Have You Heard It is a sequence of twitter polls held on the @ellie_made account during the Eurovision national final season, which asks one question: “Have you heard the song that will win this year’s Eurovision Song Contest yet?”
The two options are ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and it is just for fun.
Q: Why can’t I select ‘maybe’?
A: You’ve either heard it or you haven’t. Have you heard it?
Q: How do you know exactly what song people are selecting ‘Yes’ for?
A: On the whole, I do not. I am looking for jumps in the Yes percentage related to song releases or national final performances. The hypothesis we’re testing is: ‘can the Eurovision community as a whole, detect a winner when they first hear it?’
Q: Can the Eurovision community detect a winner when they first hear it?
A: I don’t know, that’s why I am doing this.
Q: Why aren’t you asking [something else, which is more complicated]?
A: Because twitter is not a medium for [something else, which is more complicated] and I am trying to keep this as simple as possible in order to make it as easy as possible to engage with.
Q: Why don’t you do your poll in [this other way which I will explain]?
A: Because I’m doing it this way, which is the way I want to do it. You should do it your way, and I would be really interested to see what you come up with! Spreadsheets and plotting scripts for all!
Q: Your methodology would not stand up to scrutiny in academia
A: I know, sometimes I just want to know if people think they’ve heard the winning Eurovision song. I’m not going to be making a formal publication based on this data.
Q: How much data do you have?
A: I started doing this as an informal straw poll during the 2018 season, but I have full twitter poll data for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. You can see the plots at the bottom of the page.
Q: Your 2019 and 2020 plots don’t get to 100% when everyone has definitely had the chance to hear all the songs, lol
A: I know right. You know what people are like.
Q: Does this mean you know what song will win Eurovision?
A: Absolutely not. I know when some subset of Eurovision fans on twitter first heard the song that they think will win Eurovision. I think that what this method shows up really nicely is if consensus forms around an early favourite. It also shows very clearly when early fan favourites do not win their national selections. It has not yet predicted a winner.
