Abstimmungsverhalten im Bundesvision Song Contest: regionale Nähe versus Qualität der Musik

Die Analyse des jährlich stattfindenden Bundesvision Song Contest als inner-deutscher Musikwettbewerb ist nicht nur aus musikalischer, sondern auch aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht lohnend. Mittels empirischer Analyse der vergebenen Punkte liefert der vorliegende Beitrag eine Untersuchung des Abstimmungsverhaltens der Zuschauer auf nationaler Ebene in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Grundsätzlich wird davon ausgegangen, dass die Qualität der Aufführung ausschlaggebend für die Abstimmung ist und somit maßgeblich für die Kür des Gewinnerbundeslandes. Die quantitative Auswertung ermöglicht es, weitere Faktoren zu erschließen, welche den Sieg erklären. Mit der empirischen Analyse können darüber hinaus wertvolle Aussagen über die Beziehung deutscher Bundesländer getroffen werden. Zentrale Ergebnisse der Schätzung sind, dass insbesondere die geografischen und kulturellen Hintergründe einen signifikanten Einfluss aufweisen

Abstimmungsverhalten im Bundesvision Song Contest

Die Analyse des jährlich stattfindenden Bundesvision Song Contest als innerdeutscher Musikwettbewerb ist nicht nur aus musikalischer, sondern auch aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht lohnend. Mittels empirischer Analyse der vergebenen Punkte liefert der vorliegende Beitrag eine Untersuchung des Abstimmungsverhaltens der Zuschauer auf nationaler Ebene in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Grundsätzlich wird davon ausgegangen, dass die Qualität der Aufführung ausschlaggebend für die Abstimmung ist und somit maßgeblich für die Kür des Gewinnerbundeslandes. Die quantitative Auswertung ermöglicht es allerdings, weitere Faktoren zu erschließen, welche den Sieg erklären. Mit der empirischen Analyse können darüber hinaus wertvolle Aussagen über die Beziehung deutscher Bundesländer getroffen werden. Zentrale Ergebnisse der Schätzung sind, dass insbesondere die geografischen und kulturellen Hintergründe einen signifikanten Einfluss aufweisen und somit das Abstimmungsverhalten bestimmen

Media bias in women´s magazines: do advertisements influence editorial contents?

Existing theoretical and empirical studies on Media Bias are subjects of controversial discussions in the literature. However, scientific literatures on Media Bias establish empirical evidence for a positive impact of advertising volume on media coverage. To get in line with the debated literature about whether biases occur, this economic paper presents an empirical analysis of a possible (commercial) Media Bias influenced by advertising expenditure in monthly women’s magazines. The results of a linear panel model regression, a panel poisson regression, as well as those of a panel negative binomial regression model show that there is a positive relation with the amount of advertising expenditure on the coverage of a company that purchased advertisements on the women’s magazines in Germany. A positive correlation between advertising volume and the nomination as well as prize winning of (cosmetic) products could also be found

Media Bias in Women´s Magazines: Do Advertisements Influence Editorial Content?

Existing theoretical and empirical studies on Media Bias are subjects of controversial discussions in the literature. However, scientific literatures on Media Bias establish empirical evidence for a positive impact of advertising volume on media coverage. To get in line with the debated literature about whether biases occur, this economic paper presents an empirical analysis of a possible (commercial) Media Bias influenced by advertising expenditure in monthly women’s magazines. The results of a linear panel model regression, a panel poisson regression, as well as those of a panel negative binomial regression model show that there is a positive correlation with the amount of advertising expenditure on the coverage of a company that purchased advertisements on the women’s magazines in Germany. A positive correlation between advertising volume and the nomination as well as prize winning of (cosmetic) products could also be found

Culturally-biased voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: do national contests differ?

The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally-biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with principally the same rules but organized on the national level in Germany, offers a unique opportunity to compare international voting bias patterns to national voting bias patterns. Thus, this paper presents an innovative analysis by comparatively analyzing the ESC´s historical data from 1998 to 2013 and the BSC´s data from its beginning in 2005 until 2013 with the same econometric methodology. Our results show that voting biases do not only matter in international contests but also occur in similarly-organized national contests with roughly similar magnitude and quality – despite the cultural background of participants and voters being much more homogenous

Do preferences for pop music converge across countries?: empirical evidence from the Eurovision Song Contest

The combination of the digitalization of cultural goods and facilitated cross-border availability through the internet fuels a globalization process that is of-ten said to cause a homogenization of demand across countries, in particular, for entertainment goods as music and movies. In the markets for music, this implies that the same hits and the same artists should be popular across countries and cultures. In order to test this hypothesis, we analyze historical voting data of the Eurovision Song Contest, the worldwide biggest live broadcasted international music competi-tion between all countries of the European Broadcasting Union. It covers the period from 1975-2016 where digitalization and internet availability were invented and evolved into mass phenomena. Consequently, according to the outlined theory of homogenization of preferences, voting should have become more concentrated on the leading artists and less focused on regional differences in taste. For the purpose of detecting concentration trends in the points allocation, we employ different indi-cators for measuring concentration. First, we calculate a concentration ratio, repre-senting the accumulated total number of points of the top three, five and ten-placed countries in each year of the contest. Second, we calculate the Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index (HHI) and, third, the Gini-Coefficient for each year. Furthermore, we test trend-lines for statistical significance. The results show, that our analysis cannot support the thesis of preference homogenization. We find no significant trend towards pref-erence convergence. In contrast, some of the employed indicators and methods point towards significant, albeit weak, deconcentration trends in voting behavior for the contest

Movie success in a genre specific contest: Evidence from the US film industry

This article examines the economic effect of computer animation movie success by using data from all widely released feature length movies between 2011 and 2014, and all computer animated movies in North America between 1995 and 2014. We show that computer animated movies successfully attract families, parents, children, and teenagers and outperform other major movie genres (e.g., action, com-edy or drama). This research sample also provides initial evidence that, counter to industry thinking in the film business, stardom is not directly associated with movie success

Does popularity matter in a TV song competition? Evidence from a national music contest

There is a considerable amount of literature analyzing factors of success in music contests, in particular those where the audience votes for the winner. However, one factor that is highlighted by the economic theory of stardom is generally neglected in the literature. In this paper, we tackle this research gap by focusing on a national music contest in Germany and investigating how popularity of the participating artists influences the final voting results. We employ two different concepts of popularity. First, we collected data regarding the artist’s former success (MacDonald-popularity) using music charts data. Second, we proxy the media presence of the artists (Adler-popularity) using hits in traditional and new media. In our analysis, we find empirical evidence that the artist’s ex-ante popularity positively affects the outcome of voting results. Interestingly, media presence matters more than former success. Furthermore, displaying the characteristics of a one-hit won-der harms success in the contest

Does music quality matter for audience voters in a music contest

There are numerous studies analyzing factors of success in media-broadcasted artistic contests, especially music competitions. However, one factor that is generally neglected in the literature is the quality of the artistic performances (i.e. “music quality”). In this paper, we approach this research gap by developing two novel concepts of music quality and by employing unique measures during the empirical analysis of a popular German music television contest in order to analyze how different dimensions of the music and performance quality influences the final voting results. We use the complete historical voting dataset of the music contest from its inception in 2005 until its last broadcast in 2015, collecting 2,816 observations in total. First, we define dimensions of “objective quality” according to insights from musicological research/literature. Second, we conceptualize dimensions of “subjective quality” because music preferences may be subjective and are not necessarily based on how experts’ define “good” music. We measure these subjective dimensions in an experimental setting with students from two German universities. Our analysis shows that different quality dimensions affect the outcome of voting results in different ways and not all quality dimensions reveal themselves as significant. In general, subjective quality dimensions turn out to be more relevant than objective ones. The differentiated results of our analysis support the value of our approach to deconstruct quality into different dimensions and test them individually