and fed their lyrics into a word analysis tool which counted not only how many words each song had, but also, the number of unique words (i.e. words that appear only once in the song) it contained. By taking the number of unique words and dividing them by the total number of words, you get the percentage of unique words that the lyrics comprise of - the higher the percentage, the less repetitive the lyrics.

This percentage is not typically high in songwriting - not just because many elements of a song (the chorus, bridge; hell, sometimes even the verses) are repeated, but also because of the number of little words like articles and prepositions that we frequently use. To give some benchmarks for comparison, John Lennon’s Imagine comes in at 51%; Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean at 27.5%; Dylan’s Like a rolling Stone at 46%, and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which I always considered a wordy song, clocks in at 44%.

The least lyrically repetitive of this year’s songs is Lisa Angell’s N’oubliez pas, with almost 59% original words - followed closely by Boggie's Wars for nothing with ~58%. On the other side of the sprectrum is Iceland. There are 258 words in the lyrics to Unbroken - but only 47 unique words, which means that each word in the lyrics is repeated on average more than 5 times in the song. Moldova and Australia complete the list of this year’s most repetitive songs, with 20.9% and 23.7% unique words respectively. In terms of sheer wordiness, San Marino, Germany and Moldova fit the most words into their three minutes in the field, whilst Finland, Spain and Montenegro are the most taciturn. What I find really intriguing is that there are very noticeable regional trends that emerge. Most of the countries that rely most on repetition are ones bordering Germany. Romance-speaking Europe uses less repetition than Germanic-speaking Europe. With a few notable exceptions, we even see a general north-south split where northern countries are more likely to cram as many words as possible into their three minutes, and southern countries make do with fewer words.