{"id":1783,"date":"2010-02-20T17:27:04","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T17:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.willhowells.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1783"},"modified":"2010-02-20T20:15:28","modified_gmt":"2010-02-20T20:15:28","slug":"eurovision-2009-whos-still-popular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.willhowells.org.uk\/blog\/2010\/02\/20\/eurovision-2009-whos-still-popular\/","title":{"rendered":"Eurovision 2009 – Who’s still popular?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The run up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest has begun. Many countries have already chosen their songs and singers. We know the UK’s song will be written by Dennis<\/del> Pete Waterman. And this got me wondering: which songs from last year’s competition have faded into (even greater) obscurity and which are still being listened to?<\/p>\n

There are a handful of tracks from last year that still come into my head occasionally. The winner, Fairytale<\/em>; Ukraine’s Be My Valentine<\/em>; Hungary’s pretty unsuccessful Dance With Me<\/em>; Slovenia’s Love Symphony<\/em>; Sweden’s La Voix<\/em>. But what about the rest of the world who aren’t me?<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there’s a way to get an idea. last.fm<\/a> is a website that keeps track of your listening habits, if you so desire. It has thousands of users and it’s possible to look up the listening figures for any given track. So I’ve gone through last year’s entries and counted up the number of plays each has had in the last six months.<\/p>\n

Before I give you the results, there are some caveats. For a start, it’s not going to be an objective measure of the songs themselves as the results of the Contest will skew the figures. The winner in particular had lots more exposure as a result, and the songs that didn’t progress from the semi-finals weren’t broadcast to the same audience as the final. Also, I’m aware that the songs I’ve played have tended to be served up by the shuffle feature on my iPod – so those listens are less about those songs being high quality than not being bad enough for me to have skipped to the next track. Plus, there’s no record of which country these listens came from – most could be in the entry’s home country (they couldn’t vote for it during the show) and the size of the last.fm user base in each country will make a difference.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the problem of disambiguation. Not least because of the different languages involved, but also because of the generally inconsistent taxonomies of people’s audio collections, tracks are listed on last.fm under variations of their titles and variations of their artist. And it’s case sensitive. For example, Ukraine’s entry appears separately under<\/p>\n