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

Abstract

A considerable amount of literature analyzes factors of success in music contests, particularly those where the audience votes for the winner. However, one aspect highlighted by the economic theory of stardom is generally neglected in the literature: the role of (pre-contest) popularity of the contestants. In this paper, we tackle this research gap by focusing on a national music contest in Germany and investigating how pre-contest popularity of the participating artists influences the final voting results. We employ two different concepts of popularity. First, we collected data on the artist’s former success (MacDonald-popularity) using music charts. 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-wonder harms success in the contest.

Keywords:

• Popularity
• superstar effect
• voting bias
• Bundesvision Song Contest
• cultural economics
• media economics
• music contest

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L82
• Z10
• Z19

Acknowledgments

We thank Marina Grusevaja and all participants as well as Thomas Grebel for valuable and helpful feedback. Furthermore, we thank Anne Hoag and Jeff Knapp from the Pennsylvania State University for providing data access. Moreover, we are thankful to Barbara Güldenring, Milan Lange and Sonja Schneider for valuable editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Without claiming completeness, relevant papers include, inter alia, Yair (1995), Haan et al. (2005), Clerides and Stengos (2006), Fenn et al. (2006), Ginsburgh and Noury (2008), Spierdijk and Vellekoop (2009), Kokko and Tingvall (2012), Charron (2013), Antipov and Pokryshevskaya (2017), Budzinski and Pannicke (2017), Mantzaris et al. (2018), Coupe and Chaban (2020), Budzinski et al. (2022).

2 See http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/bundesvision-song-contest-2014-revolverheld-gewinnt-bei-stefan-raab-a-992865.html

3 There is literature that employs popularity measures like Google hits, Facebook-likes, LexisNexis-hits and others in order to analyze whether popularity influences the income of sports stars, for instance in the Deutsche Bundesliga (Brandes et al. 2008), National Football League NFL (Treme and Allen 2011) or National Basketball Association NBA (Prinz et al. 2012). However, this literature considerably differs as it does not aim to explain the outcome of the (in their cases sporting) contests (which would probably also not be sensible). The BSC, on the other hand, has been analysed before albeit with different research questions and without employing broad popularity measures (Pannicke 2016; Budzinski and Pannicke 2017; Budzinski et al. 2020).

4 See http://tvtotal.prosieben.de/tvtotal/specials/bundesvision-song-contest/.

5 See http://www.motorvision.de/unterhaltung/tv/bundesvision-song-contest-online-schauen-wiederholung-prosieben-2013-bosse-gewinnt-niedersachsen-308363.html; http://tvtotal.prosieben.de/tvtotal/specials/bundesvision-song-contest/.

6 For example, Gaissmaier and Marewski (2011) showed in their study that those politicians with a high press coverage are more likely to win elections because they were made more familiar to their voters.

7 Superstar mechanisms in new (social) media partly follow the traditional theories (especially MacDonald- and Adler-effects) but partly also deviate and entail new phenomena requiring additional theories (Budzinski and Gaenssle 2018; Gaenssle 2021; Gaenssle and Budzinski 2021). Since we are analysing a television broadcasted competition between 2005 and 2015, we stick to the traditional theories in this paper.

8 See http://tvtotal.prosieben.de/tvtotal/specials/bundesvision-song-contest/.

9 The data was collected on: https://www.offiziellecharts.de/.

10 Regarding the top 40 album charts hits of the BSC contestants, the variable turns out to be de facto a dummy-variable, because the maximum number top 40 album charts hits is 1.

11 www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/findlatlong.html.

12 A high value in Neuroticism refers to a high share of easily depressed and anxious individuals and a low share of extroverted personalities (which are very sociable and talkative), while Openness to Experience stands for creativity, artistic skills and unconventional human beings. The Agreeableness factor represents compassion, corporation, and trust, while Conscientiousness is characterized by planned and organized behaviour (Atkinson et al. 2000).

13 We obtained the dataset from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP).

14 There are no German states with a share of 40 or more per cent of inhabitants affiliated to another religion than mentioned.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Budzinski

Oliver Budzinski is a Professor of Economic Theory, Institute of Economics and Institute of Media and Mobile Communication at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany.

Julia Pannicke

Julia Pannicke holds a PhD in cultural and media economics with a specific focus on empirical methods and econometrics. She currently works at Facit Research GmbH & Co. KG as Head of Publisher Research and Innovative Methods.