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Hi could you explain how the televotesystem works. I haven't found any information on how many actual calls were made or how they are distributed amongst the competitioners. Is it so simple as to for example have käärijäs 376 points and divide it with all the combined televotepoints available and get the percentage of how many voted for him or is there another system? Like is it that in one country televote number 1 gets one call more than the second one and gets 12 points versus 10 points for who comes second. And is it the same thing pointwise in another country where televote number one gets one milion calls and the one who comes second gets just thousand calls? If my examples don't make sense ignore them and just explain the televotesystem as simply as possible. I think that i'm not the onely one wondering so you would do many a great favour by answering, please?
@@user-ix8pu9iy1v The televotes are counted country by country and yes, the act with the most votes (even if it's just one more than the 2nd has) gets 12 points, and the 2nd gets 10 points. So yes, winning the most votes in a country only by 1 single vote or by 1M votes will give the act the same 12 points. It's not the best system, and I really wonder what were the actual numbers (or per cents) of televotes in each county. That would give us a clear understanding of each act's popularity in each country.
In the beginning of the year, if you had offered Finland the opportunity to be second, we would have gladly accepted. But now we were really disappointed to the second place. Not that much because we wanted Finland to win, but because we wanted Käärijä to win. We really love him, and think he deserved to win. He became a phenomenom. We had Käärijä cakes, children dressing up as Käärijä, trams in Helsinki coloured with Käärijä green and decorated with black spikes, and even the famous four statues in from of Helsinki railway station were dressed in green boleros. I saw many shops putting green decorations in their windows to show support. Actually, green fabric was sold out from the shops, so people couldn't make enough green clothes to show him support. And when he didn't win, our hearts were broken, not because we would have wanted that much ESC 2024 to be in Finland, but because we really thought he deserved to got that piece of glass more than somebody else.
One thing Rachel pointed out in her video analyzing the results was that from a technical musical perspective, juries overrated both Sweden and Finland by about 100 points. I think the narrative of the contest being "Finland vs. Sweden" had a huge subconscious impact on the jury scores and cannibalized other "jury friendly" songs we thought would be vying for the win, like Spain and France.
I think fans are heavily overrating Spain and France. I think they landed pretty much how I expected them to land. Spain was never going to be a favorite with the televote, but neither by the juries as they value commercial viability (an aspect that typical Eurofans detest). France, while having an amazing opening shot, was pretty much static throughout its stage show.
@@albiegato I agree Spain didn't stand much chance with the public, it's very polarizing to many ears, but the jury has criteria and it feels like those weren't handled the way they should. Blanca had the best vocal performance of the evening (like 100% pitch perfect) and the act had one of the most impressive fitting staging. If 60% of the jury members are pop-related, it makes sense cause they aren't used to hearing something unpredictable, which to proves Tom's and Rachel's conclusion there should be more diversity among the jury members.
@@gabesalgado789 it's people like you that give Eurovision fans a bad name. Spain was my least favorite in the final. But to call it atrocious is neither necessary not helpful. You've added nothing to the world. Just taken away. Thank you for that.
Fun fact. Konstrakta was part of Serbian jury this year and this was her Top 10: 1. Slovenia 2. Finland 3. Austria 4. Israel 5. Croatia 6. Spain 7. France 8. Czechia 9. Armenia 10. Belgium
Thank you for making this video like I think this whole discussion has been due for years now as the juries are literally knownn to dislike anything that isn't pop in English/Italian/French. Rapping and metal are basically poison for the juries but also ethnic and folksongs are not appreciated by them. The discussion needs to be kept alive because if we want any changes to the juries they need to be discussed or otherwise the contest is going to turn into a streaming radio friendly pop songs entirely.
Yeah I don't think a gigantic change is needed - just a small revamp. But they basically want to make it that music of other genres feels welcome in the competition and not that they're going to be penalised
Eurovision isn‘t over for me untill a spicy long analysis of all the voting and backstorys, explained by such a passionate superfan 🤩 It‘s sad that the show itself just ends in a matter of seconds between: „Everything can change“ and „Here‘s the winner, see ya next year“
It may intetest you for the televote video is that Danny of Voyager did an interview where he said people were apologising for not voting for him saying they felt they needed to support Finland.
@@melindamuller4466 It's a dangerous game to play, as first you need to know which country is just below Sweden in your country's televoter's heart, and then push them up just a bit (over jury's favourite, Sweden this year) but not too much, to leave them below your favourite (Finland this year). I don't think with millions of televoters voting it could ever work.
@@Eva-mp7xg Probably not, no, but you can vote multiple times, so if you vote once for the other country and twice for Finland, you could do something. Merely my votes for Finland and Croatia mattered, sadly not my votes for Portugal and Estonia.
I think me and my mate voted for Finland, France, Spain, Serbia, Czechia, Moldova, Germany and in my case Belgium and Slovenia.....results varied. I was a lot more successful last year but then again I was voting for Ukraine and from the UK for Poland. Poland kinda proved this year they could slash in a bucket on stage and still get a large televote especially in the UK or maybe some people will vote for any old shite as long as you can dance to it and performed it's performed by a pretty girl who can move vaguely in rhythm.
This is a great analysis. So much work has gone into this! I agree the weightings don’t need to be changed. It’s the composition of the jury, there needs to be a spread of ages, along with a mix of musicians, professionals & music academics. I wasn’t too keen on Finland’s, but I would have not ranked them last. Simply because the technical and stage performance was of a high standard, and there are parts of the song which were vocally difficult.
I have never watched a Eurovision video where I've gone "MM-HMM" out loud that many times. I truly did not realize stats nerds bigger than me existed. Bless you sir, from NYC.
Great video, Tom, as always. Before it even started, I wondered if there'd be any overlap with @ThePeaceAround's video on the topic, and you mentioned Rachel right up top! I get literally all of my Eurovision wisdom from you two
Another great video. Just wanted to add that if you're familiar with the Portuguese music scene and general tastes, it will come as no surprise at all that Poland was voted last by every single jury. Portugal has a music scene that is very eclectic, that favours alternative sounds, experimentation and of course African and Brazilian beats.
I'd definitely keep the 50-50 split between televoters and the jury, agreeing with the majority of what you and Rachel discovered on your deep-dive analyses. A lot of the scoring air-time is devoted to the jury votes so it would make little sense to spend almost an hour visiting every national jury just so they can award just 33% or 25% (say) of the final score. I suppose they could make that sequence all about the televoting outcome instead, but then that would change the dynamic of the combined jury points as the finale, as there will be less chance of a dramatic surge up the table for someone (except Sweden, obvs). Diverse juries is the way forward, so how do we get the EBU to realise this and ultimately make the change? I notice the Norwegian heads of delegation have started such discussions, but they won't manage the change if they are a lone voice!
yea thats a great point about how you dont want to spend such a long time for something that is such a low % that it seems pointless, and then spend 1/5th of that time on something that makes up 75%
Great video! Such good work! I was absolutely hooked the enitre time. I'm excited for part 3! Regarding how juries influence eachother, one of the belgian jurors did an interview stating that yes they were in the same room but they were absolutely forbidden to talk to eachother until their points had been verified and submitted. Apparently it was a rule made by the ebu. I guess body language can maybe still influence someone but i think it's quite unlikely. The 4 points from Greece to Cyprus will be embedded in my mind forever 😂 the room was still in aww about the 4 points furiously discussing who the 12 points would go to. We didn't expect Belgium (our country) the entire room just screamed 😂
Just looked up Belgium and they would have been 8th in the diversity scores, so it seems that system worked! I LOVE that they do that. i just wish it was formalised and that every jury had to do it. I still dont get why they need to be in the same room though
This is the first time I've ever actually subscribed to someone after being asked to hit the subscribe button! You genuinely have some of the best Eurovision content out there! 💜
Great point on the effect of Televotes only for Semi-Final. That is why I think we should bring back Jury Points into Semi-Final. And your point on a diverse Jury background is notable as well. I agree this will make the Jury points more spread out. Anyway great work! This is a great analysis video.
Tom. Tom Tom !! There is A HUGE elephant in the room here. So much discussion about the jury vs. the public vote - and yes that is really significant. As much as i was Team Finland this year, I am 100% pro jury vote. Without those two rounds of voting the results would be far less exciting for viewers, and let's not forget - this is a TV show. at the end of the day. The issue we have here is that the voting system we currently have in place has not been updated since 1975. The 12 10, 8-1 points. The phrase "douze points" is iconic, but it was created at a time when the grand final consisted of perhaps 18 or 19 songs. Seriously, in the modern era where a grand final consists of either 25 or 26 songs, that reduces the chances of any songs gaining any points at all. A system that only awards points to the Top 10 songs of any jury or public vote fails. Finishing 11th, more than top half, in both the jury and televotes scores achieves you absolutely zero points. That is disgraceful. How many times have we seen contestants in recent years receive a "nul points" from either the jury or televote? These artists have worked for perhaps six months, and are then told "Ha Ha, nobody voted for you". People DID, but not getting Top 10 overall... Well, for an artist it must be a humiliating experience. The EBU has a responsibility for the welfare and mental health of its contestants. We have watched the painful live reactions of artists receiving nul points TOO many times. It's time for that to stop and to celebrate and applaud those who have taken six months out to participate. I created a spreadsheet with results if they were based on scores of twenty points down to one for the the individual results for the grand final, both jury and televote...l. There were some interesting results, particularly for those that had finished unexpectedly mid-table. If you are interested, I'm happy to mail you the spreadsheet. Thanks again for all your amazing work.
yes i actually love that idea! Yes please do send me the spreadsheet and Ill check it out and see how it would have changed things. I agree that the douze points is iconic, BUT so was the orchestra and saying the 1-10 points and lots of other things that had to be changed with the times. I think people would miss it for a while, but we'd move on. plus we can still use it as a phrase. worst cae scenario they could keep it but add in 9 and 11 points, so at least 12 countries got points but they got to keep the phrase
Maybe confirmation bias, but I remember Spain's only 12 points of 2008 was Andorra. Thanks for this Tom, I may try to produce my own Jury fairness when I have some of my own time.
The jury system is well overdue reform. I agree the jurors must be more representative of different ages and musical backgrounds. Across the internet/ media, many legitimate criticisms have been highlighted about the jury system. I hope the EBU will listen and make the necessary changes for next year's contest. We cannot have a repeat of this year's highly controversial win. I thought the jurors are meant to help balance the contest, however this year, they completely overvalued Sweden and set them so far ahead of anybody else. Considering the trend seems to be that a country needs at least 200+ jury points to win, only Sweden got above this. The jurors secured Sweden’s win, unfortunately at the expense of not awarding other good quality acts points and rendering the televotes completely redundant because it could not influence the outcome at this point. It left an undemocratic and anticlimactic feeling to this year's contest imo.
Totally agree. More expert jurors, and from more diverse musical backgrounds, emphasizing the words "expert" and "musical". We can't have on juries young "overnight" pop stars with barely any experience and/or substantial knowledge of musical art or music industry that will make them qualified to expertly judge other musicians; we also can't have film critics, or TV hosts as jurors, as they are barely more related to the music industry/art than just an average TV spectator/televoter. Look at this year. How could jurors with the profiles I just mentioned be qualified to expertly/impartially judge entries like Spain or Germany? We need producers (music, theatre, television), composers, musicians, singers, band members, vocal coaches of diverse vocal techniques, conductors, music teachers, with relevant education and experience, and covering as many different music genres as possible. Mentioning impartiality. The jurors need to be instructed to judge as impartially as possible, leaving aside their personal taste in music, and taking into account the objective quality as much as humanely possible - that's why they need to be experts and have the technical knowledge they could use to judge. For the personal taste we already have the millions of televoters.
Thanks Tom, you're doing the lord's work! Re: the jury vote, if they were to release the show after, this may help people to see why votes can be different. I've heard performers admit they did better in one the other. It may not change a lot of minds, but could add a layer of transparency.
what a fantastic video, so much detail!! 50/50 jury and televote is definitely the best option but i really like your idea of putting junior contestants on the jury!! i personally hope that they bring back the jury for the semis as last year my favourite (sheldon from australia) probably would have been a lot more at risk it was televote only, and azerbaijan would have been straight out as they got no televote in their semi at all! can't wait for part 3 and whatever you make next!!
Regarding how the juries at ESC vote, the Greek jury came out and said that they voted in separate rooms and that there was no prior communication as to what to vote. Now with national final juries that’s completely different as it’s would be a lot smaller production. For the Greece/Cyprus thing, it’s like if Ireland and Northern Ireland were to be in the competition. Same language, same culture, same norms, same customs and a shared past.
@@ESCTom I also find what went down in 2013 quite interesting. If u don’t have enough on just 2011 u could probably do a video of weird things that went on in that era, but then you’ll probably end up with a 10 hour long video lol. But yea Azerbaijan winning in 2011 still messes with my head.
Wow Tom, thanks for this extremely thorough analysis! Well, we already know that to celebrate diversity is always a good idea ;-). A diverse jury with the symbolic number of 7 members please.
Another alternative to giving more weight to the televote is to make the televote of each country give points to MORE countries. For example, one country’s televote can give points to 15 countries (the distribution of points will probably be altered; maybe instead of the maximum 12 points, we raise the ceiling to 15-18 points). This could be implemented in the Grand Final at least. Meanwhile, the juries’ points will stay the same, and only 10 countries get points from each jury like usual.
What an interesting analysis! Your idea of diversifying the jury sounds like the best way to improve things. If it's 5 jurors foe each country, it could be jurors for different musical genres, and one for staging or the visual aspects of the performance. I think the ESC idea of what kind of music people listen to is very narrow, and might even limit what types of songs get picked to perform. I just recently had a discussion with someone about how a song can be amazing regardless of genre, if it's well made. I would gladly welcome diversity in both the performances who come to ESC, and in the juries.
Great great work👏 I got these crazy stats : -If Finland 2023 had the same televote score as Ukraine 2022, they would have won by only 6 points !! -Whereas in 2022, Ukraine could have finished as low as 19th in the jury and still have won Waiting for your 2011 analysis video btw ! 🙂
I've seen some people throw around the idea that the criteria the EBU gives the jury should just be removed completely since a) we as the televoters don't have any criteria other than our own taste and b) the current criteria puts too much emphasis on vocals which leads to the tanking of entries like Finland, Croatia, etc. I'm not sure I agree with that idea 100%, but I would support the jury criteria being updated in some way.
Honestly, I am not surprised about juries putting Poland last becuase of the whole TVP situation. I feel it's more to show that they didn't support TVP quationable descisions. On a separate note about the sound: I watched everything online, and I notices how some songs sounded really bad, like Croatia and Serbia, for example. Backtrack was sooo loud for them, I couldn't hear the vocals, while you can see how Let 3 was killing their throats to top the backtrack. I think it is a very important point you made here that should be addressed more be staff and professionals - how to make songs sound adequately with the equipment, especially if it influences juries' choices. Thank you for the video!
yea i still dont understand technically what happened with Croatia and Serbia. Especially since both of them were in the semi-finals so there was so much time to fix any technical issues
Appreciate all the effort for these massive videos Tom. If I'm allowed to say, if you want to go for these analytical videos be careful to not have them too skewed towards what you wanted and who you liked and maybe be more impartial. I felt like a lot of your videos these seasons were about trying to find ways to justify how Finland could win or why they should have won.
How can one address the issue with the jury and pointing system without mentioning the actual symptom of the issue? Yes, there's an issue with a system where 185 jurors can override the decisions of millions of televoters by block-voting for one act, giving it an unbeatable advantage. I don't think it's a matter of Tom's preference when he points out (as many other ESC bloggers) the issue with the jury, so please don't take it as a show of sympathy for Finland. It could be any other country winning televoter's majority, and still, they had no chance to win this year.
Interestingly Eurovision 1963 had 20 jury members! There was obviously a very different voting system, but we still ended up with 4 nil points out of the competing 16 entries, 1/4 of the competing songs. I believe this system was brought in to try and counter the 4 way nil points from 1962, but this obviously didn't work at all. However, we also ended up with only 5 points between 1st and 3rd, with Denmark winning with 42 points, Switzerland barely losing with 40 points, and Italy coming third with 37 points. I think that especially Sweden (nil points), who was reportedly quite popular with the public, got dragged down by the fact that only some jurors supported her, especially considering it was a more out-of-the-box entry. Maybe we would have seen some Sweden points, especially from the other Nordic countries, if there were only 5 or 10 jurors? Overall, I think this competition showed that larger juries don't necessarily give closer and more even results, but rather that they just give a select few countries all of their points. What do you think?
yea i think the more jurors that you have, the more the jury gradually starts to become the televote and you lose that minority voice. I personally think increasing jury numbers would make things worse. it wouldnt be addressing the key problems with the jury, lack of diversity and some juries being able to influence each other, it would just be doubling them! Interesting rE: 63, i need to go back and watc some of the previous shows, im just trying to come up with a way in how to film it
@@ESCTom There are 5 jury members (mostly!), each carry 20% of the jury scores. That's a lot of power per person and this can over influence results, and you have evidence to show this! Why not increase the jury size to 10 - half under 25, the other half over 25. Perhaps allow countries to flex the jury size - minimum 5, maximum 10 but always 50/50 age split.
@@ESCTom Watching the old shows would be really interesting! I've always thought of them as just some fun thing, but haven't really thought of the statistical or analysis side of them like you might. Looking forward to if you figure out a good way of doing it!
But can we really say a jury is "healthy" with completely different/random 1st places if they're supposed to be making their choices based on the same criteria? Was the vocal quality great? How can someone say it was the worst, some in the middle, and some that it was the best ever? It could happen for 1 or 2 of the jurors, but everyone having completely different scores? Sounds like not being objective enough. That wouldn't be a jury, but a random sample of 5 people's personal rankings.
i get u but the way i see it the vocal quality could be great but if its for example a rock vocal a pop producer may not be able to recognise that and would rank it lower than a rock artist would. in general accessible songs of obvious quality will still fare well, but it's hard to find any objective standpoints in music and the jury could do a better job representing that.
well it would still be healthy if they were from different backgrounds. because jurors from diff backgrounds would be able to appreciate the criteria dfrom their unique techinical perspecitve ie. an ethnic musician being able to appreciate Blanca's flamenco singing, a rapper being able to appreciate the technical difficulty of Kaarijas rap
In my opinion, as long as jury / televote have equal (50-50%) powers, it will always be a 2 horse race between jury's favourite and televoters' favourite and it leaves lots of contestants with crumbles of points, which is not fair. To have more spread out points, you need to push the balance towards one or the other. Giving more power to juries will result to lose interest from the televoters side (as you cannot make your favourite win anymore), so the only solution is to give more powers to televoters. I promise, once televoters will see that the main opponent is not the actual jury-pet act, but all acts have more equal chances to win, they will also spread out their votes more, and this overwhelming televote landslide win will not happen anymore, making the competition more open and interesting. So my vote goes for the 33-66%.
I don't know about that. imo it hasn't really been a two horse race everytime if you look at the past years that have turned out the other way around with the jury votes. Like for example 2021 we had a lot of potential winners that were close to win, the same with 2019 and 2018. This year was something else we have not seen for long which two extremley good acts fought for the first place. The most dramatic maybe in the history, I would say. I would rather have it 50/50, also since we have seen how giving the televote more power in 2000s turned out.
@@tanktheplayer4275 Maybe it worth to try giving juries a bit of power to boost artistically good acts, but not enough to supress a landslide televote win. I don't think the 33/66% was ever tried. UMK has something similar with 25/75% and it works really well for them (looking at recent Finnish submissions).
@@Eva-mp7xg I think it's a great option for a national selection and Finland and other countries have really shown that. But when it comes to eurovision is a totally different story considering the competition is bigger and more widder with so many countries taking part which causes block voting, a better chance to vote for and vote down other countries because of political reasons( The jury also have this problem, but televote is even worse) That could potentially hurt the competiton instead, which could lead to a downhill in the early 2000 which many countries were about to withdraw and get uninterested of the competition. I think the best choice is to have more juries and more diverse genres with experts and eurovision fans, but where the experts are a few more. That concept that you mention sounds good, but I think rather fit for a small competition rather than eurovision based on what it is today.
@@tanktheplayer4275 I don't think a 2 horse race is good, and we could see it happening multiple times, which kills the original purpose of ESC, to come together and celebrate our diversity and at the same time find the common denominator through music. Unfortunately, the current 2 main powers: jury and active televoters are representing 2 different concepts. Juries are all for nicely sung standard pop, while televoters are more for experimental, new, something unusual. So the duel seems to be inevitable. Imho EBU should clarify which concept they want ESC to represent: a pop-singing contest, or a talent show looking for new artists and especially for new art. I remember the jury only times, and I didn't like it, so stopped watching ESC exactly because of the juries. This year juries pushed Sweden's points to a height that made it impossible for televoters to change the result, and it kind of felt like those jury-only times again, and I decided not to follow ESC next year, unless the jury system changes. Let's see what happens, I'm really hopeful that EBU changes ESC to an interesting, innovative competition and doesn't kill the Vision in Eurovision. p.s.: I don't think a 33/66 split would bring back the weirdest 2000s numbers, because there would be still some jury power, and the public have learned a lot in the last 20 years.
@@Eva-mp7xg You say that but the mass vote for Poland kinda proves that large elements of dispora, block and voting for LCD trash is still alive and well. Also when it comes to diversity what happened to Spain's televote. There were problems on both sides this year but that said if a runway televote winner with the highest one next to a country that was been invaded can be nerfed then Houston we have a problem and the juries need to some restraining.
Very surprised that Australia appears to have such similar jury scores. I agree that independent analytical thought should be the rule. I hope Martin Österdahl watches this video. Great job Tom 😊
Great video as always. There’s a couple of things I disagree with/ would like to point out. 1) I agree that the jury member’s backgrounds should be more diverse than the current pop dominance, but I really don’t think their backgrounds is as much of a problem as people make it out to be for 3 reasons: a) What is pop? “Pop” literally refers to popular music, which can be anything. There’s typical pop like Sweden and Norway, but I’d also class Finland as pop. There’s got to be a lot of jury members who aren’t professionals in the typical “pop” movement (like Schlager) but their area of expertise can’t be properly defined, so it’s just listed as pop. Because it’s really an all encompassing category. So I don’t think there’s as much Schlager dominance as people act like. b) Related to that, most songs at Eurovision are what people would generally deem to be pop. So it’s not really a huge issue if most jury members have pop backgrounds, because that represents what we’re seeing at the contest. c) The most successful jury songs aren’t always pop, so they clearly don’t have that dominating an influence. Obviously I’ve just stated that pop is hard to define, so I admit it’s subjective, but I wouldn’t consider North Macedonia 2019 pop. Nor Switzerland or France 2021. Portugal 2017 was the overwhelming jury favourite and that definitely wasn’t pop. A lot of conventional pop songs have flopped quite a lot with the jury, for example Armenia 2022 and Norway 2023. 2) I feel like the community as a whole, regardless of who we wanted to win, has fallen into the belief that there was some sort of jury conspiracy against Finland. Where has this come from? If it was Russia or someone we were talking about then sure, I’d agree something might be going on, but this is Finland we’re talking about. One of the most peaceful, friendly nations in the world. No one is trying to hurt their chances at anything. I wouldn’t say that jury members who placed Finland last have committed any sort of atrocity. I wouldn’t have put Finland last, and if they were systematically doing it then it becomes suspicious, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. In a final with at least 20 deserving songs, then someone has to come last in your ranking, and it might just happen that that’s Finland. If the juries wanted to hurt Finland’s chances they would’ve come way lower than 4th with them. Also keep in mind that 4th place this year would be expected to receive less points than 4th place in the previous few years, because there’s less countries this year. 3) I really hope they bring back the juries into the semis. They weren’t a disaster this year but there were less countries in the semis than usual this year, and as you’ve pointed out it’s only been 1 year. The point you made was excellent: not having the juries in the semis is probably hurting the televote favourites in the finals, because the juries have less “jury type” songs to choose from. I wish more people got to hear that perspective.
I think the televote only semis are a stopgap with Luxembourg returning juries will be returning to the semis. Otherwise it's going to be like Monaco or Andorra where the smaller countries don't stay. The problem is that this year showed a freakish high jury mark can still swing things for their choice. I know a lot of people like Tattoo but I'm sorry I'm not buying it's the best song since the return of the juries or everything else was crap by comparison which that jury mark would lead you to believe. As for Poland being last with one jury a lot - well it's an extremely basic song that won its NF in extremely dubious circumstances maybe people understandably felt that was deserving of downvoting - if a contestant on Dancing with the Stars or the X Factor cheated and did something with minimal content they'd be marked low too..
But really, though, these videos are amazing. It’s so cool to see such an in depth, data-driven analysis of the results and the fascinating conclusions one might draw from them! I’ve been learning a lot through them :)
lol 😂 Ironically 2 of the countries who have massively turned around their fortunes in the last 5 years. Portugal have really changed since 2017. 12th in 2021 and 9th in 2022
Love your videos and especially your pace of speaking. I usually speed the videos up to 1.5 or 1.75, but I can actually watch your videos as is, so thanks for that! :) And BTW. I must've watched all the ESC videos this year: all reactions, compilations, analyses, vocal coaches etc and for some weird reason there was a lot of hate towards the Albanian song. It wasn't my favourite one, but her vocals were just flawless and the song had a cool Balkan vibe, so I really didn't get why the song was so triggering to some to reward all the toxic commenting.,, but apparently the juries caught same bug ?
Thank you Marsu 🥰 Personally Albania was one of my growers at the actual show. I thought the staging did a great job at explaining some of the story of the song, and then i always liked the first 30 seconds with that ethnic beckoning sound. Honestly I think that the final was just really strong this year. I struggle to pick out who I think justifiably deserved to come last, because I just don't think anyone was bad in the final in my opinion
Great video as always and great analysis over the power of a single juror, I actually never considered that 1 juror placing a song in the top 3 would basically guarantee points with the newer (2018 onwards) jury system. I know in 2016 that a Danish juror accidentally voted backwards which result in Ukraine getting 12 points and Australia 10 points, but had that juror voted correctly then Australia would have gotten 12 points and Ukraine would actually be outside the top 10 and get 0 points. Luckily that wouldn't have changed the winner of 2016 contest but that would have been a swing of 22 points so Australia would have been a lot closer to winning. I think the EBU should increase the amount of people per jury to like 8 or 10 (smaller countries can have less since I'm pretty sure you can't be on the jury in back to back years). In 2000, the backup juries were actually "assembled jury of eight individuals, which was required to be split evenly between members of the public and music professionals, comprised additionally of an equal number of men and women, and below and above 30 years of age." I know that this was during the televote only era so the EBU basically wanted a demoscopic jury that would represent the public, but I don't see why they couldn't make the current juries larger and more diverse.
Yeah I didn't realise that one juror could be so powerful as well. When I started doing those numbers, I had no idea what to expect, but I thought maybe there will be 80% points rate I wasn't expecting their first place choice to always be top 9
As a Greek myself, the 4 jury points to Cyprus were completely unexpected for me & I know I'm gonna get a lot of ""criticism"" from other Greeks for saying this but I don't care. I think it's great that our juries didn't give Cyprus their 12 this year, yes Andrew can definetely sing but the song did nothing for me, I tried listening to it a lot of times and never felt positive or negative towards this song. Before the show I had it 25th in my top but after the show, I upgraded it to 22nd, cause some songs I liked didn't have good performances or good live vocals. However I was disappointed that they didn't give a single point to Finland. Btw great job with the voting analysis, keep up the good work! 👍
First up great job promoting Rachel's channel. I like her point of view and her analysis is always considered and logical! I also liked your review but I will make the same suggestion I did when I watched Rachel's review, I think the jury and the public should vote on the same show. If you are going to have a grand final show, and you are asking people to vote on that performance for the winner, then you should have everyone who votes for the winner watch and vote on the same performances. There is no other event in the world where you basically have two grand finals. I can not see any reason why the jury votes can not be collated and counted alongside the televotes. I understand that the jury are ranking all acts in the grand final instead of just voting for their favorite, but adding the scores should not take that long.
yea thats actually a really good point, im not sure what the official reason is for that? Maybe it's because they want to have time to look at the jury results to make an assessment of them? I guess it also gives them an idea of the 3-4 who can win so that they can practice the reprise at the end and also organise where all the cameramen will be? Those are just suggestions though, i dont know what the official reason is
Great analysis as always Tom. As is healthy for debate however, I completely disagree with your theory about the Televote having c.55% influence. I am firmly of the belief that it is 50%. If you looked at it from the opposite view and compared the total number of jurors versus the total number of people picking up the phone around the world, each juror has potentially 400k times the influence of each person who televotes. I know they are music professionals, but is their opinion 400k times more valid than mine? (and ive paid for the privilege of voting!). I agree with a jury influence as it mostly eliminates the chance of a nil points, but I do agree with you that if we get repeated instances of the jury winner winning over the televote we may get a disconnect.
haha I'm always happy for you to disagree with me 🤗. I know one of the big reasons that people dislike the jury is because of the disproportionate power that they get. I do think the telephone also has a similar flaw though. Four example if you compare the quantity of votes in Albania to Germany, you could equally say that an Albanian has the power of 1,000 Germans, because the Albanian telephoto so small compared to GER. Ironically I think the thing that makes the jury work is the fact it's so small and that it gives that minority voice. So although I agree that it is definitely seems unfair that one person gets to have such a big say over others, it's necessary in order to spread out those points and not have countries showing up and feeling like they're getting paid absolute dust this is why having diverse jurors means that at least they are representing 100,000 different people. If you have 5 males 30 year old jurors, then you have a jury where one tiny demoscope is massively overrepresnted. at least with 5 people off different backgrounds, theres a greater chance that what they vote for will be more reprensentative of the people they are voting on behalf of
@@ESCTom Yeah, you make a valid point Tom between the disparity in the number of televoters in each country, but even taking that into account the balance between no. of jurors versus televoters is still enormous. But I still maintain that if we get a run of 2 or 3 consecutive results where the jury effectively decides the overall winner the EBU will have a problem. If the result from the Friday night jury show had been made public, would as many people bother to pick up the phone and pay for the privilege of voting knowing that it’d take something akin to Ukraine 2022 to change the result? Id be happy with compromise of increasing the number and diversity of the jurors, but i have my doubts that anything will change for next year, as that could be seen by the EBU as an ‘invalidation’ of the result this year.
I was thinking earlier in the video : I wish he would do a deepdive on 2011 and then you said it yourself! Also chuckled a little bit at Greece/Cyprus voting for each other in recent years. Its literally gone on to some extent since Cyprus debut in the early 80s. Greece would have had 0 in 1998, but had 12 from Cyprus.
Just to add about Greece and Cyprus swapping points - it is mostly because of the shared culture between the two countries imo. Since you cannot vote for you own country in the competition, they do the second best thing, which is voting for each other. Same with Moldova/Romania and Russia/Belarus. This is a situation that goes beyond Eurovision, and idk if it can actually be reliably solved within it.
i agree with the televote, but i dont think its that difficult to find 5 people to put on a jury who are able to rank songs based on their preferences and not just a shared culture
@@ESCTom from what I know, the Greek and Cypriot music industries are quite integrated, so it might be a bigger challenge than it seems - especially for Cyprus, as it is quite a small country. Plus it is not uncommon to have Greek singers perform for Cyprus (E.g. Eleni Foureira is Greek).
Crikey - your dedication is amazing! I think the changes you suggest are sensible. I fully agree that changing the weighting is a bad idea as any other weighting bar 50:50 would look arbitrary. I do think juries should be retained as a means of reducing bloc voting which doesn't help the reputation of the contest. Briefing jurors to vote on technical aspects may help but I think it's unavoidable that personal taste will come into it. Out of interest, I had a quick look to compare the 🇬🇧 jury and televote points over the past couple of years to see where the differences lie: - 2023: Kaarija 🇫🇮 got 12 televote points but 0 jury points in the final - I suspect he'd have got 12 televote points from us in the semi had we been assigned the first one to vote in. Monika Linkyte 🇱🇹 got the 12 televote points and fared well with both segments in the final - with she got more points from us than any other single act (with Loreen 🇸🇪 closely behind). - 2022: Kalush Orchestra 🇺🇦 got 12 televote points but 0 jury points. In the semi final, Brooke 🇮🇪 similarly got 12 public votes - presumably helped by the fact she appeared on The Voice UK and is from Northern Ireland so could have rallied her friends and family to vote for her - but again got 0 jury points. - 2021: interestingly Dadi 🇮🇸 got 12 televote and 12 jury points in the semi final and 10 from each in the final, showing much less divergence in taste. Though The Roop 🇱🇹 like Kalush and Kaarija got 12 televote points but no jury points.
wow, i never actually realised that Brooke got a 12 from the UK. and 8 from Australia too. I didnt hear anyone in IReland complaining about political voting when that happened. I guess its ok when we do it 😂
@@ESCTom I did see a post about Eurovision from an Irish news source on Facebook and it was hilarious to read some of the same sort of things Brits have been saying for years. Hope our respective national broadcasters get their acts together again 🇬🇧🇮🇪
I'm a bit surprised about the suggestion of younger people being part of the jury: I was already thinking that 22 was very young! I thought the supposed point of the jury was to be "music industry professionals" - so you would expect these to be people with many years experience in the industry, and by definition they wouldn't be young. The jury isn't supposed to be demographically representative, it's supposed to be "expert". Obviously I don't think the juries are working well right now either, but I do think you need to pick a lane: are the juries supposed to be "experts", or are they supposed to be demographically representative? And then try to make that choice work.
I wonder, since the televote is read out as a lump sum at the end, if they wanted to give the televote more weight, if they increase the number of the countries that can receive points from one televote. Ie: instead of 12, 10, 8, etc either include the 11 and 9 and have 12 songs get points from one country, or even have it be 15. That way the winner of a country’s televote will get a larger amount, and it further reduces the chance of a televote 0 since more songs will get points from a country than not
I agree the jury was too 'pop' oriented it should be more diverse. With regards to the average age of the jury I think it should bè similar to the average age of the population. Italian jury was 46 Years average but we are an 'old' population so lets say it was fair. Some countries have average age around 25 so the jury should also be younger. Of course it's hard to know what the average age of the Eurovision viewer is, there are no statistics on that. Also not everyone that watches the show votes. I also agree the jury members should not talk to each other or influence, a jury should be impartial otherwise it's not a jury. For sure some things could be improved hopefully in the future there will be some progress.
yea you bring up an interesting question of "who should be jury be?" - should they represent the demographics of their country or should it not be that strict. like you said, its very hard to know exactly how much of each demographic is actually watching.
I wish the juries were abolished, but IF there must be juries, I think juries should be larger (10-15 jurors), and deliberately more diverse considering the genres. And maybe the jury points could weigh MUCH less than the televote?
I think a big discrepancy between the juries and the televote is what they're voting for. The juries tend to vote for something familiar to them (Greece and Cyprus has a similar culture, as well as Belarus and Russia), whereas the televote likes to vote for things that are different to what they hear on a daily basis (for example Ukraine in 2021). This only helds up if we ignore the diaspora of course. (Though that is truly baffling to me. Might be because I'm German and we cannot be proud of our nationality because of reasons, but if I were to live somewhere else, I would only vote for Germany if it was my favourite song, which is rare for Germany 😅. Like, I don't see why you need to vote for a country you're originally from? That's what makes Eurovision political in my opinion. If it were for me, I would get rid of diaspora voting and everyone would need to vote for their favourite song, but that's utopia, I know.) Also I agree with another commenter that the juries and the televote need to see the same show, so we could get rid of some dumb conspiracy theories. Also also 😅 I feel like this year the discussion is purely because people would have liked to see Finland win, and if they had, no one would talk about it or the juries. Cause I remember last year, when Ukraine won with a massive televote, the juries weren't as much criticised as this year. So people will find something to be angry about if their favourite didn't win, last year it was the televote, this year the juries, next year Martin Österdahl and the year after that because the winter was too cold and the moon was in Uranus. Toxic fans will be toxic. Sorry for my incoherent rant, I'm finished now.
yep youre totally right - people will always be angry about something cos their favourite didnt win. Look at the big picture over the last 14 years, it's quite clear that the system is working very well. They're obviously gonna be some years where it doesn't work as well, but that doesn't mean that the system is totally broken. I'd just like to see some small changes to the jury so that there is a greater spread of points and less countries getting almost nothing. I also do agree with you about the nationalistic thing. I don't feel the necessity to vote for Ireland just because I'm from there. But I know some Irish people who are disgusted with me for saying that and think that I'm a traitor because I'm not willing to blindly vote for a song because of nationalistic reasons instead of just voting for what I like. Im actually not a fan of "patriotism" at all - i think its a fine line on the way to tribalism/racism
Of course the first priority in changes is to guarantee some level of diversity in music backgrounds for the jurors. But in terms of point changes, what I would like to see is for the jury to still support entries that are not that well-liked by the televote (like Estonia, Australia, and Austria this year), but not overpower the televote in the highest of rankings (cough Sweden cough). Doubling the televote score is the simplest solution (both mathematically and as an explanation to the audience during broadcast), but I don't like how the results would look like the televote's rankings and only slightly modified. I would still like to have the jury heavily affect the entries in the mid to lower end of the ranks, but limit their effect on the higher end. My suggestion would be to flatten the jury score right before they present the televote. For example, the jury winner's points would be converted to just 100 points, the second would get 95 pts, the third would get 90 pts, etc. This would allow the jury to still give substantial support to the songs they deem worthy, but not overpower the choice of the people at home who are paying to vote.
16:29 As Ukrainian I don't think that it's very surprising (considering that we had Iryna Fedyshyn as one of the juries last year) also I don't like Belgium's song either
One thing about public/jury weighting that I think many people get wrong is as you correctly identified, weird decimal point scoring. However, I don't think that the solution is rational weighting but giving the public an extra points category. I could see 15-points for first, meaning that we end up with the public's top 11 getting points, but the jury's top 10. I'd love to work out what this would do, but I can't find the data on exect televotes.
this is something im totally open to. currently only 10/26 countries get points. Id prefer something more generous, but i know that they are really not keen on getting rid of the famous DOUZE points.
@@ESCTom I completely get that douze points is really good for brand recognition and it's why I don't think we will see any change to the number of countries getting points from the judges. But the current format of scoring makes that a non-issue for the televote, because all of those scores are aggregated. In many ways, I would like to see something more like the top-13 from both the jury and the televote getting points, but I can't see it in the near future. And jumping to top-13 for just the televote would add too much weight there and unballance the jury and the televote, and you explained quite well why that isn't a good idea.
Great video, as always!! Regarding the juries, it seems that the arguments you point out so well, are a bit contradictionary. For example: you want a more diverse jury but with only 5 jurymembers that's very difficult. And with making the juries bigger, you lose the power of the jury which comes with a more diverse jury. Also I personally don't believe in putting 12-13 year olds in the juries. At that age, they're just children and do not have a long enough attention span to objectively rate all the 26 songs (in a 2,5 hour show). Minimum age of a jury member should be the same as minimum age for a contestant: 16 ( I believe it is, is it?). With 5 jury members, you almost need to go to an alternating system, whereas the one year you pick jurymembers from certain age groups and professional backgrounds, and excluding them from the jury the following year.
Thank you for the analysis, it is a very nice one, very informative. Just I want to add, why we are still talking that Kaarija was murdered by Jury, I think he has got enough form juries, I think we could argue more bout Armenia, who didn't get enough jury appreciation. Also I want to add that amazing songs like Czechia, and Estonia was murdered by the televote if we want to use terms like this. I agree that we have to change some things in the jury, but we also have to change some things in the televote. Like diaspora voting for Poland was ridiculous, how n earth Blanka gains more televote than Alika, Vesna, even I think Armenia was behind her...How ??? So we should talk about this as well that the public is also very political and I would limit the voting by citizenship not location and phone number, because that would be fair and square. For example I have a Hungarian and a Czech number, I live in Czechia, but I haven't vote for Czechia because it is not fair from my side because I felt buyest in the situation toward the son and the group who i love and the country what I love. I think that a lot of Polish people living abroad they use their status in other countries to bust the televote for their entry, I know it doesn't change the winner but it can in the future don't you think ?
Yea murdered was the wrong word. it probably would have been more accurate to say that the jury sealed the deal, or that they were the deciding factor. which i guess was kind of obvious already, which is probably why i subconsciously tried to embellish it 😅 Yea id love to see more strenuous control over people voting for themselves, cos it's technically cheating. Who knows, maybe in the future if apps like WeChat become more popular (in WeChat, your passport is uploaded to your profile), something like that might actually become possible. i think thats the only way that it could happen, but it would be awesome if it did. things would be a lot fairer!
@@ESCTom To be honest, I think the winner this year was well deserved, I know that the crowed was frustrated because they wanted their favorite, to win. But Loreen also gained a lot of televote so we need to acknowledge that she was basically winner because the song was good the staging was well executed besides of the difficulties. The song is the most streamed on spotify so a lot of people connected with the song just as much as Kaarija, and the vocals were good. I was disappointed also for some of the results but I hope the system will improve, however I would be deeply dissented if they not do 50-50 because we need jury in this competition and the public should not decide he faith of the whole competition.
yep agreed. i think the televote has shown enough times now that its just not reliable to choose the winner on its own. As much as I loved Moldova last year, if it was televote only, it almost would have won. Thats not a winning song for me. So ill always stick by 50-50 jury
@@ESCTom Let’s not forget about Verka Serducka in the past, and some other examples when quirky fun songs are getting high televote always, but they are not winner materials. Anyway I think in some case if we chalk some national final, public is right but sometimes the jury is right, for example this year in Poland televote 100% right, and in Spain last year Jury was who put Chanel to the winner position of Benidorm fest and the result proved them right.
My main wishes for changes to the jury vote would be a separation of jurors, as you discussed, and changes to the instructions given to the jurors. I think Finland's jury results, including jurors putting Finland near the bottom of their rankings makes complete sense because of how the instructions are given to jurors, and I can completely see why collectively, a room of 5 supposed "professionals" felt like they had to vote down Finland because it didn't meet the first of the listed criteria given to them - vocal capacity. I don't feel like the 50:50 jury/televote ratio needs to be changed, and I can understand why they probably won't increase the number of jurors in a country. While intuitively more would be better, I can understand why in some countries recruiting more might be challenging. If they did increase the number of jurors, I get your point Tom that it might weaken the strength of the current scaling system that means a country in the top 3 of a juror is almost guaranteed to get points. One way to resolve this while increasing the number of jurors would be to reduce the weight in the current formula. It's currently 0.827^(r-1) where r is the rank given by the juror, but if we reduced 0.827 to something smaller, the strength of a high ranking, particularly a 1st place ranking, would be improved.
Croatia Coming Last in Alot of Jurors, and all of the UKs Jurors was not Surpising. Considering how contraversal the Band is. But at the end of the Day, Its not all about winning. Rosa Linn like came 20th and she is Most Streamed. I think the Running order needs to be More Randomised, But include a Pot for the More Complex staging (These can go after the Breaks).
Rachel at the Peace Around suggested pots for different tempo songs too so you don't end up like last year where most of the uptempo bops were in the first half.
Its kind of hard to completely randomise and still optimise the show. Not just in terms of timing but also fairness (based on semi running order), genre variation, staging variation (mainly color) etc
@@Sarah-og3mp Yeah - the problem is it's a balancing act between what's fair to the acts, what's the best for the show and what's a reasonable demand on the stage crew who are already working to tight schedules.
Are jury members able to know who the other jury members are in the days leading up to the final and are they able to contact one another and discuss their favorites in the days before the final. One would think that that possibility would have a profound effect on the outcome. And a totally unrelated question: I noticed a number of people commenting on how they 'download songs'they really like, for 'owning' in their digital music library. Do you have a favorite platform for downloading (buying) songs that you want to 'own' in order to not be dependent on streaming services which require monthly fees?
You can analyse this: Interpol investigates Swedish, Norway, Finnish, Icelandic, Demark, Dutch public TV's, 3 former and 1 actual executive producers of EBU (Sarah Yuen, Svante Stockelius, Jan-Ola Sand and Martin Östeandhal) and many private persons. Interpol things that there were a lot of manipulations, corruptions and other things to made Scandinavian countries win since 1999. till 2023.
27:52 no one else notice that the two times Jury awarded more points to the winner, it was Sweden that won that year? 🙄 Swedish favouritism and Jury corruption proven.
Seeing the Ukrainian jury members putting Belgium last almost every time is the weirdest thing I've seen in this video. I suspect there was a media thing happening in the week leading up to Eurovision about one of our politicians saying something negative about the political situation in Ukraine.
And spain in 2022 also they gave Azerbaiyan 12 points being first in four jury members Fun fact-one spanish jury placed cornelia 11 th in the semifinal
One of this year's many ironies is that Cyprus' song, this year, was really good. Or, at least, to me it was. I mean, he pulled off that song live, with all those difficult head voices and high notes. The song itself will not rewrite the history of pop music but it was on a par with Loreen's song. To me at least. I do realise that my tastes don't mirror those expressed by Eurovision's final top chart. P.S. no, Loreen didn't deserve to win. If the juries had been less "pop-centric" and more diverse she wouldn't have received all those 12s.
Yea I agree about Cyprus. Ironically this was a year when a high jury score actually would have made sense cos it did well with juries and also it’s almost like something Greece would send themselves
The Greece and Cyprus thing is so complicated because there have been a couple times the past few years where them giving each other high jury points can be justified (ie Cyprus 2018 and Greece 2022) but I completely agree that dropping the hammer on jury bloc voting is good moving forward. I also hope Martin Österdahl steps in with Armenia and Azerbaijan. I know it's way more complicated than just Eurovision but other countries with volatile relations (ie Greece/Cyprus and Turkey, Ukraine and Russia from 2014-21, Serbia and Albania, Armenia and Turkey, The Balkans in general, etc) have voted for each other so it shouldn't be completely impossible for them to do the same down the road.
Some really interesting points here. Never thought about how having only 5 juries makes for more happy anomalies. I guess they will need to diversify the jury pool for this trend to become more prominent. I totally agree about juries having to watch the contest separately, I've been saying this for years. Back in 2018, when my country (Israel) was high in the odds, there were rumors that one juror was pressuring the other jurors to give low ranks to other countries who were high in the odds, and that's not cool. Also I remember in 2016 Germany gave Israel 12 points in the final, with four out of five jurors putting it 1st and the remaining juror putting it 3rd. I don't think there was any foul play there, but I find it hard to believe "Made of Stars" could have gotten such an overwhelming consensus if it wasn't for a very specific vibe in the room. I actually don't think juries should be too analytical when forming their ranking, I think they should vote according to their taste, and not consider which song is the most "deserving" according to some technical criteria, but before that they should be more diverse in background and age than they are now, and IMO fewer of them should be related to Eurovision (e.g. former participants and writers, national finals participants etc.) as I suspect Eurovision related jurors often come with a narrower view of what is a good Eurovision song.
some really great points there. Also previous Eurovision contestants sometimes have connections. We see there are returning artists every year and so sometimes jurors may know contestants, whether they competed with each other, or saw each other at a National Final or a Pre-party. You're not going to want to rank someone you know low, even if you dont like the song! The "not in the same room" thing is such a no brainer to me, i have absolutely no idea why that isnt a requirement. It's just common sense to me that they are going to talk and indirectly influence each other, or as you said with that 2018 juror, purposefully influence each other . So frustrating that this isnt something thats implemented, cos its so obvious and easy to fix
10:40 what's funny there is also seeing no fewer than two different songs just scraping into the top ten by virtue of being Juror A's top two (Australia and Belgium) while literally not making a single other juror's top ten.
yea i noticed that while i was editing as well - especially that comparison between Aus and Bel cos you can see Bel on average has better rankings, but AUS has the 1st and BEL has a 2nd
@@ESCTom also on a different note I typically root for San Marino at Eurovision so you can imagine this year was brutal. Not just cuz I watched in horror as they passed over a ton of good entries to pick the most obvious nil-pointer I’ve ever seen, but my favorite was Finland and…well, you saw how San Marino voted… (also you can call me Joe lol)
A bit late to the party but i am calling bs on the juries killing finland. And bs on how the juries should take the staging into account. For the first. Sweden could have had the same televote as UK last year Switzerland 2021 N.Macedonia/ Sweden 2019 Austria 2018 and Finland would have won. Finland very much would have been in striking distance of the win at the end of the jury vote if the jury winner wasnt also quite popular with the televote. Whilst i do think the staging does factor into the jury points and actively worked agains käärijä here... i actually think the jurors should concentrate on the songs themselves. The staging is there to attract televote and shouldnt effect juros one way or the other. In fact they should listen to them all in radio imo. The juries absolutely should have a wide range of musical backgrounds though, that i do agree on.
I'm on team Käärijä, but Rachel's model is inherently flawed. It assumes that jurors of a certain genre are always expected to vote for their own genre, therefore we need to stuff the juries with gangsta rap stans and metalheads in order to make things right, with the assumption they will vote for songs within their own genre. What we need is jurors who will vote for quality no matter the genre. I'm sorry, but we don't have control over that. Furthermore, 2022: Televote SMOKES the jury with the LANDSLIDE, the overall winner (Kalush Orchestra) coming 4th in the jury vote 2021: Televote summarily dismantles the jury vote with the winner (Måneskin) coming 4th in the jury vote Did we see the juries running around all of Europe with their hair on fire in 2021 and 2022, balls to the wall protesting the result? I don't think so. Loreen won fair and square. In the years since the split vote was introduced, this is the first and likely last for a long time that the jury prevailed over the televote. Let's move on. No rule changes are needed.
yea i mostly agree with you. if we look at the last 14 years, the system works very well. I think it just needs some small tinkering. IMO the main goal should be to make the show as exciting as possible. The issue this year was that SWE's lead was so large, that it kinda spoiled the suspense a lot, as we all knew that only FIN could catch her. Not her fault, as she totally deserved it, but its unfortunate that cos the jury scores come first, it kinda killed a lot of the excitement for the later part. How to fix that? Maybe it doesnt need fixing cos it only happens 1-2 times every 15 years. it might just be that some years are going to be more exciting than others. but I think if there are small tweaks that they can make to increase the changes of an exciting finale, that should be a goal
tom you are missing the point. Is it good that songs less popular gets votes because every song has their fan base: YES. But that is not why the people are angry, we had and amaizing song sing in finish, relatable, fun, inclusive, universally loved, that didn't won just because the juries picked a bland, but tecnically perfect, souless pop song, in english. The diversity you praise the jury get us, killed the diversity of the winner. Also people usually like song like moldova, solvenia, czechia, the public wouldn´t vote for a boring bland song (loreen got points this year because of euphoria).
Except the public gave barely any points to the countries that you listed (Moldova, Slovenia, Czechia) so you are wrong there. Personally I liked the jury voting better this year as they boosted countries like Austria, Spain, France etc. that the public gave barely any points to as they were so focused on the Finland vs Sweden battle
Let's pick a random country (Estonia). Everyone in Estonia has 20 votes. At the end of the voting period, all the Estonian votes are counted act by act, and the act with the most votes gets 12 points , 2nd most gets 10 points... act with the 10th most votes gets 1 point from Estonia. Same counting happens in every country. It's fair in the way that a small country having less people voting still can give 12 points to their most voted act, 10 to their 2nd.. etc., so it doesn't matter how big a country is. What we don't really know is the actual number (or per cent) of votes behind the points within each country, I would love to know that, too.
It has always bugged me when people say "Well Scandinavia/Nordics always vote for eachother too, it's not fair" like Norway isn't low in the juries pretty consistently since 2019? We get points and give points to eachother when the songs are good/deserve it, and you see those songs get high points from other countries too. Sometimes we don't give each other points at all, sometimes low points, and sometimes the 8, 10 or 12's. It is more cultural than political (Nordic music scene having a lot in common) and not to the extent that Greece/Cyprus has had (until this year).
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thanks for the amazing video as always!
Hi could you explain how the televotesystem works. I haven't found any information on how many actual calls were made or how they are distributed amongst the competitioners. Is it so simple as to for example have käärijäs 376 points and divide it with all the combined televotepoints available and get the percentage of how many voted for him or is there another system? Like is it that in one country televote number 1 gets one call more than the second one and gets 12 points versus 10 points for who comes second. And is it the same thing pointwise in another country where televote number one gets one milion calls and the one who comes second gets just thousand calls? If my examples don't make sense ignore them and just explain the televotesystem as simply as possible. I think that i'm not the onely one wondering so you would do many a great favour by answering, please?
@@user-ix8pu9iy1v The televotes are counted country by country and yes, the act with the most votes (even if it's just one more than the 2nd has) gets 12 points, and the 2nd gets 10 points. So yes, winning the most votes in a country only by 1 single vote or by 1M votes will give the act the same 12 points. It's not the best system, and I really wonder what were the actual numbers (or per cents) of televotes in each county. That would give us a clear understanding of each act's popularity in each country.
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Holy sh*t this is the level of ESC analyses that is not seen on any other channel. So much juicy information. Amazing.
Thank you Cinu 🥰
In the beginning of the year, if you had offered Finland the opportunity to be second, we would have gladly accepted. But now we were really disappointed to the second place. Not that much because we wanted Finland to win, but because we wanted Käärijä to win. We really love him, and think he deserved to win. He became a phenomenom. We had Käärijä cakes, children dressing up as Käärijä, trams in Helsinki coloured with Käärijä green and decorated with black spikes, and even the famous four statues in from of Helsinki railway station were dressed in green boleros. I saw many shops putting green decorations in their windows to show support. Actually, green fabric was sold out from the shops, so people couldn't make enough green clothes to show him support. And when he didn't win, our hearts were broken, not because we would have wanted that much ESC 2024 to be in Finland, but because we really thought he deserved to got that piece of glass more than somebody else.
One thing Rachel pointed out in her video analyzing the results was that from a technical musical perspective, juries overrated both Sweden and Finland by about 100 points. I think the narrative of the contest being "Finland vs. Sweden" had a huge subconscious impact on the jury scores and cannibalized other "jury friendly" songs we thought would be vying for the win, like Spain and France.
I think fans are heavily overrating Spain and France. I think they landed pretty much how I expected them to land. Spain was never going to be a favorite with the televote, but neither by the juries as they value commercial viability (an aspect that typical Eurofans detest). France, while having an amazing opening shot, was pretty much static throughout its stage show.
@@albiegatoFrance was my favorite going into the final, but there was something missing from her performance.
@@albiegato I agree Spain didn't stand much chance with the public, it's very polarizing to many ears, but the jury has criteria and it feels like those weren't handled the way they should. Blanca had the best vocal performance of the evening (like 100% pitch perfect) and the act had one of the most impressive fitting staging. If 60% of the jury members are pop-related, it makes sense cause they aren't used to hearing something unpredictable, which to proves Tom's and Rachel's conclusion there should be more diversity among the jury members.
EAEA is atrocious. She missed that one as well and ranked it real high, like 1st or 2nd
@@gabesalgado789 it's people like you that give Eurovision fans a bad name. Spain was my least favorite in the final. But to call it atrocious is neither necessary not helpful. You've added nothing to the world. Just taken away. Thank you for that.
Fun fact. Konstrakta was part of Serbian jury this year and this was her Top 10:
1. Slovenia
2. Finland
3. Austria
4. Israel
5. Croatia
6. Spain
7. France
8. Czechia
9. Armenia
10. Belgium
TASTE 🤩
If it's ever possible to love her even more.
ICONIC PICKS!!!
No Taste
Didn’t she tank Loreen and political voting with Albania
Thank you for making this video like I think this whole discussion has been due for years now as the juries are literally knownn to dislike anything that isn't pop in English/Italian/French. Rapping and metal are basically poison for the juries but also ethnic and folksongs are not appreciated by them. The discussion needs to be kept alive because if we want any changes to the juries they need to be discussed or otherwise the contest is going to turn into a streaming radio friendly pop songs entirely.
Yeah I don't think a gigantic change is needed - just a small revamp.
But they basically want to make it that music of other genres feels welcome in the competition and not that they're going to be penalised
Eurovision isn‘t over for me untill a spicy long analysis of all the voting and backstorys, explained by such a passionate superfan 🤩
It‘s sad that the show itself just ends in a matter of seconds between: „Everything can change“ and „Here‘s the winner, see ya next year“
lol IKR, the best part is so freaking short after 5 months of buildup 😂😭
How to increase the Televote Power in Two Steps:
1. Have Juries again in the Semi Finals
2. Have a more Diverse Jury
It may intetest you for the televote video is that Danny of Voyager did an interview where he said people were apologising for not voting for him saying they felt they needed to support Finland.
Funnily enough, had the televoters pushed up some other counties besides Finland, they may have pushed Sweden down enough for Finland to win.
@@melindamuller4466 It's a dangerous game to play, as first you need to know which country is just below Sweden in your country's televoter's heart, and then push them up just a bit (over jury's favourite, Sweden this year) but not too much, to leave them below your favourite (Finland this year). I don't think with millions of televoters voting it could ever work.
@@Eva-mp7xg Probably not, no, but you can vote multiple times, so if you vote once for the other country and twice for Finland, you could do something. Merely my votes for Finland and Croatia mattered, sadly not my votes for Portugal and Estonia.
@@melindamuller4466 Yup, that's how it works, you just never know what's the best way to spread your 20 votes. 😊
I think me and my mate voted for Finland, France, Spain, Serbia, Czechia, Moldova, Germany and in my case Belgium and Slovenia.....results varied.
I was a lot more successful last year but then again I was voting for Ukraine and from the UK for Poland. Poland kinda proved this year they could slash in a bucket on stage and still get a large televote especially in the UK or maybe some people will vote for any old shite as long as you can dance to it and performed it's performed by a pretty girl who can move vaguely in rhythm.
This is a great analysis. So much work has gone into this! I agree the weightings don’t need to be changed. It’s the composition of the jury, there needs to be a spread of ages, along with a mix of musicians, professionals & music academics. I wasn’t too keen on Finland’s, but I would have not ranked them last. Simply because the technical and stage performance was of a high standard, and there are parts of the song which were vocally difficult.
The junior Eurovision competitor on the jury is a brilliant idea
I have never watched a Eurovision video where I've gone "MM-HMM" out loud that many times. I truly did not realize stats nerds bigger than me existed. Bless you sir, from NYC.
Thank you Super ❤️
Great video, Tom, as always. Before it even started, I wondered if there'd be any overlap with @ThePeaceAround's video on the topic, and you mentioned Rachel right up top! I get literally all of my Eurovision wisdom from you two
These analysis videos are keeping me going through the ESC dry spell 😭 Thank you for putting as much effort into these as you do!
Another great video. Just wanted to add that if you're familiar with the Portuguese music scene and general tastes, it will come as no surprise at all that Poland was voted last by every single jury. Portugal has a music scene that is very eclectic, that favours alternative sounds, experimentation and of course African and Brazilian beats.
haha yea thats very true. you would never ever seen a song like Poland's in FdC 😂
I'd definitely keep the 50-50 split between televoters and the jury, agreeing with the majority of what you and Rachel discovered on your deep-dive analyses. A lot of the scoring air-time is devoted to the jury votes so it would make little sense to spend almost an hour visiting every national jury just so they can award just 33% or 25% (say) of the final score. I suppose they could make that sequence all about the televoting outcome instead, but then that would change the dynamic of the combined jury points as the finale, as there will be less chance of a dramatic surge up the table for someone (except Sweden, obvs). Diverse juries is the way forward, so how do we get the EBU to realise this and ultimately make the change? I notice the Norwegian heads of delegation have started such discussions, but they won't manage the change if they are a lone voice!
yea thats a great point about how you dont want to spend such a long time for something that is such a low % that it seems pointless, and then spend 1/5th of that time on something that makes up 75%
Great video! Such good work! I was absolutely hooked the enitre time. I'm excited for part 3!
Regarding how juries influence eachother, one of the belgian jurors did an interview stating that yes they were in the same room but they were absolutely forbidden to talk to eachother until their points had been verified and submitted. Apparently it was a rule made by the ebu. I guess body language can maybe still influence someone but i think it's quite unlikely.
The 4 points from Greece to Cyprus will be embedded in my mind forever 😂 the room was still in aww about the 4 points furiously discussing who the 12 points would go to. We didn't expect Belgium (our country) the entire room just screamed 😂
Just looked up Belgium and they would have been 8th in the diversity scores, so it seems that system worked! I LOVE that they do that. i just wish it was formalised and that every jury had to do it.
I still dont get why they need to be in the same room though
This is the first time I've ever actually subscribed to someone after being asked to hit the subscribe button! You genuinely have some of the best Eurovision content out there! 💜
Thank you RH! ❤️
Love this analysis, Tom! We need more diverse juries and their criteria to be updated.
Great point on the effect of Televotes only for Semi-Final. That is why I think we should bring back Jury Points into Semi-Final.
And your point on a diverse Jury background is notable as well. I agree this will make the Jury points more spread out.
Anyway great work! This is a great analysis video.
A completely analysis of 2011? That would be amazing 😍 (and kinda kreyza)
Well done Tom
This analysis is totally awesome. We really appreciate all the hard work.
👏👏👏👍
Tom you should be in charge of running Eurovision. Every recommendation is spot on.
Tom. Tom Tom !! There is A HUGE elephant in the room here.
So much discussion about the jury vs. the public vote - and yes that is really significant. As much as i was Team Finland this year, I am 100% pro jury vote. Without those two rounds of voting the results would be far less exciting for viewers, and let's not forget - this is a TV show. at the end of the day.
The issue we have here is that the voting system we currently have in place has not been updated since 1975. The 12 10, 8-1 points. The phrase "douze points" is iconic, but it was created at a time when the grand final consisted of perhaps 18 or 19 songs.
Seriously, in the modern era where a grand final consists of either 25 or 26 songs, that reduces the chances of any songs gaining any points at all. A system that only awards points to the Top 10 songs of any jury or public vote fails. Finishing 11th, more than top half, in both the jury and televotes scores achieves you absolutely zero points.
That is disgraceful. How many times have we seen contestants in recent years receive a "nul points" from either the jury or televote? These artists have worked for perhaps six months, and are then told "Ha Ha, nobody voted for you". People DID, but not getting Top 10 overall... Well, for an artist it must be a humiliating experience.
The EBU has a responsibility for the welfare and mental health of its contestants. We have watched the painful live reactions of artists receiving nul points TOO many times. It's time for that to stop and to celebrate and applaud those who have taken six months out to participate.
I created a spreadsheet with results if they were based on scores of twenty points down to one for the the individual results for the grand final, both jury and televote...l. There were some interesting results, particularly for those that had finished unexpectedly mid-table.
If you are interested, I'm happy to mail you the spreadsheet.
Thanks again for all your amazing work.
yes i actually love that idea! Yes please do send me the spreadsheet and Ill check it out and see how it would have changed things.
I agree that the douze points is iconic, BUT so was the orchestra and saying the 1-10 points and lots of other things that had to be changed with the times. I think people would miss it for a while, but we'd move on. plus we can still use it as a phrase. worst cae scenario they could keep it but add in 9 and 11 points, so at least 12 countries got points but they got to keep the phrase
my email is here - www.youtube.com/@ESCTom/about
I love the way you explained how a more diverse jury could make the televote count even more, since it already does a little. Great video!
Tons of food for thought. Awesome. Can't wait for part 3. Thank you so much for your time and all the effort 😊 Mike
Thank you Michael 💕
Maybe confirmation bias, but I remember Spain's only 12 points of 2008 was Andorra.
Thanks for this Tom, I may try to produce my own Jury fairness when I have some of my own time.
The jury system is well overdue reform. I agree the jurors must be more representative of different ages and musical backgrounds. Across the internet/ media, many legitimate criticisms have been highlighted about the jury system. I hope the EBU will listen and make the necessary changes for next year's contest. We cannot have a repeat of this year's highly controversial win. I thought the jurors are meant to help balance the contest, however this year, they completely overvalued Sweden and set them so far ahead of anybody else. Considering the trend seems to be that a country needs at least 200+ jury points to win, only Sweden got above this. The jurors secured Sweden’s win, unfortunately at the expense of not awarding other good quality acts points and rendering the televotes completely redundant because it could not influence the outcome at this point. It left an undemocratic and anticlimactic feeling to this year's contest imo.
Totally agree. More expert jurors, and from more diverse musical backgrounds, emphasizing the words "expert" and "musical". We can't have on juries young "overnight" pop stars with barely any experience and/or substantial knowledge of musical art or music industry that will make them qualified to expertly judge other musicians; we also can't have film critics, or TV hosts as jurors, as they are barely more related to the music industry/art than just an average TV spectator/televoter. Look at this year. How could jurors with the profiles I just mentioned be qualified to expertly/impartially judge entries like Spain or Germany? We need producers (music, theatre, television), composers, musicians, singers, band members, vocal coaches of diverse vocal techniques, conductors, music teachers, with relevant education and experience, and covering as many different music genres as possible. Mentioning impartiality. The jurors need to be instructed to judge as impartially as possible, leaving aside their personal taste in music, and taking into account the objective quality as much as humanely possible - that's why they need to be experts and have the technical knowledge they could use to judge. For the personal taste we already have the millions of televoters.
Thanks Tom, you're doing the lord's work! Re: the jury vote, if they were to release the show after, this may help people to see why votes can be different. I've heard performers admit they did better in one the other. It may not change a lot of minds, but could add a layer of transparency.
I love Rachel's vidoes as well as yours Tom! You two have been my ESC guides as I am new to be a superfan :)
what a fantastic video, so much detail!! 50/50 jury and televote is definitely the best option but i really like your idea of putting junior contestants on the jury!! i personally hope that they bring back the jury for the semis as last year my favourite (sheldon from australia) probably would have been a lot more at risk it was televote only, and azerbaijan would have been straight out as they got no televote in their semi at all! can't wait for part 3 and whatever you make next!!
Sheldon came 8th in the televote in the semi last year so would still have been safely through.
Thank you Livvy ❤️
Regarding how the juries at ESC vote, the Greek jury came out and said that they voted in separate rooms and that there was no prior communication as to what to vote. Now with national final juries that’s completely different as it’s would be a lot smaller production.
For the Greece/Cyprus thing, it’s like if Ireland and Northern Ireland were to be in the competition. Same language, same culture, same norms, same customs and a shared past.
We need a 2011 video please! That year needs some explaining
yea its such a wild year 😂
ill start writing and see what i come up with
@@ESCTom I also find what went down in 2013 quite interesting. If u don’t have enough on just 2011 u could probably do a video of weird things that went on in that era, but then you’ll probably end up with a 10 hour long video lol. But yea Azerbaijan winning in 2011 still messes with my head.
I was just craving some ESC content
Wow Tom, thanks for this extremely thorough analysis! Well, we already know that to celebrate diversity is always a good idea ;-). A diverse jury with the symbolic number of 7 members please.
Thank you for your dedication. I helped to understand the importance of knowing who the juries are
Great analysis! Well done.
Another alternative to giving more weight to the televote is to make the televote of each country give points to MORE countries.
For example, one country’s televote can give points to 15 countries (the distribution of points will probably be altered; maybe instead of the maximum 12 points, we raise the ceiling to 15-18 points). This could be implemented in the Grand Final at least. Meanwhile, the juries’ points will stay the same, and only 10 countries get points from each jury like usual.
That would make it about 70% televote 30% jury. Go ahead and ruin the contest if you want, the results of 2023 will never change
What an interesting analysis! Your idea of diversifying the jury sounds like the best way to improve things. If it's 5 jurors foe each country, it could be jurors for different musical genres, and one for staging or the visual aspects of the performance. I think the ESC idea of what kind of music people listen to is very narrow, and might even limit what types of songs get picked to perform. I just recently had a discussion with someone about how a song can be amazing regardless of genre, if it's well made. I would gladly welcome diversity in both the performances who come to ESC, and in the juries.
Once again demonstrating why I have migrated from Wiwiblogs to ESCTom (and Alesia Michelle) for the best Eurovision commentary and analysis.
Thank you tony 🙏🏻
Great great work👏
I got these crazy stats :
-If Finland 2023 had the same televote score as Ukraine 2022, they would have won by only 6 points !!
-Whereas in 2022, Ukraine could have finished as low as 19th in the jury and still have won
Waiting for your 2011 analysis video btw ! 🙂
oh wow, i didnt realise Ukraine could have finished so low, thats crazy!
I've seen some people throw around the idea that the criteria the EBU gives the jury should just be removed completely since a) we as the televoters don't have any criteria other than our own taste and b) the current criteria puts too much emphasis on vocals which leads to the tanking of entries like Finland, Croatia, etc. I'm not sure I agree with that idea 100%, but I would support the jury criteria being updated in some way.
We should keep the juries , as it helped many countries and judging vocally and save good songs
Finally caught up with it!
It's awesome, this video should be sent to osterdahl
Honestly, I am not surprised about juries putting Poland last becuase of the whole TVP situation. I feel it's more to show that they didn't support TVP quationable descisions. On a separate note about the sound: I watched everything online, and I notices how some songs sounded really bad, like Croatia and Serbia, for example. Backtrack was sooo loud for them, I couldn't hear the vocals, while you can see how Let 3 was killing their throats to top the backtrack. I think it is a very important point you made here that should be addressed more be staff and professionals - how to make songs sound adequately with the equipment, especially if it influences juries' choices. Thank you for the video!
yea i still dont understand technically what happened with Croatia and Serbia. Especially since both of them were in the semi-finals so there was so much time to fix any technical issues
Appreciate all the effort for these massive videos Tom. If I'm allowed to say, if you want to go for these analytical videos be careful to not have them too skewed towards what you wanted and who you liked and maybe be more impartial. I felt like a lot of your videos these seasons were about trying to find ways to justify how Finland could win or why they should have won.
How can one address the issue with the jury and pointing system without mentioning the actual symptom of the issue? Yes, there's an issue with a system where 185 jurors can override the decisions of millions of televoters by block-voting for one act, giving it an unbeatable advantage.
I don't think it's a matter of Tom's preference when he points out (as many other ESC bloggers) the issue with the jury, so please don't take it as a show of sympathy for Finland. It could be any other country winning televoter's majority, and still, they had no chance to win this year.
Interestingly Eurovision 1963 had 20 jury members! There was obviously a very different voting system, but we still ended up with 4 nil points out of the competing 16 entries, 1/4 of the competing songs. I believe this system was brought in to try and counter the 4 way nil points from 1962, but this obviously didn't work at all. However, we also ended up with only 5 points between 1st and 3rd, with Denmark winning with 42 points, Switzerland barely losing with 40 points, and Italy coming third with 37 points. I think that especially Sweden (nil points), who was reportedly quite popular with the public, got dragged down by the fact that only some jurors supported her, especially considering it was a more out-of-the-box entry. Maybe we would have seen some Sweden points, especially from the other Nordic countries, if there were only 5 or 10 jurors? Overall, I think this competition showed that larger juries don't necessarily give closer and more even results, but rather that they just give a select few countries all of their points. What do you think?
yea i think the more jurors that you have, the more the jury gradually starts to become the televote and you lose that minority voice.
I personally think increasing jury numbers would make things worse. it wouldnt be addressing the key problems with the jury, lack of diversity and some juries being able to influence each other, it would just be doubling them!
Interesting rE: 63, i need to go back and watc some of the previous shows, im just trying to come up with a way in how to film it
@@ESCTom There are 5 jury members (mostly!), each carry 20% of the jury scores. That's a lot of power per person and this can over influence results, and you have evidence to show this! Why not increase the jury size to 10 - half under 25, the other half over 25. Perhaps allow countries to flex the jury size - minimum 5, maximum 10 but always 50/50 age split.
@@ESCTom Watching the old shows would be really interesting! I've always thought of them as just some fun thing, but haven't really thought of the statistical or analysis side of them like you might. Looking forward to if you figure out a good way of doing it!
But can we really say a jury is "healthy" with completely different/random 1st places if they're supposed to be making their choices based on the same criteria? Was the vocal quality great? How can someone say it was the worst, some in the middle, and some that it was the best ever? It could happen for 1 or 2 of the jurors, but everyone having completely different scores?
Sounds like not being objective enough.
That wouldn't be a jury, but a random sample of 5 people's personal rankings.
i get u but the way i see it the vocal quality could be great but if its for example a rock vocal a pop producer may not be able to recognise that and would rank it lower than a rock artist would. in general accessible songs of obvious quality will still fare well, but it's hard to find any objective standpoints in music and the jury could do a better job representing that.
well it would still be healthy if they were from different backgrounds. because jurors from diff backgrounds would be able to appreciate the criteria dfrom their unique techinical perspecitve ie. an ethnic musician being able to appreciate Blanca's flamenco singing, a rapper being able to appreciate the technical difficulty of Kaarijas rap
In my opinion, as long as jury / televote have equal (50-50%) powers, it will always be a 2 horse race between jury's favourite and televoters' favourite and it leaves lots of contestants with crumbles of points, which is not fair.
To have more spread out points, you need to push the balance towards one or the other. Giving more power to juries will result to lose interest from the televoters side (as you cannot make your favourite win anymore), so the only solution is to give more powers to televoters.
I promise, once televoters will see that the main opponent is not the actual jury-pet act, but all acts have more equal chances to win, they will also spread out their votes more, and this overwhelming televote landslide win will not happen anymore, making the competition more open and interesting.
So my vote goes for the 33-66%.
I don't know about that. imo it hasn't really been a two horse race everytime if you look at the past years that have turned out the other way around with the jury votes. Like for example 2021 we had a lot of potential winners that were close to win, the same with 2019 and 2018. This year was something else we have not seen for long which two extremley good acts fought for the first place. The most dramatic maybe in the history, I would say. I would rather have it 50/50, also since we have seen how giving the televote more power in 2000s turned out.
@@tanktheplayer4275 Maybe it worth to try giving juries a bit of power to boost artistically good acts, but not enough to supress a landslide televote win. I don't think the 33/66% was ever tried. UMK has something similar with 25/75% and it works really well for them (looking at recent Finnish submissions).
@@Eva-mp7xg I think it's a great option for a national selection and Finland and other countries have really shown that. But when it comes to eurovision is a totally different story considering the competition is bigger and more widder with so many countries taking part which causes block voting, a better chance to vote for and vote down other countries because of political reasons( The jury also have this problem, but televote is even worse) That could potentially hurt the competiton instead, which could lead to a downhill in the early 2000 which many countries were about to withdraw and get uninterested of the competition. I think the best choice is to have more juries and more diverse genres with experts and eurovision fans, but where the experts are a few more. That concept that you mention sounds good, but I think rather fit for a small competition rather than eurovision based on what it is today.
@@tanktheplayer4275 I don't think a 2 horse race is good, and we could see it happening multiple times, which kills the original purpose of ESC, to come together and celebrate our diversity and at the same time find the common denominator through music.
Unfortunately, the current 2 main powers: jury and active televoters are representing 2 different concepts. Juries are all for nicely sung standard pop, while televoters are more for experimental, new, something unusual. So the duel seems to be inevitable. Imho EBU should clarify which concept they want ESC to represent: a pop-singing contest, or a talent show looking for new artists and especially for new art.
I remember the jury only times, and I didn't like it, so stopped watching ESC exactly because of the juries.
This year juries pushed Sweden's points to a height that made it impossible for televoters to change the result, and it kind of felt like those jury-only times again, and I decided not to follow ESC next year, unless the jury system changes. Let's see what happens, I'm really hopeful that EBU changes ESC to an interesting, innovative competition and doesn't kill the Vision in Eurovision.
p.s.: I don't think a 33/66 split would bring back the weirdest 2000s numbers, because there would be still some jury power, and the public have learned a lot in the last 20 years.
@@Eva-mp7xg You say that but the mass vote for Poland kinda proves that large elements of dispora, block and voting for LCD trash is still alive and well. Also when it comes to diversity what happened to Spain's televote. There were problems on both sides this year but that said if a runway televote winner with the highest one next to a country that was been invaded can be nerfed then Houston we have a problem and the juries need to some restraining.
Excellent analysis! 👍 🙏
Love your videos from Malta , I have a lot of things to discuss and give opinion
Very surprised that Australia appears to have such similar jury scores. I agree that independent analytical thought should be the rule. I hope Martin Österdahl watches this video. Great job Tom 😊
Thanks Karina ❤️
Interesting though that the top 3 from Australia also weren't in the Top 5 countries that year.
Great video as always. There’s a couple of things I disagree with/ would like to point out.
1) I agree that the jury member’s backgrounds should be more diverse than the current pop dominance, but I really don’t think their backgrounds is as much of a problem as people make it out to be for 3 reasons:
a) What is pop? “Pop” literally refers to popular music, which can be anything. There’s typical pop like Sweden and Norway, but I’d also class Finland as pop. There’s got to be a lot of jury members who aren’t professionals in the typical “pop” movement (like Schlager) but their area of expertise can’t be properly defined, so it’s just listed as pop. Because it’s really an all encompassing category. So I don’t think there’s as much Schlager dominance as people act like.
b) Related to that, most songs at Eurovision are what people would generally deem to be pop. So it’s not really a huge issue if most jury members have pop backgrounds, because that represents what we’re seeing at the contest.
c) The most successful jury songs aren’t always pop, so they clearly don’t have that dominating an influence. Obviously I’ve just stated that pop is hard to define, so I admit it’s subjective, but I wouldn’t consider North Macedonia 2019 pop. Nor Switzerland or France 2021. Portugal 2017 was the overwhelming jury favourite and that definitely wasn’t pop. A lot of conventional pop songs have flopped quite a lot with the jury, for example Armenia 2022 and Norway 2023.
2) I feel like the community as a whole, regardless of who we wanted to win, has fallen into the belief that there was some sort of jury conspiracy against Finland. Where has this come from? If it was Russia or someone we were talking about then sure, I’d agree something might be going on, but this is Finland we’re talking about. One of the most peaceful, friendly nations in the world. No one is trying to hurt their chances at anything. I wouldn’t say that jury members who placed Finland last have committed any sort of atrocity. I wouldn’t have put Finland last, and if they were systematically doing it then it becomes suspicious, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. In a final with at least 20 deserving songs, then someone has to come last in your ranking, and it might just happen that that’s Finland. If the juries wanted to hurt Finland’s chances they would’ve come way lower than 4th with them. Also keep in mind that 4th place this year would be expected to receive less points than 4th place in the previous few years, because there’s less countries this year.
3) I really hope they bring back the juries into the semis. They weren’t a disaster this year but there were less countries in the semis than usual this year, and as you’ve pointed out it’s only been 1 year. The point you made was excellent: not having the juries in the semis is probably hurting the televote favourites in the finals, because the juries have less “jury type” songs to choose from. I wish more people got to hear that perspective.
I think the televote only semis are a stopgap with Luxembourg returning juries will be returning to the semis. Otherwise it's going to be like Monaco or Andorra where the smaller countries don't stay.
The problem is that this year showed a freakish high jury mark can still swing things for their choice. I know a lot of people like Tattoo but I'm sorry I'm not buying it's the best song since the return of the juries or everything else was crap by comparison which that jury mark would lead you to believe.
As for Poland being last with one jury a lot - well it's an extremely basic song that won its NF in extremely dubious circumstances maybe people understandably felt that was deserving of downvoting - if a contestant on Dancing with the Stars or the X Factor cheated and did something with minimal content they'd be marked low too..
Amazing content, Tom! Dj Orkidea ( Tapio Hakanen ) is the Head of the UMK Delegation.
Finland and Portugal looking at the “in the 90s and 80s when it was so easy to be in the top 5” statement: 👀👀
But really, though, these videos are amazing. It’s so cool to see such an in depth, data-driven analysis of the results and the fascinating conclusions one might draw from them! I’ve been learning a lot through them :)
lol 😂
Ironically 2 of the countries who have massively turned around their fortunes in the last 5 years. Portugal have really changed since 2017. 12th in 2021 and 9th in 2022
and thank you for the second message 🙏🏻
the DEDICATION
Haha thanks. This video almost killed me 😭
Love your videos and especially your pace of speaking. I usually speed the videos up to 1.5 or 1.75, but I can actually watch your videos as is, so thanks for that! :)
And BTW. I must've watched all the ESC videos this year: all reactions, compilations, analyses, vocal coaches etc and for some weird reason there was a lot of hate towards the Albanian song. It wasn't my favourite one, but her vocals were just flawless and the song had a cool Balkan vibe, so I really didn't get why the song was so triggering to some to reward all the toxic commenting.,, but apparently the juries caught same bug ?
Thank you Marsu 🥰
Personally Albania was one of my growers at the actual show. I thought the staging did a great job at explaining some of the story of the song, and then i always liked the first 30 seconds with that ethnic beckoning sound.
Honestly I think that the final was just really strong this year. I struggle to pick out who I think justifiably deserved to come last, because I just don't think anyone was bad in the final in my opinion
Greece and Cyprus are the same nation, i dont any others countries hsve that similarity, that's y they exchange points, they have the same ethnicity
Great video as always and great analysis over the power of a single juror, I actually never considered that 1 juror placing a song in the top 3 would basically guarantee points with the newer (2018 onwards) jury system. I know in 2016 that a Danish juror accidentally voted backwards which result in Ukraine getting 12 points and Australia 10 points, but had that juror voted correctly then Australia would have gotten 12 points and Ukraine would actually be outside the top 10 and get 0 points. Luckily that wouldn't have changed the winner of 2016 contest but that would have been a swing of 22 points so Australia would have been a lot closer to winning.
I think the EBU should increase the amount of people per jury to like 8 or 10 (smaller countries can have less since I'm pretty sure you can't be on the jury in back to back years). In 2000, the backup juries were actually "assembled jury of eight individuals, which was required to be split evenly between members of the public and music professionals, comprised additionally of an equal number of men and women, and below and above 30 years of age."
I know that this was during the televote only era so the EBU basically wanted a demoscopic jury that would represent the public, but I don't see why they couldn't make the current juries larger and more diverse.
Yeah I didn't realise that one juror could be so powerful as well. When I started doing those numbers, I had no idea what to expect, but I thought maybe there will be 80% points rate
I wasn't expecting their first place choice to always be top 9
As a Greek myself, the 4 jury points to Cyprus were completely unexpected for me & I know I'm gonna get a lot of ""criticism"" from other Greeks for saying this but I don't care. I think it's great that our juries didn't give Cyprus their 12 this year, yes Andrew can definetely sing but the song did nothing for me, I tried listening to it a lot of times and never felt positive or negative towards this song. Before the show I had it 25th in my top but after the show, I upgraded it to 22nd, cause some songs I liked didn't have good performances or good live vocals. However I was disappointed that they didn't give a single point to Finland. Btw great job with the voting analysis, keep up the good work! 👍
Thank you Nick 🙏🏻
First up great job promoting Rachel's channel. I like her point of view and her analysis is always considered and logical! I also liked your review but I will make the same suggestion I did when I watched Rachel's review, I think the jury and the public should vote on the same show. If you are going to have a grand final show, and you are asking people to vote on that performance for the winner, then you should have everyone who votes for the winner watch and vote on the same performances. There is no other event in the world where you basically have two grand finals. I can not see any reason why the jury votes can not be collated and counted alongside the televotes. I understand that the jury are ranking all acts in the grand final instead of just voting for their favorite, but adding the scores should not take that long.
yea thats actually a really good point, im not sure what the official reason is for that? Maybe it's because they want to have time to look at the jury results to make an assessment of them? I guess it also gives them an idea of the 3-4 who can win so that they can practice the reprise at the end and also organise where all the cameramen will be?
Those are just suggestions though, i dont know what the official reason is
Great analysis as always Tom. As is healthy for debate however, I completely disagree with your theory about the Televote having c.55% influence. I am firmly of the belief that it is 50%. If you looked at it from the opposite view and compared the total number of jurors versus the total number of people picking up the phone around the world, each juror has potentially 400k times the influence of each person who televotes. I know they are music professionals, but is their opinion 400k times more valid than mine? (and ive paid for the privilege of voting!). I agree with a jury influence as it mostly eliminates the chance of a nil points, but I do agree with you that if we get repeated instances of the jury winner winning over the televote we may get a disconnect.
haha I'm always happy for you to disagree with me 🤗.
I know one of the big reasons that people dislike the jury is because of the disproportionate power that they get. I do think the telephone also has a similar flaw though. Four example if you compare the quantity of votes in Albania to Germany, you could equally say that an Albanian has the power of 1,000 Germans, because the Albanian telephoto so small compared to GER.
Ironically I think the thing that makes the jury work is the fact it's so small and that it gives that minority voice. So although I agree that it is definitely seems unfair that one person gets to have such a big say over others, it's necessary in order to spread out those points and not have countries showing up and feeling like they're getting paid absolute dust
this is why having diverse jurors means that at least they are representing 100,000 different people.
If you have 5 males 30 year old jurors, then you have a jury where one tiny demoscope is massively overrepresnted.
at least with 5 people off different backgrounds, theres a greater chance that what they vote for will be more reprensentative of the people they are voting on behalf of
@@ESCTom Yeah, you make a valid point Tom between the disparity in the number of televoters in each country, but even taking that into account the balance between no. of jurors versus televoters is still enormous. But I still maintain that if we get a run of 2 or 3 consecutive results where the jury effectively decides the overall winner the EBU will have a problem. If the result from the Friday night jury show had been made public, would as many people bother to pick up the phone and pay for the privilege of voting knowing that it’d take something akin to Ukraine 2022 to change the result? Id be happy with compromise of increasing the number and diversity of the jurors, but i have my doubts that anything will change for next year, as that could be seen by the EBU as an ‘invalidation’ of the result this year.
So excited to watch this!
we are eating well today
Serving you ESC statistical realness 🍝
A degustation served Eurovision style.
I was thinking earlier in the video : I wish he would do a deepdive on 2011 and then you said it yourself!
Also chuckled a little bit at Greece/Cyprus voting for each other in recent years. Its literally gone on to some extent since Cyprus debut in the early 80s. Greece would have had 0 in 1998, but had 12 from Cyprus.
Just to add about Greece and Cyprus swapping points - it is mostly because of the shared culture between the two countries imo. Since you cannot vote for you own country in the competition, they do the second best thing, which is voting for each other. Same with Moldova/Romania and Russia/Belarus. This is a situation that goes beyond Eurovision, and idk if it can actually be reliably solved within it.
i agree with the televote, but i dont think its that difficult to find 5 people to put on a jury who are able to rank songs based on their preferences and not just a shared culture
@@ESCTom from what I know, the Greek and Cypriot music industries are quite integrated, so it might be a bigger challenge than it seems - especially for Cyprus, as it is quite a small country. Plus it is not uncommon to have Greek singers perform for Cyprus (E.g. Eleni Foureira is Greek).
Crikey - your dedication is amazing!
I think the changes you suggest are sensible. I fully agree that changing the weighting is a bad idea as any other weighting bar 50:50 would look arbitrary.
I do think juries should be retained as a means of reducing bloc voting which doesn't help the reputation of the contest.
Briefing jurors to vote on technical aspects may help but I think it's unavoidable that personal taste will come into it.
Out of interest, I had a quick look to compare the 🇬🇧 jury and televote points over the past couple of years to see where the differences lie:
- 2023: Kaarija 🇫🇮 got 12 televote points but 0 jury points in the final - I suspect he'd have got 12 televote points from us in the semi had we been assigned the first one to vote in. Monika Linkyte 🇱🇹 got the 12 televote points and fared well with both segments in the final - with she got more points from us than any other single act (with Loreen 🇸🇪 closely behind).
- 2022: Kalush Orchestra 🇺🇦 got 12 televote points but 0 jury points. In the semi final, Brooke 🇮🇪 similarly got 12 public votes - presumably helped by the fact she appeared on The Voice UK and is from Northern Ireland so could have rallied her friends and family to vote for her - but again got 0 jury points.
- 2021: interestingly Dadi 🇮🇸 got 12 televote and 12 jury points in the semi final and 10 from each in the final, showing much less divergence in taste. Though The Roop 🇱🇹 like Kalush and Kaarija got 12 televote points but no jury points.
wow, i never actually realised that Brooke got a 12 from the UK. and 8 from Australia too. I didnt hear anyone in IReland complaining about political voting when that happened. I guess its ok when we do it 😂
@@ESCTom I did see a post about Eurovision from an Irish news source on Facebook and it was hilarious to read some of the same sort of things Brits have been saying for years. Hope our respective national broadcasters get their acts together again 🇬🇧🇮🇪
I'm a bit surprised about the suggestion of younger people being part of the jury: I was already thinking that 22 was very young! I thought the supposed point of the jury was to be "music industry professionals" - so you would expect these to be people with many years experience in the industry, and by definition they wouldn't be young. The jury isn't supposed to be demographically representative, it's supposed to be "expert".
Obviously I don't think the juries are working well right now either, but I do think you need to pick a lane: are the juries supposed to be "experts", or are they supposed to be demographically representative? And then try to make that choice work.
I wonder, since the televote is read out as a lump sum at the end, if they wanted to give the televote more weight, if they increase the number of the countries that can receive points from one televote. Ie: instead of 12, 10, 8, etc either include the 11 and 9 and have 12 songs get points from one country, or even have it be 15. That way the winner of a country’s televote will get a larger amount, and it further reduces the chance of a televote 0 since more songs will get points from a country than not
I agree the jury was too 'pop' oriented it should be more diverse. With regards to the average age of the jury I think it should bè similar to the average age of the population. Italian jury was 46 Years average but we are an 'old' population so lets say it was fair. Some countries have average age around 25 so the jury should also be younger. Of course it's hard to know what the average age of the Eurovision viewer is, there are no statistics on that. Also not everyone that watches the show votes. I also agree the jury members should not talk to each other or influence, a jury should be impartial otherwise it's not a jury. For sure some things could be improved hopefully in the future there will be some progress.
yea you bring up an interesting question of "who should be jury be?" - should they represent the demographics of their country or should it not be that strict. like you said, its very hard to know exactly how much of each demographic is actually watching.
I wish the juries were abolished, but IF there must be juries, I think juries should be larger (10-15 jurors), and deliberately more diverse considering the genres. And maybe the jury points could weigh MUCH less than the televote?
I think a big discrepancy between the juries and the televote is what they're voting for. The juries tend to vote for something familiar to them (Greece and Cyprus has a similar culture, as well as Belarus and Russia), whereas the televote likes to vote for things that are different to what they hear on a daily basis (for example Ukraine in 2021). This only helds up if we ignore the diaspora of course. (Though that is truly baffling to me. Might be because I'm German and we cannot be proud of our nationality because of reasons, but if I were to live somewhere else, I would only vote for Germany if it was my favourite song, which is rare for Germany 😅. Like, I don't see why you need to vote for a country you're originally from? That's what makes Eurovision political in my opinion. If it were for me, I would get rid of diaspora voting and everyone would need to vote for their favourite song, but that's utopia, I know.)
Also I agree with another commenter that the juries and the televote need to see the same show, so we could get rid of some dumb conspiracy theories.
Also also 😅 I feel like this year the discussion is purely because people would have liked to see Finland win, and if they had, no one would talk about it or the juries. Cause I remember last year, when Ukraine won with a massive televote, the juries weren't as much criticised as this year. So people will find something to be angry about if their favourite didn't win, last year it was the televote, this year the juries, next year Martin Österdahl and the year after that because the winter was too cold and the moon was in Uranus. Toxic fans will be toxic.
Sorry for my incoherent rant, I'm finished now.
yep youre totally right - people will always be angry about something cos their favourite didnt win. Look at the big picture over the last 14 years, it's quite clear that the system is working very well. They're obviously gonna be some years where it doesn't work as well, but that doesn't mean that the system is totally broken. I'd just like to see some small changes to the jury so that there is a greater spread of points and less countries getting almost nothing.
I also do agree with you about the nationalistic thing. I don't feel the necessity to vote for Ireland just because I'm from there. But I know some Irish people who are disgusted with me for saying that and think that I'm a traitor because I'm not willing to blindly vote for a song because of nationalistic reasons instead of just voting for what I like. Im actually not a fan of "patriotism" at all - i think its a fine line on the way to tribalism/racism
Of course the first priority in changes is to guarantee some level of diversity in music backgrounds for the jurors. But in terms of point changes, what I would like to see is for the jury to still support entries that are not that well-liked by the televote (like Estonia, Australia, and Austria this year), but not overpower the televote in the highest of rankings (cough Sweden cough).
Doubling the televote score is the simplest solution (both mathematically and as an explanation to the audience during broadcast), but I don't like how the results would look like the televote's rankings and only slightly modified. I would still like to have the jury heavily affect the entries in the mid to lower end of the ranks, but limit their effect on the higher end.
My suggestion would be to flatten the jury score right before they present the televote. For example, the jury winner's points would be converted to just 100 points, the second would get 95 pts, the third would get 90 pts, etc. This would allow the jury to still give substantial support to the songs they deem worthy, but not overpower the choice of the people at home who are paying to vote.
16:29 As Ukrainian I don't think that it's very surprising (considering that we had Iryna Fedyshyn as one of the juries last year) also I don't like Belgium's song either
In 2015, Cyprus got 11 points. 1 point from somebody(idk who) and 10 from Greece. It's kinda funny tbh
One thing about public/jury weighting that I think many people get wrong is as you correctly identified, weird decimal point scoring. However, I don't think that the solution is rational weighting but giving the public an extra points category. I could see 15-points for first, meaning that we end up with the public's top 11 getting points, but the jury's top 10. I'd love to work out what this would do, but I can't find the data on exect televotes.
this is something im totally open to. currently only 10/26 countries get points. Id prefer something more generous, but i know that they are really not keen on getting rid of the famous DOUZE points.
@@ESCTom I completely get that douze points is really good for brand recognition and it's why I don't think we will see any change to the number of countries getting points from the judges. But the current format of scoring makes that a non-issue for the televote, because all of those scores are aggregated.
In many ways, I would like to see something more like the top-13 from both the jury and the televote getting points, but I can't see it in the near future. And jumping to top-13 for just the televote would add too much weight there and unballance the jury and the televote, and you explained quite well why that isn't a good idea.
Great video, as always!!
Regarding the juries, it seems that the arguments you point out so well, are a bit contradictionary.
For example: you want a more diverse jury but with only 5 jurymembers that's very difficult. And with making the juries bigger, you lose the power of the jury which comes with a more diverse jury.
Also I personally don't believe in putting 12-13 year olds in the juries. At that age, they're just children and do not have a long enough attention span to objectively rate all the 26 songs (in a 2,5 hour show). Minimum age of a jury member should be the same as minimum age for a contestant: 16 ( I believe it is, is it?).
With 5 jury members, you almost need to go to an alternating system, whereas the one year you pick jurymembers from certain age groups and professional backgrounds, and excluding them from the jury the following year.
"With more jurors you lose that power of minority" but isn't this a big issue being put forward, that the jury is an overrepresented minority?
Given that Finland got more jury points than Estonia or Belgium (whose vocals were perfect ) I think they got adequate respect from the juries.
True, yet Volvo getting 350+ points, double the amount of Estonia, how do you call that? I call it DISGRACEFUL
Thank you for the analysis, it is a very nice one, very informative. Just I want to add, why we are still talking that Kaarija was murdered by Jury, I think he has got enough form juries, I think we could argue more bout Armenia, who didn't get enough jury appreciation. Also I want to add that amazing songs like Czechia, and Estonia was murdered by the televote if we want to use terms like this. I agree that we have to change some things in the jury, but we also have to change some things in the televote. Like diaspora voting for Poland was ridiculous, how n earth Blanka gains more televote than Alika, Vesna, even I think Armenia was behind her...How ??? So we should talk about this as well that the public is also very political and I would limit the voting by citizenship not location and phone number, because that would be fair and square. For example I have a Hungarian and a Czech number, I live in Czechia, but I haven't vote for Czechia because it is not fair from my side because I felt buyest in the situation toward the son and the group who i love and the country what I love. I think that a lot of Polish people living abroad they use their status in other countries to bust the televote for their entry, I know it doesn't change the winner but it can in the future don't you think ?
Yea murdered was the wrong word. it probably would have been more accurate to say that the jury sealed the deal, or that they were the deciding factor. which i guess was kind of obvious already, which is probably why i subconsciously tried to embellish it 😅
Yea id love to see more strenuous control over people voting for themselves, cos it's technically cheating. Who knows, maybe in the future if apps like WeChat become more popular (in WeChat, your passport is uploaded to your profile), something like that might actually become possible. i think thats the only way that it could happen, but it would be awesome if it did. things would be a lot fairer!
@@ESCTom To be honest, I think the winner this year was well deserved, I know that the crowed was frustrated because they wanted their favorite, to win. But Loreen also gained a lot of televote so we need to acknowledge that she was basically winner because the song was good the staging was well executed besides of the difficulties. The song is the most streamed on spotify so a lot of people connected with the song just as much as Kaarija, and the vocals were good. I was disappointed also for some of the results but I hope the system will improve, however I would be deeply dissented if they not do 50-50 because we need jury in this competition and the public should not decide he faith of the whole competition.
yep agreed. i think the televote has shown enough times now that its just not reliable to choose the winner on its own. As much as I loved Moldova last year, if it was televote only, it almost would have won. Thats not a winning song for me.
So ill always stick by 50-50 jury
@@ESCTom Let’s not forget about Verka Serducka in the past, and some other examples when quirky fun songs are getting high televote always, but they are not winner materials. Anyway I think in some case if we chalk some national final, public is right but sometimes the jury is right, for example this year in Poland televote 100% right, and in Spain last year Jury was who put Chanel to the winner position of Benidorm fest and the result proved them right.
My main wishes for changes to the jury vote would be a separation of jurors, as you discussed, and changes to the instructions given to the jurors. I think Finland's jury results, including jurors putting Finland near the bottom of their rankings makes complete sense because of how the instructions are given to jurors, and I can completely see why collectively, a room of 5 supposed "professionals" felt like they had to vote down Finland because it didn't meet the first of the listed criteria given to them - vocal capacity.
I don't feel like the 50:50 jury/televote ratio needs to be changed, and I can understand why they probably won't increase the number of jurors in a country. While intuitively more would be better, I can understand why in some countries recruiting more might be challenging. If they did increase the number of jurors, I get your point Tom that it might weaken the strength of the current scaling system that means a country in the top 3 of a juror is almost guaranteed to get points. One way to resolve this while increasing the number of jurors would be to reduce the weight in the current formula. It's currently 0.827^(r-1) where r is the rank given by the juror, but if we reduced 0.827 to something smaller, the strength of a high ranking, particularly a 1st place ranking, would be improved.
Croatia Coming Last in Alot of Jurors, and all of the UKs Jurors was not Surpising. Considering how contraversal the Band is. But at the end of the Day, Its not all about winning. Rosa Linn like came 20th and she is Most Streamed.
I think the Running order needs to be More Randomised, But include a Pot for the More Complex staging (These can go after the Breaks).
Rachel at the Peace Around suggested pots for different tempo songs too so you don't end up like last year where most of the uptempo bops were in the first half.
Its kind of hard to completely randomise and still optimise the show. Not just in terms of timing but also fairness (based on semi running order), genre variation, staging variation (mainly color) etc
@@Sarah-og3mp Yeah - the problem is it's a balancing act between what's fair to the acts, what's the best for the show and what's a reasonable demand on the stage crew who are already working to tight schedules.
Are jury members able to know who the other jury members are in the days leading up to the final and are they able to contact one another and discuss their favorites in the days before the final. One would think that that possibility would have a profound effect on the outcome. And a totally unrelated question: I noticed a number of people commenting on how they 'download songs'they really like, for 'owning' in their digital music library. Do you have a favorite platform for downloading (buying) songs that you want to 'own' in order to not be dependent on streaming services which require monthly fees?
personally i use Itunes to buy songs. ive never gotten into Spotify for some reason 🤷🏻♂️
@@ESCTom Thanks, Tom! The cost of using Spotify has gone up recently. I have bought songs through iTunes earlier so I may go back to that. :)
You can analyse this: Interpol investigates Swedish, Norway, Finnish, Icelandic, Demark, Dutch public TV's, 3 former and 1 actual executive producers of EBU (Sarah Yuen, Svante Stockelius, Jan-Ola Sand and Martin Östeandhal) and many private persons. Interpol things that there were a lot of manipulations, corruptions and other things to made Scandinavian countries win since 1999. till 2023.
I like tattoo but there was no way in hell it deserved 340 jury points 😂😅
27:52 no one else notice that the two times Jury awarded more points to the winner, it was Sweden that won that year? 🙄 Swedish favouritism and Jury corruption proven.
10 jurors put finland last?? käärijä's voice didn't even waver when he almost got decapitated mid-sentence and they put him LAST???
Seeing the Ukrainian jury members putting Belgium last almost every time is the weirdest thing I've seen in this video. I suspect there was a media thing happening in the week leading up to Eurovision about one of our politicians saying something negative about the political situation in Ukraine.
And spain in 2022 also they gave Azerbaiyan 12 points being first in four jury members
Fun fact-one spanish jury placed cornelia 11 th in the semifinal
One of this year's many ironies is that Cyprus' song, this year, was really good.
Or, at least, to me it was. I mean, he pulled off that song live, with all those difficult head voices and high notes. The song itself will not rewrite the history of pop music but it was on a par with Loreen's song. To me at least. I do realise that my tastes don't mirror those expressed by Eurovision's final top chart.
P.S. no, Loreen didn't deserve to win. If the juries had been less "pop-centric" and more diverse she wouldn't have received all those 12s.
Yea I agree about Cyprus. Ironically this was a year when a high jury score actually would have made sense cos it did well with juries and also it’s almost like something Greece would send themselves
The Greece and Cyprus thing is so complicated because there have been a couple times the past few years where them giving each other high jury points can be justified (ie Cyprus 2018 and Greece 2022) but I completely agree that dropping the hammer on jury bloc voting is good moving forward. I also hope Martin Österdahl steps in with Armenia and Azerbaijan. I know it's way more complicated than just Eurovision but other countries with volatile relations (ie Greece/Cyprus and Turkey, Ukraine and Russia from 2014-21, Serbia and Albania, Armenia and Turkey, The Balkans in general, etc) have voted for each other so it shouldn't be completely impossible for them to do the same down the road.
He should do that with the continental Nordics almost always voting each other, Albania and Slovenia always giving high points to Italy...
I would love a 2011 video, make it happen
Some really interesting points here. Never thought about how having only 5 juries makes for more happy anomalies. I guess they will need to diversify the jury pool for this trend to become more prominent.
I totally agree about juries having to watch the contest separately, I've been saying this for years. Back in 2018, when my country (Israel) was high in the odds, there were rumors that one juror was pressuring the other jurors to give low ranks to other countries who were high in the odds, and that's not cool. Also I remember in 2016 Germany gave Israel 12 points in the final, with four out of five jurors putting it 1st and the remaining juror putting it 3rd. I don't think there was any foul play there, but I find it hard to believe "Made of Stars" could have gotten such an overwhelming consensus if it wasn't for a very specific vibe in the room.
I actually don't think juries should be too analytical when forming their ranking, I think they should vote according to their taste, and not consider which song is the most "deserving" according to some technical criteria, but before that they should be more diverse in background and age than they are now, and IMO fewer of them should be related to Eurovision (e.g. former participants and writers, national finals participants etc.) as I suspect Eurovision related jurors often come with a narrower view of what is a good Eurovision song.
some really great points there. Also previous Eurovision contestants sometimes have connections. We see there are returning artists every year and so sometimes jurors may know contestants, whether they competed with each other, or saw each other at a National Final or a Pre-party. You're not going to want to rank someone you know low, even if you dont like the song!
The "not in the same room" thing is such a no brainer to me, i have absolutely no idea why that isnt a requirement. It's just common sense to me that they are going to talk and indirectly influence each other, or as you said with that 2018 juror, purposefully influence each other . So frustrating that this isnt something thats implemented, cos its so obvious and easy to fix
10:40 what's funny there is also seeing no fewer than two different songs just scraping into the top ten by virtue of being Juror A's top two (Australia and Belgium) while literally not making a single other juror's top ten.
yea i noticed that while i was editing as well - especially that comparison between Aus and Bel cos you can see Bel on average has better rankings, but AUS has the 1st and BEL has a 2nd
@@ESCTom also on a different note I typically root for San Marino at Eurovision so you can imagine this year was brutal. Not just cuz I watched in horror as they passed over a ton of good entries to pick the most obvious nil-pointer I’ve ever seen, but my favorite was Finland and…well, you saw how San Marino voted… (also you can call me Joe lol)
A bit late to the party but i am calling bs on the juries killing finland. And bs on how the juries should take the staging into account.
For the first. Sweden could have had the same televote as UK last year Switzerland 2021 N.Macedonia/ Sweden 2019 Austria 2018 and Finland would have won. Finland very much would have been in striking distance of the win at the end of the jury vote if the jury winner wasnt also quite popular with the televote.
Whilst i do think the staging does factor into the jury points and actively worked agains käärijä here... i actually think the jurors should concentrate on the songs themselves. The staging is there to attract televote and shouldnt effect juros one way or the other. In fact they should listen to them all in radio imo.
The juries absolutely should have a wide range of musical backgrounds though, that i do agree on.
I'm on team Käärijä, but Rachel's model is inherently flawed. It assumes that jurors of a certain genre are always expected to vote for their own genre, therefore we need to stuff the juries with gangsta rap stans and metalheads in order to make things right, with the assumption they will vote for songs within their own genre. What we need is jurors who will vote for quality no matter the genre. I'm sorry, but we don't have control over that. Furthermore,
2022: Televote SMOKES the jury with the LANDSLIDE, the overall winner (Kalush Orchestra) coming 4th in the jury vote
2021: Televote summarily dismantles the jury vote with the winner (Måneskin) coming 4th in the jury vote
Did we see the juries running around all of Europe with their hair on fire in 2021 and 2022, balls to the wall protesting the result? I don't think so.
Loreen won fair and square. In the years since the split vote was introduced, this is the first and likely last for a long time that the jury prevailed over the televote. Let's move on. No rule changes are needed.
yea i mostly agree with you.
if we look at the last 14 years, the system works very well. I think it just needs some small tinkering.
IMO the main goal should be to make the show as exciting as possible. The issue this year was that SWE's lead was so large, that it kinda spoiled the suspense a lot, as we all knew that only FIN could catch her. Not her fault, as she totally deserved it, but its unfortunate that cos the jury scores come first, it kinda killed a lot of the excitement for the later part.
How to fix that? Maybe it doesnt need fixing cos it only happens 1-2 times every 15 years. it might just be that some years are going to be more exciting than others. but I think if there are small tweaks that they can make to increase the changes of an exciting finale, that should be a goal
13:23 where did you find this?
Wikipedia
tom you are missing the point. Is it good that songs less popular gets votes because every song has their fan base: YES. But that is not why the people are angry, we had and amaizing song sing in finish, relatable, fun, inclusive, universally loved, that didn't won just because the juries picked a bland, but tecnically perfect, souless pop song, in english. The diversity you praise the jury get us, killed the diversity of the winner. Also people usually like song like moldova, solvenia, czechia, the public wouldn´t vote for a boring bland song (loreen got points this year because of euphoria).
Except the public gave barely any points to the countries that you listed (Moldova, Slovenia, Czechia) so you are wrong there. Personally I liked the jury voting better this year as they boosted countries like Austria, Spain, France etc. that the public gave barely any points to as they were so focused on the Finland vs Sweden battle
I would like to know how our phone votes are converted into the televote points. And the phone vote total for each country.
Let's pick a random country (Estonia). Everyone in Estonia has 20 votes. At the end of the voting period, all the Estonian votes are counted act by act, and the act with the most votes gets 12 points , 2nd most gets 10 points... act with the 10th most votes gets 1 point from Estonia.
Same counting happens in every country.
It's fair in the way that a small country having less people voting still can give 12 points to their most voted act, 10 to their 2nd.. etc., so it doesn't matter how big a country is.
What we don't really know is the actual number (or per cent) of votes behind the points within each country, I would love to know that, too.
It has always bugged me when people say "Well Scandinavia/Nordics always vote for eachother too, it's not fair" like Norway isn't low in the juries pretty consistently since 2019? We get points and give points to eachother when the songs are good/deserve it, and you see those songs get high points from other countries too. Sometimes we don't give each other points at all, sometimes low points, and sometimes the 8, 10 or 12's. It is more cultural than political (Nordic music scene having a lot in common) and not to the extent that Greece/Cyprus has had (until this year).