From prose to pose: lyric readability and performance success at the Sanremo Music Festival

Abstract

This article investigates the role of lyric readability in determining success at the Sanremo Music Festival, Italy’s most prominent song competition. While previous research on popular music competitions has largely focused on musical composition, performance style, and audience dynamics, the textual dimension of songs has received limited empirical attention. Using the Gulpease Index, a readability metric tailored to Italian, we measure the linguistic readability of all competing songs from all the years in which the festival has been held. Probit and logit models estimate the association between readability and winning outcomes, controlling for other textual characteristics and yearly effects. The results indicate a long-term decline in average lyric readability across the festival’s history, together with a diminishing importance of readability for victory, particularly following the introduction of mass televoting in 2004. Among the newcomer artists, readability shows no significant relationship to success, suggesting that performer persona and audience engagement may outweigh textual factors. These findings contribute to the literature on cultural competitions, offering insights into the music industry for scholars of cultural economics and practitioners.