SDU researchers launch app to study music preferences and collective choices

Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest unites more than 160 million viewers across dozens of countries around the same shared spectacle. Now, a team of researchers is harnessing that extraordinary reach to ask some of the fundamental questions in the science of human preferences: Why do we like what we like? How much does our cultural background and identity shape our taste? And how can people make better decisions together?

The app is called 12 Points (12points.science), a free Eurovision companion app that lets fans rate every competing entry, compare their ratings and rankings with their friends, and participate in one of the largest cross-national citizen-science projects on musical taste.

The project is led by Pantelis P. Analytis at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), a leading expert in the study of social influence and group dynamics, in collaboration with Minsu Park at NYU Abu Dhabi, a leading expert in the cross-cultural study of musical tastes. It is supported by a Digital Infrastructure grant from the prestigious Carlsberg Foundation through 2028.

- Most studies of musical taste rely on small samples from a single country or culture. Eurovision gives us something rare: an enthusiastic, cross-national audience of millions, all evaluating the same competition entries. That kind of rich, real-world window into collective opinions and cultural tastes doesn’t come along very often., says Associate Professor Pantelis P. Analytis, University of Southern Denmark

Three big questions, one unlikely stage

Behind the sequins and the televotes, 12 Points pursues three interlocking research questions:

How do culture and identity shape musical taste?
When listeners from Denmark, Australia, or Korea, or people with different levels of training in music, hear the same song, what do they agree on, and where do they diverge? 12 Points aims to generate a dataset that’s large and diverse both geographically and demographically to answer these questions rigorously.

How do we form and revise preferences?
Eurovision fans may update their opinions when they see what their peers or the crowd likes or when they re-listen to a song (live or on the radio). The app can capture this dynamic process.

How can groups make better, fairer collective decisions?
The contest's existing voting system has been debated for years. The researchers will use the ratings data to model and compare alternative preference aggregation mechanisms, findings with implications far beyond pop music.

The App

Available free on iOS and Android (and as a web app), 12 Points was designed to be genuinely fun. Users can browse competing countries on an interactive map, rate each entry on a ten-star scale, build a personal scorecard, and compare results with friends side by side. Once all entries from a contest are rated, community statistics unlock—revealing how different countries, age groups and demographics rated, or even how different voting rules could lead to different outcomes.

Open science, global reach

The project operates on an open-science commitment. All findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and made freely accessible. Anonymised datasets with the ratings of consenting participants, analysis code and documentation will be shared alongside publications with the scientific community to support future generations of researchers.

While Eurovision is a European contest, participation in 12 Points is open to everyone, everywhere. “Whether you are watching from Oslo, Sydney, or Abu Dhabi,” the team notes, “your ratings are welcome. The more countries represented, the richer the picture.”