People can say what they will, but Eurovision is fun.

However indignant Europe’s citizenry may be over the costs, or the quality of the music, or even the possibility that the voting might be subject to political influence, the abundance of column inches dedicated to analysing, celebrating, and bewailing various aspects of the competition, clearly justifies Eurovision’s inclusion in Europe’s (and apparently Australia’s) social calendar.

For one week it creates a common demos from a pan-national grouping of broadly European countries, in a way that the European parliamentary elections, for all their significance, never have.

What makes Eurovision particularly interesting, though, is that if you remove all the theatre, the event is a mechanism for choosing a song. If Eurovision did not exist, and someone were challenged to choose a European pop-classic, a tune so engaging that it was loved by people across the entire continent, what would they do? Obviously the first step would be to create a committee responsible for judging the contenders. In fact, each nation should create a committee, empowered to choose a national champion to be sent forth to the international stage of the competition.

Not everyone knows enough about music to be eligible for membership of such a committee so, instead, judges should be chosen based on years of demonstrated expertise in the field.

On the other hand, the benefits of crowd-sourcing opinion should not be neglected, so telephone poles add an important popular element to the overall ranking system. There is always a danger of being too popular, and in case the bulk of public opinion doesn’t reflect the narrower technical merits of the different songs, the broader public interest as a whole, or the vaguely defined concerns of the contest as a whole, then the panel of experts should have a certain latitude to overrule the popular will.

Once each country has chosen their winner, they can be brought together in a final round where each chosen song is given an equal opportunity to promote itself, before there is a final round of voting in which national committees combine with telephone polls to present a combined score for each song. At the end of this lengthy and slightly opaque process, where songs from each country are exposed to the judgement and scrutiny of many nations, there will be a final winner.

If someone were to design a selection process to identify a Europe wide popular song, then it must surely look something like this. True, some of the voting might be political, and the telephone polls unscientific (being composed of self-selected groups of people with special interests), and the views of the panel of experts dated, but then no system is perfect.

If someone were to design a selection process for a Europe wide popular song, what they would never do is nothing. They would never agree a system where there was no panel of experts, no shared platform for the songs to promote themselves fairly, or no voting system. Yet that is precisely how the music industry works. An entirely self-organising industry delivers a dynamic and varied playlist of exciting, interesting, unusual, clichéd, and commercial music. Whatever the occasional merits of individual songs and performances, Eurovision music, as a whole, reflects the weakness of delivering creativity through committee, being bland and formulaic.

The point in all this is that no one would ever design the free market, as an organisational system, if it didn’t exist. It is apparently too haphazard, unfocused and inefficient. Apparently, centrally planned committees of experts are in a better position to judge the merits of something from a broader, less superficial angle. Yet despite what logic might suggest, a meditation on Eurovision versus the music industry suggests that unfettered markets are more creative and innovative and somehow do manage to deliver what the public wants, with no central planning whatsoever. Whenever arguments are advanced in favour of increased levels of government intervention in the markets, it is next to impossible to find a concise, compelling, reason why governments, or other experts, should leave well alone. Yet, being too trivial to be the concern of governments, the music industry (of which, really, Eurovision is actually a part) is entirely unregulated and succeeds in delighting, challenging, and amusing listeners everywhere. In this way music is a strange and magical manifestation of the collective popular will which may explain why deep down, everyone does love Eurovision (even if they don’t admit it).