Final results
[voting results entered at ~11.30pm GMT / 6.30pm ET on May 12th 2018. My predictions shown in brackets]
- Israel ‘TOY’ (2)
- Cyprus ‘Fuego’ (1)
- Austria ‘Nobody But You’ (x)
- Germany ‘You Let Me Walk Alone’ (4)
- Italy ‘Non Mi Avete Fatto Niente’ (x)
My predictions (actual placing shown in brackets):
- Cyprus ‘Fuego’ (2)
- Israel ‘TOY’ (1)
- Ireland ‘Together’ (16)
- Germany ‘You Let Me Walk Alone’ (4)
- France ‘Mercy’ (13)
So I missed Austria and Italy completely, but got the first two (albeit reversed) and predicted three of the top four.
Of the soft predictions:
- The Danes’ ‘Higher Ground’ (my personal favourite) will do well, but won’t win.
CORRECT. Denmark came 9th (of 26) - Finland’s ‘Monsters’ will be in the top half of the voting.
WRONG. Finland were 25th out of 26! - The Netherlands’ competent and enjoyable US country-rock ‘Outlaw in ‘Em’ will get some votes but will be in the bottom half.
CORRECT. 18th of 26. - The Estonian operatics won’t do well.
WRONG. Estonia were 8th of 26. - The Hungarian metalheads will get crucified. Which will probably suit them just fine.
CORRECT. Hungary were 21st out of 26.
Predictions
[Written at at 10:19pm GMT (5:19pm ET) on May 12th 2018, before voting begins]. As always, I’ll leave the predictions here permanently, and post the real results when the voting is complete.
- Cyprus ‘Fuego’
- Israel ‘TOY’
- Ireland ‘Together’
- Germany ‘You Let Me Walk Alone’
- France ‘Mercy’
Soft predictions:
- The Danes’ ‘Higher Ground’ (my personal favourite) will do well, but won’t win.
- Finland’s ‘Monsters’ will be in the top half of the voting.
- The Netherlands’ competent and enjoyable US country-rock ‘Outlaw in ‘Em’ will get some votes but will be in the bottom half.
- The Estonian operatics won’t do well.
- The Hungarian metalheads will get crucified. Which will probably suit them just fine.
Intro
Welcome to the 2018 Eurovision live musicology blog, now in its eighth year. This site has provided live music analysis of the ESC final every year since 2011, previously during the UK live broadcast. Since 2016, the text has been written from Boston USA, 5 hours behind UK time and, this year, also the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal, where the live show takes place. [Read more…]
Back in 2010 I live-tweeted some song commentary as the show was going out. Since 2011 I’ve been 
This week, Lana Del Rey 
Abstract: In my presentation, I will explore differences and similarities in the creative agency of the producer in the production process of urban pop music produced in a home studio, rock music produced in a conventional studio facility and classical concert hall music produced in a concert hall setting. Starting from the premise of record production being a collaborative effort, I approach agency as the capacity to make and effect decisions within a structure or even to alter it to some extent, and creativity as contributing to the domain of existing works through exercising aesthetic decision-making. Based on these understandings of agency and creativity, I will examine how different cultures in different production settings and different studios conceived as cultural spaces affect the construction of the producer’s agency within creative communities in the production process. Furthermore, I will discuss how differences in understandings of the ontology of the music contribute to the level of creativity, i.e. the contribution to the domain of existing works, that a producer agent can possess. I base my presentation on extensive ethnographic fieldwork of three case studies on production processes, which took place in the course of 2015-2017. The presentation will summarize and discuss some of the central findings of my forthcoming PhD dissertation. This presentation is intended to be in the short presentation format.
Abstract: In his introduction to The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field (Frith & Zagorski-Thomas, 2012), Simon Frith proposed that producers in pop and dance music genres have a significantly different role to music producers in other music genres such as rock. A prominent difference is that pop music producers are often part of a production team that involves direct collaboration and participation with songwriters, programmers, musicians, artists, management and record company representatives. Pop music songwriting and production teams are therefore more frequently part of a larger creative collective (Hennion, 1990) in creating a musical product. The following paper describes the creative production workflow system at Pete Waterman Ltd. (PWL) Studios during the 1980s and investigates the way in which Phil Harding and Ian Curnow (P&E) worked with manager and entrepreneur, Tom Watkins in the 1990s. Drawing upon a series of interviews and data gathered during an extended ethnographic and auto ethnographic study, this paper presents the pop music ‘service’ model, which underlines collectivist rather than individualist thinking and illustrates how evaluation is present (and co-current) at the ideation stage in the generation of creative ideas (Sawyer, 2003) at various stages of the commercial pop songwriting and production process.