Possibly my longest video ever - so please look at the timestamps haha. Let me know down below your thoughts on the juries this year - do you agree with my suggested reforms?
I suggested jury to my MP in May 2006, but this step for 50/50 was wrong because of political and corruption influence. Czech jury gave 12 points to Ukraine as a political gift. Jury must be cut NOW to 1/3 of votes.
As for your political point in VESNA song, in reality the text of the song could be interpreted solely as Ukraine-Russian sisterhood love song, defintely not anti-Slovanian or pro-West song. Thats funny :-D Also, those colors at the begging of performance are quite Russian flag colors. Totaly against forced pro-Ukrainian political message that is pushed be mainstream media and political class in Czech republic and even mabye by members of the VESNA group.
@@ondrejdobrota7344forced pro ukrainian message ? the chorus is in ukrainian and written together with a ukrainian musician. that’s exactly not against a ukrainian a message but against russian imperialism
That’s how it’s done. Instead of making up conspiracy theories, you’ve actually addressed possible root issues in the jury system. Wonderful job and I really hope this reaches the correct channels! I’m so sick and tired of juries punishing entries with real depth and character.
Thank you! That means a lot - the conspiracy theories this year (particularly the Abba one) have been ridiculous and void of any evidence. The only shred of possibility I can see with the whole 'Abba' thing, is that maybe the Swedish delegation was aware that it was the 50th anniversary coming up, and decided to bring out the big guns and really try hard to win this year - by having Loreen back in melfest with her mammoth staging, they were increasing the possibilities of winning as much as possible. That's how I see it anyway - no funny business behind it.
@@ThePeaceAround That’s very fair. The fans have tainted the year for me. They usually choose the most mediocre winners 9 times out of 10 and only just now seem to have unlocked an opinion about originality. I still remember when they acted this rabid towards Jamala when 1944 won over My Only One-two songs with a day and night’s difference in originality and substance. This fandom is hypocritical to say the least. This may sound harsh but those of us who actually VOTE for the out-of-the-box entries every single year are always respectful when the winner ends up inevitably being another ballad or pop song and our favorites end up on the bottom (still sad for Jeangu). And now that the second place happens to have won, everyone wants to be toxic and try to explain how it was a sabotage? I’ve never seen this fanbase act this toxic. Can’t believe some of the theories I’ve read (like the EBU being a puppet of Spotify). Absolutely unbearable.
@@UsernameUsername0000People pick and choose televotes vs juries depending on who wins and who they prefer. Last year when Kalush Orchestra won, it was, “The televote is political. They got the sympathy vote. The UK is the rightful winner. The juries were right.” This year, it’s the opposite. It’s always the same back and forth. The only thing I can agree with is Sweden consistently gets away with mediocrity, year after year. It’s been the same regurgitation for years, and somehow they are in the Top 10. Most other countries would land in the second half, if not the bottom with some of their entries in the last few years.
_"Instead of making up conspiracy theories"_ Careful with accusing people of making up conspiracy theories. They often tend to be right in the end. Especially, when there is a valid motive in place.
@@marcushertz4434 people's votes serve a completely different purpose. The professional jury is supposed to judge objectively the technical aspects of the entry, the people like what they like. Spain deserved points from the jury, period, regardless if the general public likes it or not.
@Teamsamsung This is my take as well. Finland did about as well as I expected in the jury vote, actually better than I expected! But I was not at all prepared for Sweden to get such a massive landslide when there were definitely other acts that deserved much more points than they got
Rachel, are you KIDDING with this kind of content! This is an incredible analysis! Somebody should pay you for the work you do. Please set up an easy way for viewers to support your channel. And get press accreditation next year. Your insights go so far beyond what others out there are offering and more people need to hear from you! Thanks so much for this!
Thank you for your time! I think the jury voting this year was all over the place. So much have been said about Sweden's gigantic jury score, that it was all thanks to the vocal performance -and yet Germany and Spain were not rewarded for their vocals at all (I would dare say that Blood and Glitter is more vocally demanding than Tattoo, growling is not easy!). Also, were the juries really following their own criteria? Some juries ranked Finland first while others put it dead last. I think it shows that juries vote according to their own preferences, just like the rest of us. They just have too much power. Eurovision is evolving and reaching new (younger) audiences globally. Nobody is tuning in to watch 26 generic pop songs sung in english. Originality sholud be awarded more and why not give points to using your native language as well.
The jury is a must to balance out f.e diaspora-voting, political voting and as we unfortunately saw this year...tactical voting. If every country would vote tactical the competition would crash. That was actually the saddest part of this ESC. I think the native language discussion is dusty when many European countries are multicultural.
@@kevytmelankolia3395 The Finnish ESC commentator said to the finnish viewers "dont forget that its forbidden to vote on Finland but its not forbidden to vote tactically ". The Finnish televote result stood out from the rest of Europes because they were the ONLY country to give Sweden 0 points. When you think about the fact that Tattoo was a favorite and was the third most streamed song in Finland on Spotify, it hardly seems coincidental. And unfortunately many Finns have in fact confirmed that they were voting tactically. "Why would we vote for our biggest rival?" " When its competition or Nato or war...Finns just know what to do...unite against the enemy" "I voted om Norway but in reality I voted against Sweden"...thats just three of MANY comments I got from Finns here on YT the last week. The second comment currently has 676 likes. I guess that sums it up.
@Evi Pevi Televoters are free to give their votes to whichever country they wish to support. Rest assured, if Finns had felt Tattoo was the best song and truly deserved to win, they would have voted for it, no matter what any commentator said (or didn't say, since the whole thing is debatable). Historically, Finns have rarely supported their own entries.
@@evipevi1973 I thought that voting for your neighbor was heavily frowned upon in eurovision? Isn't that exactly why we have professional juries? Sweden sent in a song that was perfectly crafted to please the juries. And it worked! Finnish jury gave it 12 points. Finnish audience gave 12 points to Norway. Are you saying that they didn't deserve it? That Alessandra should have gotten even less points than she did so Loreen could...win harder? And why didn't Loreen get a single 12 points from any audience? Tattoo was streaming well in other countries as well before the contest. And nice job attacking our eurovision commentator who is perhaps the biggest Loreen fan in Finland. Seems like nobody is happy with the result, not even the winners.
I thought Spain's performance was among the best of the night but unfortunately I didn't give it any of my votes. Reason being is that it isn't my taste in music, excellent vocals aside. I felt really bad seeing her televote score though. She took it extremely well but I'd understand if that was just a brave face and deep down she was gutted.
Rachel, once again I would respectfully petition for you to get media credentials for Eurovision. There is a “Fan Community Media” credential for content creators. It provides online access to things like video feed of rehearsal performances. It’s available for TH-camrs just like you. Thanks for another year of thoughtful ESC coverage.
@@ThePeaceAround As someone who's been doing the media beat for almost a decade now, you would fit right in with everyone else there. If being on site isn't feasible next year, the online credentials would give you all the a lot of access if you're looking to expand your coverage.
@@ThePeaceAround I agree with @hippopotamusbosch3513. I have only seen 2 videos of yours, but you've already given far more well structured arguments than many of the blogs and forums I've visited in the last few days. In a daypart, you've managed become my favorite Eurovision TH-camr.
I just feel the main problem this year is not that Loreen won the Jury vote, but the fact that she got +300 points, the song wasn't that good even if the performance was great.
I love Loreen and the song, but the vocals weren't the best and it wasn't something mindblowing to be honest, might just be me, but it didn't deserve to have such a huge point advantage at the jury vote.
The charts worldwide show the contrary. The televotes come from Eurovision fans. Eurovision fans are obviously not representative of more global tastes and trends.
@@brauliogodoygonzalez4140 Probably in the jury show she focused more on the vocals and in the live show she focused more on emotion and showmanship instead of vocals. If only they uploaded the jury show, even 1 week later than the live...
@@brauliogodoygonzalez4140 the melodifestivalen performance, with her actual visión coming to life, was so amazing and miles away from anything we watched in Eurovision. The problem is Liverpool did not allow her to do it. The Eurovision staging was a cheap versión of it. But as a staging was really increíble and really superior to anyone else.
Thank you for such a detailed and entertaining video, Rachel! Here in Ukraine, the national juries were elected through Diya - the e-governance mobile app, which serves as the digital copy of your ID and the platform for community votings, so everyone could choose the Eurovision jury there too. Btw, the same system was used for Vidbir - Ukrainian National selection. Everyone could choose their favourite entry for free and each person could only vote once, because each account is connected to the citizen’s ID
I like the fact that Käärijä made a video telling people to stop hating on Loreen. That whatever happened with the voting was not her fault and that people shold shill. That made me like him even more.
They've both been extremely respectful towards each other, as artists tend to be. They understand that all this discussion over points and winners really has almost nothing to do with the artists.
My biggest questionmark is why Sweden is always favoured by the juries? Thank you for your huge effort in this analysis Rachel, it was very interesting to watch!
They have mastered the ESC pop genre (along with some other countries) and have the public interest to have all those talented composers, singers and production teams, etc., take part.
@@zsokapados5197 Because they haven't perfected the Swedish pop formula nearly as well as Sweden. BTW, I'm saying this as someone who was also disappointed with the result. The Swedish music industry knows how to send jury bait, and combine that with the legendary Loreen and you have an (unfair, in my opinion) advantage that is massive.
@@gabesalgado789 Yes, I expected Sweden to win the jury vote, but it was kinda dissapointing that we knew who will win before the televote results and honestly before the final itself. That difference for Käärijä was unbeatable even with that amazing televote support. Loreen is amazing, but Tattoo as a song has nothing special in it for me.
Great analysis as always. Despite accepting Loreen victory since the beginning, the amount of points Sweden received was unimaginable. What I love about Eurovision is the diversity of songs and languages. If all countries sended only english pop songs, Eurovision would be less interesting. I always understand that english songs were more accessible, but the public has been more open to uniqueness entries and less biased than the juries on the last years. I really expected the opposite and never understood why. The amount of pop music professionals wasn't on my radar, but it makes total sense now.
A professional jury IS necessary as long It is professional. They should rate songs based on different criteria than televote does. Right now juries are just televoters Who vote one day earlier.
Completely disagree, we are all voting on the same songs and how much we like them so why should the criteria be different? The thing that sets juries apart from the public is their ability to consider every song equally and give appreciation to songs which may be generally liked by the public but just don't have the characteristics to attract massive voting figures.
@@clarinetmoonesc True , but I think it's that they choose a song with their professional insight in to the music industry/ songs, nothing is really neutral I guess but this is more as it should be just about the song, which is how I vote although I am no expert. I just go with the one I liked most. Judging by the comments on this video and others this time they didn't choose a liked that people didn't vote for, idk what their criteria were as I found it kinda forgettable, but maybe that's why I'm not on the jury lmao.
A jury is good for the professional side of what they think is a good song, but I think it's kinda annoying in a landslide like this where public votes end up pointless and the song is bland, but what can you do. Maybe a system is needed where the Jury votes are worth a bit less as they are fewer people to avoid it at least feeling like this or at least in a case like this do the public vote first idk if that would make it obvious, but maybe there are enough countries to not. Sweeden had a forgettable song other than it winning, I guess the Juries saw something most of us didn't.
@@clarinetmoonesc : Because they have those 4 criteria to score the songs and they should use them and be objective? The audience does not need to be objective, or to vote according to any other criteria than what they like. And why audiences like a certain entry can have a lot of reasons that aren't even related to the musical quality of the song itself. I'm pretty sure that if any other country had sung "Tattoo", even with a similar staging and vocal ability, the jurors wouldn't have given it 340 points. And probably neither the audience. The issue is that, for the audience, simply wanting to see Loreen win again is good enough of a reason. For the jurors, it shouldn't be. But I think this year it was.
@@irenenaya7644 there is no such thing as an objective opinion when judging art, even if it's by a music professional. If the aim was to be objective then surely one person could decide them all, why do you think there are 185 people all ranking them differently
Haha that's very kind. The issue is that the EBU are in possession of the 100% correct facts about the Juries already, every single year. No changes have happened. My only hope is that Martin Österdahl has been making some rigorous changes to the system already, and may refine the Juries next year.
This was so interesting, thank you so much for this Rachel. ❤ I agree with your suggestions 100%, the jury is needed but changes are needed as well if they want to keep this competition going without angering a massive amount of people like this year. When you looked into what kind of genre of music the juries were experts in and said that there was not a single person with rap background; as someone who was rooting for Finland, that felt like a stab in heart. 😞 Because he is an amazing rapper and he deserves to be recognized for it, though I agree that he did better with the juries than I originally thought. It was just impossible to catch to Tattoo because Sweden got such a huge lead and that to me is the biggest question mark and like you said, transparency for the reasons should be available to the public. Also agree with you on that Germany, Spain and Slovenia did not get nearly enough appreciation as they should have, their voices and performances were amazing! 😞 Also those comments that pointed out that the televote score were not equal either, I completely agree. This year made it obvious that it was a battle between a song that would be heavily preferred by the jury (Sweden) and the song that would battle against that. (Finland). I have seen SO many comments by people saying that they sacrificed even their own preferred favorites because they wanted to support Käärijä. That speaks volumes about how people felt that the jury points would be unjust even before they were given. This is not the way to go, because this probably robbed some of the other artists from the points they would have gotten if the public had not felt like they needed to give all of their support to Käärijä. So yeah, I hope we see these changes next year already in some scale. 😞
Thank you :) I do think that the 'vocal's and vocal ability' box is not entirely representative of the songs. Katerina from Go_A was marked down for her 'white voice' style of singing in 2021 for a similar reason - too many people on the juries who had a 'westernised' ear and therefore not entirely able to understand the technique as it should be understood.
38:40 Honestly, I find the 8.5 score for Tattoo's 'Composition and originality' category to be quite generous, considering its basic repetitive melody that you mentioned, the ChatGPT-esque lyrics and the fact it sounds like 4 other songs combined to many, Euphoria being one of them. I don't think it deserved a higher score in that category than for example Portugal, France, Czechia at all. In fact, as far as I can tell, it was one of the worst of the night in that aspect, which made its x2 points lead over #2 even more perplexing to me.
I agree. I'm surprised how many people favor Sweden. I actually found her entire performance boring. For me, a beautiful voice doesn't help when it's wrapped in a song that doesn't stand out from what I've heard before and a performance that made me think there was a horny man sitting behind a peephole watching.
I see where you are coming from - however I was trying to be 'realistic' in what a Eurovision Jury would see. The song is palatable across a range of ages, background etc, so I could realistically see it scoring high for composition.
@@ThePeaceAround : I mentioned the same as @KometBlu in my comment and only now I see your explanation. But how does being palatable across a range of ages and backgrounds have anything to do with "composition and originality"? Shouldn't the jury reward original and well crafted compositions? I mean, what's palatable across different audiences is already going to be rewarded by the televote.
People forget that the televoters react to the existence of the Juries. Tactical voting is real. Australia won their semi, then got tanked in the final because people didn't expect them to do well with the juries (and couldn't then take the win). Then you got a big groundswell for Finland because they were high in the odds, and a mini one for Norway who some people projected as a potential spoiler if her jury score was high enough. If you compare the points distribution among televoters in the Grand Final vs the Semis, the semis are much closer as people are voting for their actual favorites rather than who could win. You can also compare to a televote only year like 2006 and see the voting being much more representative. If you scrapped the juries, the televote would likely normalize a lot since projected favorites are harder to predict without the obvious jury biases.
I agree there was a lot of tactical televoting - myself included who voted for Finland 20 times. I think some (not all) people were aware that Finland may struggle with the Juries and therefore would be relying on televotes, and therefore came out in big numbers to vote.
Honestly, Norway was my personal favourite and I don't know why she didn't do better with the Televote. But I'm also not European so maybe it's partly a cultural thing? I'm also a bit surprised with how high Israel placed - not that it wasn't great, it just didn't feel stand-out to me personally.
@@Lynsey17 Norway was my favorite too. She was pretty popular in the fandom at large. But we had this narrative of Käarija vs Loreen, and some people think a vote for someone who won't win is a vote wasted. So we get a severely lopsided vote where people voted for one of the two "favorites" instead of their actual favorites. As for Israel, I don't get it either. I guess some people see tight choreo and vote? No idea why that was the juries' pick for token bop to get major points.
Rachel - thank you for your insightful, in-depth video. Two things - 1) let's not be agesist. I'm 63 years old and watched my first ESC in 1970. My favourites this year were Finland, Slovenia and Spain. I grew up in the 70s as a punk, watching The Clash and The Jam, but also enjoying disco, northern soul and The Carpenters. I am ABSOLUTELY open to all genres of music. 2) Although there have been comments opposing this, for me the best national juries would be people who have had an involvement in ESC in the past and understand the zeitgeist, how ESC works, what makes a popular ESC song - performing artists, songwriters, producers, delegation members. Just looking at the UK jury members for this year. Honestly, how invested are they in the contest? Have they even watched it over the past 5-10 years? I get the feeling that that is minimal. Eurovision songs and performances cannot be linked to mainstream pop. ESC is a genre all of it's own and to judge it needs an historical knowledge of what makes a great ESC entry. When you see the camaraderie and mutual support of ESC contestants year after year, that tells me who artists, not just viewers, want to succeed.
Thank you :) I want to clarify that I'm not being ageist and I apologise completely if that was the way it came across. We need to have a wide range of ages on the juries. I absolutely loved how there was an 82 year old on the Finnish jury, I thought that was quite cool actually. 65% of the juries were over the age of 40, whilst the remaining 35% (27% being 30s, and 8% being 20s) felt a bit under-represented. The median age was 44, so similar to the average. I think having an even spread, like 15% teens, 15% 20s, 15% 30s, 15% 40s, 15% 50s 15% 60s, 10% 70s etc, or something similar, will be interesting and more diverse. So everyone's opinion matters, and theirs no skew towards a certain age group.
@@ThePeaceAround Aww, Rachel - sorry, my wording may have been wrong - I wasn't accusing YOU, specifically, of being ageist, more the community. I really respect your views and comments - thank you for all your hard work. I love your channel. I still stand by my other comment, that people with past experience of ESC would possibly be the fairest and most reactive of judges. We can say all we want about the different music genres we get in the contest but, we need to accept that Eurovision music is a genre all of it's own, and we need judges who understand that genre. Looking at the UK jury - do ANY of them have any past interest or knowledge of the contest? That is what concerns me and perhaps answers the question why Kaarija, the fan favourite, received no jury points from the UK this year. There is a real disconnect that just shouldn't be there.
@@thingybob4375 I would disagree with the assertion that Eurovision is its own genre when since in its DNA it didn't set out to be its own genre in the first place. Having the mindset of Eurovision as a genre greatly limits the contest into a box that in reality doesn't fit at all, especially in this current era. I've been a fan of the contest since 2008 and in my perspective, over time there's less and less agreement on what makes a Eurovision song successful than 15 years ago. In my first years as a fan, I wanted it to sound like mainstream pop so it would be more relevant to people. Over time, it got to that point that it has the respectability that as song quality-wise, and the next stage of the evolution if you will, is more out-of-the-box entries which I've noticed started appearing around 2016. Right now what Eurovision needs is not necessarily jurors with past experience in the contest, but more diverse genre and age backgrounds. That's my take.
As a spaniard it certainly means a lot 😢😢😢 honestly the disappointment was real 😂 but we are so proud of Blanca and i absolutely loved the performance 🏹🕊️😊
José Pablo Polo, el productor de Eaea dijo que estaba más decepcionado con el noveno puesto del jurado que con el televoto, y le doy la razón. Como ya nos vamos dando cuenta, el perfil de los jurados por desgracia no es como esta adorable mujer, sino que son concursantes de preselecciones, programas tipo La Voz, etc... Que sólo saben valorar voces y estilos comerciales y probablemente a muchos la forma de cantar de Blanca les desagradaria y pensarían que estaba gritando. Muy fuerte y tristemente no sabemos si de cara a futuras ediciones la forma de cantar aflamencada a la que estamos tan acostumbrados sería un factor que se podría volver en contra en canciones comerciales que mandaramos.
This is brilliant analyses. Must have taken so much time. Your results and findings certainly support the discrepancies and disconnect with the viewers/audience/voters/fans we've seen. So I am not surprised. This is A-grade evidence that the juries need reform.
I have seen some videos looking into the reasons for how things operate or why they happen, but I have to say that this was one of the best I have ever seen. Very well researched, very well explained, very comprehensive and all in all, a very detailed observation of the situation. The only thing I would add to your recommendations, is that the jury and public vote for the grand final performance. If you are going to call a show a grand final and you have two groups voting on that grand final performance, you need the two groups to be voting for the same performance.
16:23 This poses an issue because if only 4 countries have rappers, then that still means that the rest of the countries will be biased against rap. Instead of 5, juries need to be 10-15+ with a good distribution of musical styles in THOSE 10-15.
I was thinking about this problem too. EBU can’t regulate the range of backgrounds of just a few countries’ juries to fit a few more rappers in the whole. I’m not sure the best way to tackle that problem but adding more people is an option.
@@DannyPotato Yeah. That opens another issue where some countries might lack artists of certain genres such as rap or Eastern European music (although I highly doubt that considering rap is trending everywhere, and even West Europe would have Turkish or Balkan migrants who are experts in that Eastern European music)
It will take more than just diversifying the musical backgrounds of the Jurors, I agree with you. I think in order for the Juries to consider 'other' types of vocals aside from pop, such as white voice, flamenco, rap etc, the criteria boxes for how the mark the vocals has to change and become more inclusive.
@@ThePeaceAround This poses a genuine question though: If the juries are not yet objective, do we need them? Their existence hinges on the idea that they are objective. You’ve shown multiple instances where their song placements were super fishy. All they did this year was push up dated songs or ballads. I found the televote a lot more reasonable in assessing vocals and quality (not that it was perfect, as was obvious with the bottom points). It punished bad vocals but also failed to reward good vocals with unimaginative songs. This is how it should be. Interestingly, it also punished songs that were *too* different, which is atypical of the televote (Hatari still placed top 6 in televotes in 2019, but Blood and Glitter (a comparatively much safer song) got scraps in 2023).
I don't know my opinion on this. On one hand, Estonia was my third place out of all 37 songs this year and I would've been devastated if it was televote only for her. Same with Spain. However, Sweden getting what was it like 15 countries giving her 12 points is ridicoulous imo, even taking away the conspiracy of Abba's 50th anniversary, I just think that's an unbeatable lead... this was a great video though, really well structured :)
That's some professional research work, really impressive! I do think the juries (when judging properly) are needed in the competition, even 50/50. Sometimes the televote tend to just recognize what's "weird" and take that as the only criteria, not even considering originality (like Spain this year for example), so the balance between the two is needed. But it's a shame the way the jury voted this year. Anyway, thanks for the great video! I agree with basically everything.
Spain was the best performance this year and I know that's right. I can't imagine not having juries and Blanca Paloma coming in last place. I don't know if I would keep watching every year.
As a spaniard it certainly means a lot 😢😢😢 honestly the disappointment was real 😂 but we are so proud of Blanca and i absolutely loved the performance 🏹🕊️😊
@@ristoravela652 wym? they gave spain way more points than the televote did. Can't pretend from the jury 300 points tbh and can't blame them for the result.
This year quite simply felt like a tug-of-war between the public and the juries and I hated it. My theory as to why so many countries who performed very well got such low televote scores, is that people voting knew that the juries would skew massively toward Sweden, and so poured all their points into whoever among the songs they liked had the best chance of beating Sweden (so between Finland, Norway, Israel etc.). Not enough of the public agreed on which song could beat Sweden to actually do it, because the jury was so massively biased it was almost unbeatable. Is this what Eurovision is meant to be? Is this really fun for anybody? I think the juries need to be held to a much stricter standard of judging so that the public can feel more at ease voting for all the songs they like. I poured all my points into Finland in a desperate bid to beat out Sweden and I know several friends who did the same, when I liked plenty of songs other than Finland's! I loved Australia, Germany, Austria, Serbia, I would have loved to distribute my points among them, but I felt like I couldn't because of this stupid power struggle against the juries. I appreciate all the work that went into this video, it confirms what I think most people can feel in their gut; that we desperately need reform before next May. Because what's the point in voting at all if the jury can just landslide the public's will out of the way? Why should we pay money to the EBU if they're going to stack it so that whoever they say wins, is the winner? I'm annoyed and heartbroken and I'm sure some of the bitterness will fade in the next few months but man. It shouldn't have been this way.
I agree with all you said. And I feel cheated. Why did we go through this charade in the first place, if our votes would just be cast aside? I am still fuming. I think the juries need to go altogether or be revamped to include at least 10 people or more, one from each music genre. Unless they're changed, I won't be voting in the future ESCs. All this bs sucked the joy out of it, got to take a lot of time off from any ESC related stuff to stop seething. IMO no past winners should be allowed in the future, they already won! To me it felt like Sweden brought a gun to a knife fight, choosing Loreen. All winners just aren't the same.
@@ThePeaceAround I cannot help thinking that the current 50/50 system is somewhat illogical, as the two scores do not reflect the same reality. Juries need to distribute their votes among 10 entries. Televoters can vote 20 times for a single favourite. There can potentially exist a big gap between 1st and 2nd places in the public preference. Finland could have got 60% of the televotes and Sweden 30%, and the results would have been computed as 12 and 10 points, disguising a strong preference. In my opinion, a 25/75 system, favouring the public, would be a more democratic choice.
@@ThePeaceAround That's often what people forget when they said they felt it wasn't fair that Sweden got a landslide jury vote, completely forgetting Loreen ahs a massive fanbase in the Eurovision community (and a "safer" alternative to Finland for those who don't like the song).
@@ThePeaceAround That doesn't necessarily contradict the argument by @Raine re: the massive vote clustering. I guess I never saw so many acts being so utterly disappointed & literally huddled around a very meagre low-to-semi-low point campfire and I think the voter wars are part of the reason why. Of course, with Sweden coming in 2nd in televote, it kinda calms down on the rage over jury vote weights but eventually it came down to two highly polarized camps just voting the living daylights out for their fave, leaving nearly all other artists grasping for the leftover crumbs.
Really good points are brought up in this video. Not only the deep insight on the jury voting and crucial aspects of it, but also some appropriate methods for improvement. Well done, Rachel!
This is just amazing! Thanks for your dedication. I think we all can agree that voting system isn't perfect and it was great to see detailed analysis with a lot of data considered instead of "JuSt reMoVe RIgGeD JuRIes". As for me I think that as for now 50/50 percentage is essential. So far only 2017 and 2023 had concentrated jury votes (no drama in 2017 because of same favourite), while televote can't notice more than 10 songs every single year. I have previously thought that it would have been amazing if juries voted during final, so that both them and televote evaluate same performance (For example juries listening to entries and taking notes about possible favourites during jury final and then actually voting after all grand final performances. I also agree with you about needed diversification of genres and age groups represented by jury members, so once again thanks for great analysis and extremely reasonable suggestions ❤
I definitely think the juries should remain. But they need to consist of a bigger and more diverse group of people. They should also be more open to songs that don't fit typical pop songs and ballads. This being said, I'm okay with the order of the jury vote this year, even more so than with the one of the televote actually. But the point differences shouldn't have been as big as they were Maybe letting the people choose half of or all the jurors like Ukraine did this year is a good way to increase diversity.
I voted for Croatia because I felt it was 1. a good message 2. rememberable for Eurovision and 3. I felt this was them as a band. I almost voted for Belgium. I also liked Germany (I thought they would get a lot higher up the board, maybe not winning, but on the left), France and Czechia, and Finland off the top of my head from what I can remember correctly from my scoring list.
@@steam_jane5580 I just found the Croatian song very melodic in the second half and that part where it goes all crazy is the most inventive part of any song this year. 5/10 for uniqueness almost looks like a typo.
I probably should have explained myself better in the video regarding Croatia. What I was trying to do, was use the criteria that the juries have to mark the songs - and my point is, that the criteria is vague and constrained. I gave Croatia a 5/10 for uniqueness of composition, because the song contains only two chords, and maintains a similar drum pattern and rhythm throughout the 3 minutes. HOWEVER If the Jury criteria boxes were more detailed, expansive - perhaps an additional box for lyrical content, overall message etc - then the score would have gone up, maybe even a 9-10? Us eurofans rate the music based on possibly a wide range of reasons - so perhaps the jury should have the opportunity to do that as well. Perhaps the score of 5/10 by following the criteria also might demonstrate to you guys why Croatia was scored in 25th overall by the Juries.
This was a joy to watch and super interesting and insightful!! I agree that the jury composition should include people from different backgrounds, but I don't think it's necessarily because jurors from pop backgrounds can't appreciate or fully understand other genres of music. They're educated listeners (one would hope) and they should be able to judge songs for their merits, regardless of genre. I think that they just don't want to. They favour their style of music because it's good for business, or it's closemindedness, or some sort of "tribal" thing. Which is sad, of course. With respect to the current year's voting and the flood of votes towards Sweden, I think there's another factor that may come into place, which is part hype and part the "Loreen factor" itself. Jurors might have voted this entry so highly just because of the reputation that precedes the artist, and not for the song's merits in itself. And I think that, up to a certain point, you also fell under the "Loreen factor" effect. I am really intrigued on that 8.5 you gave "Tattoo" for uniqueness of composition. What makes it more unique than entries such as Portugal, Armenia, Czechia, Australia or even Israel? Just rewatched your reactions to all of these, and in all cases you mentioned a lot of more interesting elements than you did for Sweden, which you described as "Euphoria part 2" and mentioned the lack of musical evolution. There seems to be a gap between your analysis and the score. Maybe it's just that sometimes it's really hard to score down entries from artists you've grown to love. Still, your analysis and scoring was way fairer and honest than the jurors!! This year the jurors decided that Sweden was the winner, and no matter what else other contestants brought to the stage, nothing was going to change that. Spain's entry made it painfully clear. I can't really conceive a world in which Spain would be ranked below 5th place on average by jurors. That would mean at least 200 points. And I don't like Flamenco, I find the style of singing quite exasperating, I don't see myself listening to "Eaea" much in the future. So as part of the public, I wouldn't have voted for it. But if I was a juror, I would really suspect my objectivity if I didn't rank that song quite high. They have those 4 clear criteria, and Blanca Paloma knocked it out of the park in at least 3 of them ("overall impression" seems to me the only criteria in which there's quite a bit of room for subjectivity and personal preference). Like Joker Out's singer Bojan said, "Robada!!" ("Robbed") This has been way too long of a comment, so I'm gonna make it a bit longer 😃 Just to say that I've been following this channel since 2021. And there's been quite a few reactors that I have watched but you are the only one that I consistently watch time and again. Your knowledge, love of music and respect for the artists are always amazing! Thank you for sharing them with us!! 😍
As a data scientist, I greatly admire your initiative. From what I've gathered, you're venturing into something potentially fruitful. However, there are a few missteps in your method that you could rectify (its a lot of work). The primary task you're working on is developing a predictive model to forecast jury scores using various factors you've selected. You've shown a clear understanding of potential biases in this process and are making efforts to compensate for them, which is commendable. The most crucial challenge I notice in your current approach is the lack of cross-validation of your model with data from different time periods. This step is pivotal as it allows you to understand how well your model generalizes its predictions across diverse data sets. At present, you've built your model using jury scores and public votes collected post-event. Of course, there's no feasible way to revert this, but there are viable alternatives to address this limitation. One approach is to replicate your prediction process for the upcoming year's competition before the jury and audience votes become public knowledge. This will give you an unbiased gauge of your model's predictive power. Alternatively, you could select a previous Eurovision Song Contest event whose details you do not remember, such as jury and audience votes or contestants, and run your prediction process. This method offers another impartial way to assess your model's performance. There are several additional factors that can be optimized in your model, and certain biases will still persist. However, these modifications would steer you closer to achieving your objective. Edit: Certainly, your perspective as a trained musician adds invaluable insights to the scoring process. However, the methodology you're using to calculate scores might benefit from a more sophisticated approach. Generally, in data science, we would apply machine learning algorithms to establish correlations based on expert ratings like yours, rather than relying on educated guesswork. The advantage here is that a machine learning model can systematically and efficiently detect complex patterns and relationships in the data, something that could be quite labor-intensive or even infeasible manually. Therefore, it might be beneficial to leverage these computational tools for your analysis, rather than attempting to approximate correlations based on your expert scores. Edit2: If you decide to do something like this, i strongly recommend you to get a little bit of help in setting up your next "test", so your work on it will be even more valuable. There are a lot of small things that are not immediately obvious, that could help a bunch.
... you're not offering yourself to help 'cause you're too modest or because, I quote, it's a lot of work? 😓We can all agree she did an amazing work and probably the best she could. So please, rather than just mentioning them, make your tools available to Rachel and possibly share these new results with us, thank you.🙏
@@GiancarloCorvale Sure, i would help out if its needed / wanted. It sounds like a fun thing to do. I haven't offered my assistance earlier because I genuinely don't want to impose on a project where someone else has already put in all the effort.
Thank you for the advice - I'm just a humble auditor and don't know too much about data science :) A lot of this was also just for fun as well, although it did take a long time to put together
I think uniqueness is an important one because it's basically the only criterion that promotes experimentation, and experimentation enables evolution and progress. Of course some of it is going to suck, probably most of it to be honest. But experimenting is the only way to find fresh new ideas and avoid getting stale. Not that Eurovision is ever going to be where the actual groundbreaking stuff happens but at least this might avoid it falling completely behind its times and losing relevance. (Which I think is something it really struggles with.)
I voted for Croatia but also liked Belgium (nearly voted for it), Germany (thought it would get higher up the board), France, Czechia and Finland if I remember correctly what was on my scoring list. I would put what I feel is a good song above a purely unique song, but I feel uniqueness is part of Eurovision being an experience and I would put it above the forgetfulness of Sweeden other than it winning. This year I saw something in the most Unique song when voting, but not always. A Unique song winning even if bd is at least somewhat interesting and No Unique songs would take away from the Eurovision experience and you might actually miss it??
How I would interpret Croatia's 'uniqueness' of composition would be more negative as the song only contains two chords. However, it is unique in other senses, such as the vocal processing, lyrical content etc. This is why the system needs to change to include more criteria, so other parts of the entries are being assessed fairly.
@@ThePeaceAround Yeah I totally agree. More specific criteria would improve the system a lot. By the way, love the level of detail in your analysis and how passionate you are in videos! ❤️
Thank you so much! You have done the concrete thing everyone has been looking for to bring to light the problems with the jury system. I've only watched half way through, I'll get back after finishing. I hope this will get a lot of attention, this is so well presented.
Wow Rachel, you really achieved and even exceeded ESC Tom's level in Eurovision nerdiness 😊. I loved every second of it (I adore also Tom's work thoroughly). I agree the points you gave and would also like to stress the question that how can juries based on musical background rank the same song with the same criterias by all jurors of one country in their TOP2 and another country by all jurors to their bottom3. That is what happened with Cha Cha Cha by juries of Norway and San Marino.
I'm sad some Europeans don't have more musical knowledge. I've seen people saying Spain's song didn't have a rhythm (for those who don't see it, it's a 12/8 : 3 3 2 2 2). And this is just an exemple, it's not only about taste, it's about judging things we don't understand.
I honestly can't stand this song... I like Spanish music, I acknowledge Blanka was perfect vocally and the uniqueness of the song, but for some reason I find it very disturbing....
sometimes it’s not about musical knowledge, but about personal preference. even if a song should be perfect in theory, it won’t appeal to everyone. music is not only about notes and rhythm, it is about feelings that are transported to other people, which is different to everybody.
the juries are there to judge these music theory things, but the fans don’t need the knowledge to vote. we can’t just say that others shouldn’t vote for their favorites, because they don’t this expertise
wtf "it didn't have a rhythm"? there was clapping throughout the song, if they can't follow that they clearly have bigger problems than flamenco. what they mean is "my brain is too smooth to handle anything other than 4/4"
I agree and that's the magic (or some would say problem) of music, a song can be technically good but not be something you vibe with or feel works. Everyone listening habits and tastes are different
I appreciate the enormous amount of work you put into this analysis , Rachel. My issue is that you as a trained classical musician was still able to put songs out of your genre high on the list. Why would this not also be the case for jurors being able to see the quality of songs out of their respective genres?
I think the way I mark songs in my reviews uses a wide range of personal criteria, and the Juries at Eurovision are only given four! Lyrics should be a box on it's own!
@@ThePeaceAround : You still managed to give a fairer score than the jurors did (there's a huge comment on the main thread about it). I think it's not that jurors from pop music can't appreciate other genres. They just don't want to.
A thing I think tends to happen is that juries weigh each category differently for all entries. For example, with Blanca Paloma, because it wasnt the taste of some juries they didnt give it points based on overall impression even if they objectively thought it was good objectively looking at the other criteria. While in Alika's case the vocals would be what was weighed the most. With Käärijä it would be the originality and Loreen would have gotten a lot of points for staging. To counter this you could make sure that every criteria is take into equal account, but that is way too hard to do because of unconscious biases. What I suggest is assign jurors to each criteria and then jury points average out and each criteria has equal weight.
One thing that went unaddressed: ODDS. I'm convinced Finland did this well because it was high in the odds so jurors saw it as a safe bet. Same with Sweden
I haven't ever followed the trio of "like, comment and subscribe!" instructions of TH-camrs because I don't like algorithms skewing my search results or suggestions. This is the first ever video that has inspired me to do all three. The work that went into this video was absolutely spectacular! Thanks, I'm definitely going to recommend this to all my Eurovision friends.
I personally think the "overall impression" is key here, and it is, at the end of the day, the decisive factor to score the performances. And that's what would explain the results. I'm a native spanish speaker, but not from Spain, and what I always thought it was gonna happen with Blanca Paloma ended up happening, people didnt like it. The overall impression is that they didnt click with the performance. Technically flawless but nobody's favourite.
That’s a totally fair argument tbh. In my personal opinion there is still some bias to work through there as well through. I’ve personally sung and listened to songs with a similar musical structure to Spain (complex time signatures and lots of dissonance) and it absolutely clicked with me, and talking to some of my other Eurovision fan friends they agreed that it was cool but felt that in some places the harmony just sounded bad (where the hard dissonances were) and that they found it hard to connect with. I definitely think that exposure to similar harmonic and musical structures in particular is imperative to really connecting with Spain’s entry for this year-its definitely an acquired taste, but more of the jurors should be familiar with similar ethnic music styles in order to score them fairly. What is accessible in terms of widespread appeal and understandability in these regards is usually best left to the televote.
Main points: age bias and pop bias (+ English language bias) in the juries. Hope Eurovision and broadcasters will think about a more broader musical background + age for the years to come.
The competition is still a song contest, so the "handiwork" of song-writing should still be a part of the judging. I still think we need to have juries, but there are changes needed. The juries need to be bigger. Their identities and individual votes needs to be publicized after the final. The juries need to include more than just "music industry" people. This will ensure transperancy and a juryvote that is slightly more diversified. I also think there should be a re-balancing of jury vs peoples vote. Perhaps a 40-60 or 30-70. As I said before the quality of the songwriting/creation should be scored, but in the end the popularity of a song should be the major part.
@@user-gs3yf7dv8r That is why I think transperancy of the members of the juries and their individual votes are important. To get such issues out into the clear
@@user-gs3yf7dv8r that is not true, Sweden was also a fan favourite, and the juries placed it first, and Finland was also a fan favourite, and they put it 4th, a very respectable placement, and surely they did not put all fan's favourite last.
i humbly disagree. too much often, quality of music has nothing to do with popularity. 70 30 would flatten the musical offer to low level cheap pop songs. music is an art, and rap explicitly declares that working on voice as an instrument is a waste of time.
Of you are gonna unbalance the jury vote might as well eliminate it enterily. The televoting is also very flawed, People vote for polítical reasons, for their favourites that exced a lot of the time the musical aspects of the entry. It will become a popularity contest.
I don't think there is a bias AGAINST non-english entries, I think there is a bias FOR english entries, as they do better in the charts, so I would adjust your predictions this way. I don't agree the jury helped Finland, they didn't impede Finland, that is different. They however massively belped Sweeden no matter how you look at it.
The reason I had the bias against non-English entries, is because in the past we have seen native language songs come very low in the Jury rankings. I think this partly due to the fact that there isn't a box criteria for the Juries to mark 'lyrics' of the entries. This would encourage them to get an understanding of what the song is about and potentially give the song more of a chance. I think that's a pitfall of the jury system, and therefore negatively impacts on non-English songs. How do we know that the Juries are doing there research, into for example, Croatia?
Wow, thanks for taking all the time to put this together! Very interesting results, indeed. I guess even if some things were different, Sweden would have won regardless probably, but it would have been even closer. As I said on the poll, the juries definitely are necessary. But a more balanced and more transparent process is required. If necessary, increase the number of juries and make sure more groups are more fairly represented (over 50% pop is ridiculous, we also need jurors who are less biased towards ethnic/native language entries). I also would like to see how the juries would have voted in the semi finals.
Completely agree there :) I mentioned in another comment that it would be cool to have a 'rest of the world' jury as well as televote. Perhaps some musical experts from India, Nigeria, South America etc. How would they vote?
Thank you Rachel, that was an extraordinary effort, extremely well analysed and thought out. I definitely agree juries need to be balanced and from a range of musical genres and ages. ESC acts have evolved over time and so should juries. If ESC is to be a true song contest then it requires a true and accurate representation of current and ethnic European sounds. Thank you so much for all your work and time you put into your reviews and analysis Rachel. It is an impressive effort and I look forward to more in the future. ESC wouldn't be the same without your insight.
First of all, thank you for this deep analysis and for providing all of those details! I think that, if the way each juror in each country voted was made public, they would try to be more objective and everything would be fair. Also, it seems to me that this year there was a "Loreen bias", for example when they promoted the official Eurovision cd a few weeks ago they put Loreen's song first and many major ESC related blogs and websites were addressing her as "royalty". I also agree with what you suggested at the end of the video. Lets hope that things will get better and more fair next year.
Thank you so much for the analysis. I can't imagine how much effort it took to create. You mentioned some points I didn't even think about. It all makes a lot more sense to me now. I find it a fascinating event with all the new music and I think the unpredictability makes it interesting for the broad public as well. Some changes need to be made within the jury group, but I always agreed the jury are needed to vote, even if they don't always match the public. Again, thank you so much for your effort.
Im still so angry about this score board almost all of the contestants robbed. And juries made that night one of the disgrace night of the esc history. Jury selected a winner one night before grand final and televote didnt effect anything. Im still devastated and pissed off about germany's, spain's placement. What was 3, juries are you insane? Germany's vocals are one of the hardest vocals in that night and chris, which is lord of the lost's vocalist, sing that song absolutely perfectly and they gave them just 3 points, unbelievable. Even poland and uk had more points than them its just ridiculous. Im sick of that pop songs domination in the esc and in the juries. Juries effect to the score must be %30 not more not less in both semi and grand finals. That video is pissed me even more when I learned all about juries.
What an analysis - "shut the front door" (a quote from lovely Rachel herself; if anyone watched her "EUROVISION 2023 - REACTING TO THE GRAND FINAL TELEVOTE RESULTS", you know what this is about) 😉😃😊 In large part, I agree with what you said at the end: A jury is definitely needed, preferably a mixed one. And while I do think that the EBU could try a 60/40 % (public/jury) voting system (instead of 50/50), before that they need to take a closer look at the jury members - age and background. I was surprised to see that the average age of the jury members isn't younger. That really is a problem in regards to the age of the participants. And yes, too many with a pop music background. I understand the pop background to some extend because there IS a lot of pop music at Eurovision. But the lack of ethnic and indie/alternative background is not ok. Ethnic songs have always been there and I feel like every year there're more and more Indie/Alternative songs. Especially those songs often have more quality than generic pop songs - and juries need to reward that (not saying that an e. g. pop music producer can't appreciate a nice ethnic song like "Duje" or an Indie song like "Carpe Diem", but be realistic 🙃) It's also impossible that 7,7 % (which may not seem much, but it is to me) of the areas of expertise from jury members are "unknown" and "others" - it NEEDS to be transparent who they are and what musical background they have. Another point that annoys me: The lack of explanation on why they give points to an entry. Again: transparency, please! To your "jury reasonableness test": While I don't think "Tattoo" deserves 8.5 for "Uniqueness of Composition", maybe 8, if not 7.5 (I mean you basically pointed out why), "Mama ŠČ" deserves more than 5, maybe 7. I think that songs is pretty unique and smart. But that's my opinion. ✌🙂 So yeah, overall I think many of us can agree that "Tattoo" got more points than it maybe should have and "Eaea" and "Blood and Glitter" should've got way more than they did.
There is a general problem with jury and Sweden. For the last 10 years, the jury has placed Sweden outside the top 3 only twice! Whereas Sweden WAS only once in top 3 in televoting! ITS ABSURD!! Why is nobody talking about this?! There must be some changes either with power of jury or requirements that must be met by members of the jury.
Thanks so much, Rachel. Excellent and very insightful analysis! I would just add to your conclusions that juries need more musical diversity ( as you touched on )and even be chosen by public rather than broadcasters who could favour certain individuals with inside connections. Thus, jury size needs to be expanded to perhaps 7-10 individuals on each one, and there really needs to be serious consequences for any collusion or blatant biases. Looking forward to your analyses!😊
Really interesting analysis! I think the main controversy this year is that Loreen got twice as much as the second place in the jury (was her song really twice as good as everyone else's?) . in 2017 Portugal got a huge jury vote but the second place was 'only' 104 points behind so possibile to catch up. In the end Portugal won also the televote so the jury vote was quite in sync with the public. It seems just very 'convenient' that majority of the juries were all convinced Tattoo was the best song but absolutely different opinions on second third fourth ecc. So maybe a bias is 'previous winner or previous contestant' that the jury votes regardless because they were already successful in the past? With regards to the ages of the juries I agree that maybe some are a bit old but for example in Italy the average age of the population is 46 so an older age jury is probably representing the general audience better. If all the contestants are 20 years old it would'n't be fair that the jury is too, nothing against gen z but the majority of them have never heard of Elvis, the Beatles, Bowie, Queen can you really consider them experts then? At the end of the day the focus should not be on who wins but the fact that so many artists are getting together sharing their music. I think Kaariya and many other artists will be very successful so we should just be happy for all of them (I know lord of the lost have sold out their concerts so they are getting the recognition they deserve).
Surprisingly interesting (as I'm not a real Eurovision super fan, never watch the semis for example, but I do love Excel stats). From what I gather I tend to agree with the comments suggesting bigger juries, maybe 10 jurors instead of current 5. Also adding some actual criteria for countries in how to form a jury would be good. For example giving a target for an average age based on the contestants' age average over say the last five years, and requiring representation for at least five different music styles, but leaving the details open. And yes, transparency about all aspects would be crucial too. I'd also be happy to add a rule that any contestant who's already won the competition once could not take part in the future. Not because of them necessarily making superior songs, but because of the effect their past victory is likely to have on everyone and everything. Loreen was from the start predicted to do super well because of Euphoria, not because of Tattoo. Is any juror likely to not give a high score to a previously proved winner? And if they then still do produce another good song and perform well and win again like happened now, they will inevitably face a lot of accusations for unfairness. It will never be purely about their latest song, and for me that ruined the feeling this year. I'd also hate to see it become a trend, where more countries just keep sending their previous winners, if it's proven to work.
For background, I'm a Finn but didn't really like Käärijä's song, as it's not my style. My personal favourites were Serbia, Germany, Australia and Spain.
Agree the reason I didn't want Loreen to win is that it gives a signal that if you want to win you have to bring a big star or previous contestant but that means new talents would not have an opportunity to show themselves.
I like the idea of the juries, but I would rather they focus on awarding well written, technically well sung and complex compositions instead of being so similar to the public! I liked their support of Australia, because the public will never give them the points they deserve But I adored Spain's song this year and in 2015: these ladies both had incredibly complex vocals and sounded so beautiful ( and the instrumentals were great too) but they were overlooked in favour of less technically complex singers. I understand the public overlooking them for funnier acts, but why the judges? Apart from supporting Australia, what's their purpose if they don't award technical brilliance?? This was a great analysis. :)
Thanks for the video, very intersting. Only note: you said little about originality. The Swedish song is very unoriginal. I'm not talking about plagiarism, but about already heard melodies. An expert member of the jury should notice it at once. Therefore the juries' result, this year, is really disappointing, since originality is one of the key components of the vote.
Great video and suggestions for how to improve the juries! I definitely agree in diversifying the expertise in juries and would also like for the juries to be bigger. Even if we have more diverse experts, five jurors per country is still not much. I also think that the final vote from jury should come from the same show as where the public vote comes from. It’s ridiculous that five people who see a different performance currently have the same amount of power than the rest of the world who see the final main performance and pay to vote based on it. The pricing of votes between different countries is also problematic. 20 votes costs 20 euros in Finland, 6 euros in Sweden and 36 euros in Estonia for example. That comes in play with the televotes when richee countries can afford to vote more for their favorites. All in all I really hope EBU takes even some of the criticism to heart and change things up for next year. It doesn’t look good when even one of their jurors for this year (Konstrakta) is posting the petition to remove juries from Eurovision to her insta stories.
The problem is partly logistics. A big part that is. To get almost 200 people together across 40 give it take countries at the same day takes 6 months+. And arranging their stay plus overseeing their voting that day. How do you sort that out? Adding more people will increase the costs and logistics even more. Not saying it’s wrong or right but that’s the reality. Who’s gonna pay? It’s our national broadcasters and they’re not bathing in gold. They have a yearly budget and those change. The hosting city? The sms and IVR tariffs are a national matter. It’s the public broadcaster the companies they use the taxes etc in each country you have to go after. Looking at the fees, they’re pretty similar in most countries and not super unreasonable. But ok I’m no expert in each countries prices and deals with the broadcasters I have to admit😅
As an alternative skewing musician and singer myself, I really appreciate your comments re the vocal talent of Chris Harms, coming from a classical music expert! Really enjoying this deep dive (currently about half way through)
A potential solution besides increasing and diversifying the "professional" jury is adding a "demoscopic" jury similar to what they have in Sanremo and Benidorm.
Agree SanRemo jury is not perfect but usually their results don't differ that much from the televote so it seems to be a fair representation, the jury is more concentrated on the lyrics and composition which is how it should be.
This was an incredible video! I have learnt so much and I think you're spot on. What a great analysis, I'm so happy to see someone being so objective about the results and that your opinions mirror mine (which aren't objective at all 😂). You've gained a new subscriber!
I wish we could also dedicate some deep analysis to televoting. Everyone is up in arms about jury voting because Sweden can first and Kaarija second, but no one seems to shed a tear for those countries which constantly get slaughtered in the televote, whether in the final or semifinal. The juries aren't perfect, and the recipe for reforming the juries is quite easy. And admittedly they're also more easily corruptible (as we saw last year). Nonetheless, they have constantly proven to provide a bit of balance and fairness to Eurovision. The televote on the other hand ... Lets think for a second how Blanka (not of the Paloma kind) fared in this...
1:04:13 I’ve watched many live streams from jury-final and different yt videos of that and only one who I’ve heard doing badly was Norway not been able to sing that high whistle sound well. Finland had better vocals than before according to many youtubers escYounited for ex. I’m also sad that Portugal was really overlooked by the juries because from many videos I’ve heard that she did amazing performance in jury evening. I so wished that jury performances could be published on Eurovision Song Contest yt page too so we all could compare. Eurovision should make their juries more ”seethrough” there should not be need to google different members professions etc. I’m hoping 30%/70% jury/televotes in the future.
He would have won if Loreen would have gotten under 187 points by public, but how realistic was this? +She charts in more countries and is higher in the charts
Thank you for such a measured and well-researched view, in the midst of a landslide of reflexive 'abolish'/'70-30' takes - which would likely have a number of unintended consequences (and likely introduce new problems). Improving targeted elements of the current system is undoubtedly the right approach - ESC needs to build confidence in it. However, even with better transparency and diversity on juries, people need to accept there will ALWAYS be a chance the televote's choice won't win overall. The principle of the current system has worked well for a few years now, and the winner has pretty much always been the public's favourite or a fair compromise. We absolutely shouldn't be turning things upside down because of one year where the jury's vote swayed the outcome. The split system gives ESC a unique flavour, is fairly simple to understand and more often than not works just fine. Broadly speaking, it's fit for purpose. Though I do agree juries need to represent an improved variety of genres, I would also say that the jury system as it stands is a better guarantor of rewarding musical quality and variety than the public tends to be - there are a handful of strong, niche songs EVERY year for which the juries turn out to be the main source of recognition. Ditching 50-50 should be the very last thing ESC tries - and it should only do so if it has a very clear rationale for why the new percentages are the correct ones, and the exact effect the change is intended to have. Any rationale that boils down to 'this is the amount of change that was needed for Finland to win in 2023' should not be taken seriously, otherwise there'd be calls to tinker with it every year. Which is why it's so good to see someone address the deeper structural weaknesses instead. Someone please put this video in front of the main minds at the ESC!
I am so glad you really took this from an objective and stats based viewpoint. It definitely makes your argument more compelling when you're not just insulting the songs you didn't like, but actually setting out a clear argument on why things happened. My only issue with the televote is the way that running order can massively impact voting, it would be great if we could fix this... I would love an in-depth follow up on what could be done to improve the jury system (e.g. expanding on what you did at the end, perhaps with stats examples)!
I think that the system of rating and ranking the songs that you did in part 3 of the video is in my opinion exactly the way jurors should rank the songs. And I also think we need more jurors and more diverse jurors.
nice work :-). I took some popcorn and streamed it on my TV! See you next season! a few remarks: The juries are small because that gives a bigger chance on a larger spread of the points (and a smaller chance on zeroes). This year was quite different from other years because of Sweden getting so many points but also for the televote handing out no zeroes. Try to take the lyrics into account as well. It is a song contest, so the content and message of the song are important as well. There is politics as well to consider, also in the juries. The way the Greek jury handed it out their votes almost ridiculed them so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some EBU guidelines given to them (and also to Moldova-Romania)
Thank you for doing a really good video about this, that explains kind of what happened - and that the jury system definitely has it flaws as far as getting the juries to represent the music in the contest, and a better age range. This really explained what went wrong, and exactly how. This needs to reach the EBU and different delegations so that they can take some of this into consideration for the future of the juries 🙂
For some reason this year's Eurovision results have left a massive sense of dissatisfaction accross the fandom. I, for once, felt totally disconnected as voting went on.
A large part of it in my opinion is so many songs getting for low scores, televote or jury, in part because Sweden and Finland ate up so much of them. To me this year felt largely like the Sweden vs Finland contest and that didn't leave much spotlight for the rest of the contestants
@@sapphicgal3245 I would agree. However, I reckon Finland gained traction simply because people wanted to avoid a foregone conclusion. This meant that anyone wanting to not see that, voted for Finland as the best option for doing so.
Impressive analysis, thank you so much Rachel🌹 A couple of comments: I would not compare jurys age average being 45 so much with the age of the contestants, but the audience. But it is too high, I agree. So somebody commented saying the televotes were also ”wrong”. That is a bit weird idea. Jury members are supposed to rank the songs and performances based on these mentioned criteria, but the whole idea of televotes is that each ESC fan just votes his/her personal favorite no matter what. I think that should be self evident idea of fan voting. It can give a result somebody disagrees with, but never really be ’wrong’.
I agree about the televote! There is absolutely no need to control people's taste. Like this year there were no "joke" entries and the variety in genres was quite good. So let the people vote what they love! And also, this year there are multiple songs that are charting and you can bet your ass record labels and artists are paying attention.
I think the Eurovision audience is diverse and has a wide range of age groups, and so should the Jury. The average age of the Jury was 45, and the median age was 44. However, 65% of the juries were over 40 years old, with 8% being in their 20s - I would have preferred to see a more even distribution of ages.
What a great video! Thank you Rachel, that was so interesting. I couldn't agree more with most of what you mentioned in this analysis. Still can't recover from Spain's jury placing... I had to rewatch her performance a few times to make sure there wasn't any massive mistake there. Nope, there wasn't..
@@thehunter6321 Still should have been higher with the jury.. top 3 I think. I don't even want to start thinking about the televote. That was a very sad moment 😔
Hi, Rachel! I am Yiota from Greece. I am a heartbroken Finland's fan. My compliments! You, your videos and analysis are amazing! Very professional and clean always. I discovered you last year. Regarding the juries: me too, I conclude that unfortunately juries' actual work is to promote the winner EBU has decided-made a deal to be and by that control who gets next Eurovision's profitable investment. And thanks to juries we have controlled odds for betting. If I forget all about this, and I choose so, I totally agree with you that that juries should be of younger ages and represent more music genres. I don't ageee with the 50% percentage. It's a song contest. What people want to hear and dance to. So, their vote must be stronger. 45-55, 40-60 are more appropriate percentages. And by that you sonehow limitate bias, alliances , favouritism -which are very strong and real in juries-based on social, political, sexual criteria In alternative I could even see the jury only at the semi finals, not the grand final. Make sure all quality songs partecipate at the grand final and then get people decide freely. But that would kill the betting system..😅 And sth personal. You stubbed me twice in the heart with your last comments.😂 First, I was born in 1974. I think if i didn't have that privilege, I wouldn't have Finland as my favourite, such a genious multi-genre song and a charismatic performer. Brilliant! You see, my generation is very lucky, seen and heard so many different musics. Disco, funk, punk, rap, pop, rock, metal, hard rock, electro, techno..throughout 70s 80s 90s 00s. For me all other songs were good pop, disco songs, but not original, not creative enough. Finland killed it this year. And Spain wow, electro-ethnic.. So plz don't be harsh on middle aged juries😊 And second what's the problem with Greece and Cyprus? Even you commented. Are we the only neighnbour countries supporting each other in Eurovision? And do non-Greek people know that Cypriots are practically and in essence Greek? Same language, same culture, same religion? That thousands of students from Cyprus study for free and live in Greece? They vote too, you know. Sorry for the long comment. You are great! Keep rocking in social media ❤
Excellent video. Congratulations for all the effort put into it. Best jury is the public. Setting up a diverse jury is a way too difficult and it doesn’t make any sense that few people have the same power of the public. At the end it’s the public that buys or streams the tracks. So no more juries and all entries in native language. This would be an Eurovision contest I like
Televoting does not necessarily represent the public vote, but a percentage of passionate supporters of certain songs who vote 20 times, which is against democratic voting in any election
If everyone has the same amount of votes, how is it not democratic? At the end of the day, each country's televoters give 12+10+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 points, no matter the size of the country or the number of the voters.
Thank you so, so, bloody much for this video.😍 I really appreciate the super in-depth analysis of the individual juries and their scores, the jurors' backgrounds, etc. It's so refreshing to see somebody earnestly argue that we should have juries, but why and how they need to change in such a thorough and detailed way. I especially like how you were able to explain how juries can become biased, whilst also implying that this more due to laziness or inconsideration rather than insidiousness (which is something I think way too many do). I also admire you risking potential backlash by arguing that maybe the juries were generous towards Käärijä. 😅 *On the topic of what needs to change...* That excel spreadsheet 38:18; I honestly love the idea of jurors having to vote this way. Having them objectively (as possible) rate the songs and performances in the four criteria, and then working out the average score they've given each entry, and using that to calculate a juror's top 25/26. When there's a tie in a juror's score (like Italy and Israel are in that spreadsheet), a juror could use their personal opinion as a tiebreaker. And then combine all members' top 25/26 to make a jury's top 25/26 and score. I think that could make it as close to objective as possible, ensure that they're voting according to the criteria, help to leave out political biases, all whilst giving some room for personal opinion so it doesn't all become monotonous. When it comes to diversifying the juries, I'm certain that the first way to make that more possible is to increase the number of people that make up a jury from just 5. Have like 10 or 15 people per jury. Even if nothing else changes, they should definitely up the number of people per jury. I've got no better way of saying this, but having just 5 people feels wrong a gut level. For such a big decision, it should be down to more than just 5 people. Imagining they do that, maybe one way to guarantee a more diverse range of musical expertise in a jury is to have a fixed quota of what kind of people make up the jury. Like we can have the pop expert, the rock expert, the classical expert, the rapper, the music producer, the EDM DJ, the folk music expert, the TV production expert, etc. Like we can't guarantee a diverse selection of genres in the contestants each year, but maybe we could guarantee it in the juries if we have a fixed quota year to year. Maybe quotas are also how they could solve the age issue. They can work out what the average age of the competing artists over the last 3-5 years, and have an age quota to try a make a jury's average age close to the artist's average age. E.g. This number of jurors have to be aged 18-25, this many aged 26-32, this many aged 33-40, etc. A bit like the age groups in the Melfest app vote. And the number of jurors per age group could be adjusted year by year to accommodate the changing average. I've got another idea, and I'll preface it saying that I don't know if this is feasible or not. Somewhat in line with Tiago M's comment at 54:05, what if the EBU picks the juries, instead of the broadcasters? The EBU could put together a committee that assembles and put's together each participating country's jury, instead of the broadcasters? This way the juror's identities could be kept secret from everyone during the contest, even the broadcasters. This could be a way to prevent bribery, vote swapping and alleged "lobbying" from certain broadcasters, given that some of them have shown that they can't be trusted to play fairly at this point. Again, maybe this is unfeasible and fantastical in ways that I don't realise, but it's an idea.
I think it definitly is more about changing the skew of the juries and making sure there are people with varied backgrounds in various genre. Definitely need more rock, hiphop, rap, indie/alt, even edm etc jurors in the mix. Which also means expanding the numbers slightly. Idealistically we'd want a lot more - which let's be honest is not what broadcasters and delegations want to do because of costs. However adding at least 2-4 and expanding 5 people to 7-9 seems more feasible and would allow there to be enough spots for more of a spread of professionals who specialize in different genre to fit (which hibges on selection of course but pulling from a varied pool should be a requirement). Also, while I agree on aiming for a slightly lower age average, mathematically a 30 average is not realistic, unless maybe in the high 30s like 38/39 because even if you get more 20 and 30s on the jury, you still should include some older people from 40-60+ population for diversity, just not overwhelmingly so. Thus making and average of 40-something more realistic imo. The aim is preventing an older skew but making sure there is still a diverse mix. Limiting juries to only 20-40s to achieve a younger average discounts people who are older and comes off as equally ageist. And while some older people may prefer more traditional songs, not all of them do. Speaking as a young person looking at the older people around me, tbh they appreciate rock and non-pop music more than some of my peers - I mean they were young once too and they lived through the heights of rock n roll and other experimental periods so hoping the esc community don't entirely discount them due to their age.
Speaking about the juries, one thing that didn't come up, is the corruptibility of the juries. The reason why juries were reintroduced in 2009 was the block-voting. But isn't jury scandals like what happened in 2022 a much bigger threat to credibility of the competition than block voting? Though the block voting is visible, I don't think it would ever have determined the winner of the competition. To win, a song must get votes from different parts of Europe. But if the juries have deals of exchanging votes, that can change a lot. Plus, I don't see why so few people should have so much power. At least the juries should be bigger, perhaps ten members each (that would also permit more versatile juries regarding genre, age, etc.), and maybe their vote should weigh less, perhaps 25% of the total score.
@@KyrieFortune I think, that if we dive deeper, we would find out, that people vote artists from neighbouring countries not because they are from neighbouring countries, but because they are often already known in the region, and represent similar taste and esthetics. But even if there was such thing as block voting, it would be a lesser evil than juries making shady dealings with the other.
Maybe I'm being too cynical but I think changing jury members won't fix the fundamental problem and it's that juries are just normal people who all have their biases. It's simply too much work to make sure each member of the jury from all countries is competent and won't let any political or personal beliefs skew their judgement. Finland this year is actually a good example of how jury clearly inflated Kaarija's points just to keep the intrigue for the televoting part. It all feels so fixed. That's why I believe reducing juries influence would be more effective than trying to make them more diverse.
Possibly my longest video ever - so please look at the timestamps haha.
Let me know down below your thoughts on the juries this year - do you agree with my suggested reforms?
Wow a one hour deep dive! Thank you 😊
I suggested jury to my MP in May 2006, but this step for 50/50 was wrong because of political and corruption influence. Czech jury gave 12 points to Ukraine as a political gift. Jury must be cut NOW to 1/3 of votes.
As for your political point in VESNA song, in reality the text of the song could be interpreted solely as Ukraine-Russian sisterhood love song, defintely not anti-Slovanian or pro-West song. Thats funny :-D Also, those colors at the begging of performance are quite Russian flag colors. Totaly against forced pro-Ukrainian political message that is pushed be mainstream media and political class in Czech republic and even mabye by members of the VESNA group.
and i love it ❤❤, nice work, see you next year sweetheart
@@ondrejdobrota7344forced pro ukrainian message ? the chorus is in ukrainian and written together with a ukrainian musician. that’s exactly not against a ukrainian a message but against russian imperialism
Over an hour?? In the midst of our Eurovision depression??? We are truly blessed
What is happening to uuuuuus???
That’s how it’s done. Instead of making up conspiracy theories, you’ve actually addressed possible root issues in the jury system. Wonderful job and I really hope this reaches the correct channels! I’m so sick and tired of juries punishing entries with real depth and character.
Thank you! That means a lot - the conspiracy theories this year (particularly the Abba one) have been ridiculous and void of any evidence.
The only shred of possibility I can see with the whole 'Abba' thing, is that maybe the Swedish delegation was aware that it was the 50th anniversary coming up, and decided to bring out the big guns and really try hard to win this year - by having Loreen back in melfest with her mammoth staging, they were increasing the possibilities of winning as much as possible. That's how I see it anyway - no funny business behind it.
@@ThePeaceAround That’s very fair. The fans have tainted the year for me. They usually choose the most mediocre winners 9 times out of 10 and only just now seem to have unlocked an opinion about originality. I still remember when they acted this rabid towards Jamala when 1944 won over My Only One-two songs with a day and night’s difference in originality and substance. This fandom is hypocritical to say the least.
This may sound harsh but those of us who actually VOTE for the out-of-the-box entries every single year are always respectful when the winner ends up inevitably being another ballad or pop song and our favorites end up on the bottom (still sad for Jeangu). And now that the second place happens to have won, everyone wants to be toxic and try to explain how it was a sabotage?
I’ve never seen this fanbase act this toxic. Can’t believe some of the theories I’ve read (like the EBU being a puppet of Spotify). Absolutely unbearable.
@@UsernameUsername0000People pick and choose televotes vs juries depending on who wins and who they prefer. Last year when Kalush Orchestra won, it was, “The televote is political. They got the sympathy vote. The UK is the rightful winner. The juries were right.” This year, it’s the opposite. It’s always the same back and forth. The only thing I can agree with is Sweden consistently gets away with mediocrity, year after year. It’s been the same regurgitation for years, and somehow they are in the Top 10. Most other countries would land in the second half, if not the bottom with some of their entries in the last few years.
_"Instead of making up conspiracy theories"_
Careful with accusing people of making up conspiracy theories. They often tend to be right in the end. Especially, when there is a valid motive in place.
@@KulaGGin What was the motive? This year has been a clustercluck and I have yet to see the “huge” ABBA reunion.
The problem is no way that Finland was treated unfairly. The problem seems to be that Sweden was treated a bit too well
Exactly. And Spain was treated extremely unfairly. Half of Sweden's points should have been Spain's.
@@aeonarin how do you square that? Spain came dead last in the televote, so the jury overvalued Spain even more than Sweden.
@@marcushertz4434 people's votes serve a completely different purpose. The professional jury is supposed to judge objectively the technical aspects of the entry, the people like what they like. Spain deserved points from the jury, period, regardless if the general public likes it or not.
@Teamsamsung This is my take as well. Finland did about as well as I expected in the jury vote, actually better than I expected! But I was not at all prepared for Sweden to get such a massive landslide when there were definitely other acts that deserved much more points than they got
@@aeonarin They did got a lot of points from the juries, almost 100. Way too much if you ask me.
Rachel, are you KIDDING with this kind of content! This is an incredible analysis!
Somebody should pay you for the work you do. Please set up an easy way for viewers to support your channel. And get press accreditation next year. Your insights go so far beyond what others out there are offering and more people need to hear from you!
Thanks so much for this!
Completely concur with this comment! 😊
Absolutely fantastic analysis. An excellent and very interesting watch.
Put into words exactly my sentiments. Absolute brilliant mind Rachel has.
Amen
That's so kind of you
❤❤❤
Thank you for your time! I think the jury voting this year was all over the place. So much have been said about Sweden's gigantic jury score, that it was all thanks to the vocal performance -and yet Germany and Spain were not rewarded for their vocals at all (I would dare say that Blood and Glitter is more vocally demanding than Tattoo, growling is not easy!).
Also, were the juries really following their own criteria? Some juries ranked Finland first while others put it dead last. I think it shows that juries vote according to their own preferences, just like the rest of us. They just have too much power. Eurovision is evolving and reaching new (younger) audiences globally. Nobody is tuning in to watch 26 generic pop songs sung in english. Originality sholud be awarded more and why not give points to using your native language as well.
The jury is a must to balance out f.e diaspora-voting, political voting and as we unfortunately saw this year...tactical voting. If every country would vote tactical the competition would crash. That was actually the saddest part of this ESC. I think the native language discussion is dusty when many European countries are multicultural.
@@evipevi1973 What do you mean by tactical voting?
@@kevytmelankolia3395 The Finnish ESC commentator said to the finnish viewers "dont forget that its forbidden to vote on Finland but its not forbidden to vote tactically ". The Finnish televote result stood out from the rest of Europes because they were the ONLY country to give Sweden 0 points. When you think about the fact that Tattoo was a favorite and was the third most streamed song in Finland on Spotify, it hardly seems coincidental. And unfortunately many Finns have in fact confirmed that they were voting tactically. "Why would we vote for our biggest rival?" " When its competition or Nato or war...Finns just know what to do...unite against the enemy" "I voted om Norway but in reality I voted against Sweden"...thats just three of MANY comments I got from Finns here on YT the last week. The second comment currently has 676 likes. I guess that sums it up.
@Evi Pevi Televoters are free to give their votes to whichever country they wish to support. Rest assured, if Finns had felt Tattoo was the best song and truly deserved to win, they would have voted for it, no matter what any commentator said (or didn't say, since the whole thing is debatable). Historically, Finns have rarely supported their own entries.
@@evipevi1973 I thought that voting for your neighbor was heavily frowned upon in eurovision? Isn't that exactly why we have professional juries? Sweden sent in a song that was perfectly crafted to please the juries. And it worked! Finnish jury gave it 12 points. Finnish audience gave 12 points to Norway. Are you saying that they didn't deserve it? That Alessandra should have gotten even less points than she did so Loreen could...win harder? And why didn't Loreen get a single 12 points from any audience? Tattoo was streaming well in other countries as well before the contest.
And nice job attacking our eurovision commentator who is perhaps the biggest Loreen fan in Finland. Seems like nobody is happy with the result, not even the winners.
Voted for Spain 20 times. Good to see I wasn’t the only one impressed with Spain entry.
I thought Spain's performance was among the best of the night but unfortunately I didn't give it any of my votes. Reason being is that it isn't my taste in music, excellent vocals aside. I felt really bad seeing her televote score though. She took it extremely well but I'd understand if that was just a brave face and deep down she was gutted.
I'm glad you showed Spain the love it deserved!
for me it was the worst song of the entire eurovision this year, but thats only a taste thing from me
You know who is going to be watching a 1 long video of Rachel talking about juries? Yeah, that's me, thanks for the video :D
me, too!🤗
Me as well. We love a 1-hour long well constructed Eurovision analysis video.
Rachel, once again I would respectfully petition for you to get media credentials for Eurovision. There is a “Fan Community Media” credential for content creators. It provides online access to things like video feed of rehearsal performances. It’s available for TH-camrs just like you. Thanks for another year of thoughtful ESC coverage.
That's very kind of you :) It would take a huge confidence boost and raise in self belief for me to even consider doing that haha
@@ThePeaceAroundSoon crossing 20000 subs supporting you 🙂
@@ThePeaceAround As someone who's been doing the media beat for almost a decade now, you would fit right in with everyone else there. If being on site isn't feasible next year, the online credentials would give you all the a lot of access if you're looking to expand your coverage.
@@ThePeaceAround I agree with @hippopotamusbosch3513. I have only seen 2 videos of yours, but you've already given far more well structured arguments than many of the blogs and forums I've visited in the last few days. In a daypart, you've managed become my favorite Eurovision TH-camr.
I just feel the main problem this year is not that Loreen won the Jury vote, but the fact that she got +300 points, the song wasn't that good even if the performance was great.
I love Loreen and the song, but the vocals weren't the best and it wasn't something mindblowing to be honest, might just be me, but it didn't deserve to have such a huge point advantage at the jury vote.
The charts worldwide show the contrary. The televotes come from Eurovision fans. Eurovision fans are obviously not representative of more global tastes and trends.
@@brauliogodoygonzalez4140 Probably in the jury show she focused more on the vocals and in the live show she focused more on emotion and showmanship instead of vocals. If only they uploaded the jury show, even 1 week later than the live...
@@brauliogodoygonzalez4140 the melodifestivalen performance, with her actual visión coming to life, was so amazing and miles away from anything we watched in Eurovision. The problem is Liverpool did not allow her to do it. The Eurovision staging was a cheap versión of it. But as a staging was really increíble and really superior to anyone else.
Totally agree! It was understandable that Loreen won the jury vote, but not by such a big margin. Other songs definitely deserves more jury points
Thank you for such a detailed and entertaining video, Rachel!
Here in Ukraine, the national juries were elected through Diya - the e-governance mobile app, which serves as the digital copy of your ID and the platform for community votings, so everyone could choose the Eurovision jury there too.
Btw, the same system was used for Vidbir - Ukrainian National selection. Everyone could choose their favourite entry for free and each person could only vote once, because each account is connected to the citizen’s ID
I believe that this is the future of Eurovision!
I like the fact that Käärijä made a video telling people to stop hating on Loreen. That whatever happened with the voting was not her fault and that people shold shill. That made me like him even more.
They've both been extremely respectful towards each other, as artists tend to be. They understand that all this discussion over points and winners really has almost nothing to do with the artists.
I'm so pleased that Käärijä and Loreen has good sportsmanship throughout the contest, and after the results too :)
He's an absolute darling!
1 full hour of eurovision content from Rachel? What a great day to be alive
My biggest questionmark is why Sweden is always favoured by the juries? Thank you for your huge effort in this analysis Rachel, it was very interesting to watch!
They have mastered the ESC pop genre (along with some other countries) and have the public interest to have all those talented composers, singers and production teams, etc., take part.
Because they nailed the formula long ago and have stuck to it. Why is this even a question?
@@gabesalgado789 Other countries also sent polished pop songs before and not treated nearly as well as Sweden.
@@zsokapados5197 Because they haven't perfected the Swedish pop formula nearly as well as Sweden. BTW, I'm saying this as someone who was also disappointed with the result. The Swedish music industry knows how to send jury bait, and combine that with the legendary Loreen and you have an (unfair, in my opinion) advantage that is massive.
@@gabesalgado789 Yes, I expected Sweden to win the jury vote, but it was kinda dissapointing that we knew who will win before the televote results and honestly before the final itself. That difference for Käärijä was unbeatable even with that amazing televote support. Loreen is amazing, but Tattoo as a song has nothing special in it for me.
Great analysis as always. Despite accepting Loreen victory since the beginning, the amount of points Sweden received was unimaginable. What I love about Eurovision is the diversity of songs and languages. If all countries sended only english pop songs, Eurovision would be less interesting. I always understand that english songs were more accessible, but the public has been more open to uniqueness entries and less biased than the juries on the last years. I really expected the opposite and never understood why. The amount of pop music professionals wasn't on my radar, but it makes total sense now.
A professional jury IS necessary as long It is professional. They should rate songs based on different criteria than televote does. Right now juries are just televoters Who vote one day earlier.
Completely disagree, we are all voting on the same songs and how much we like them so why should the criteria be different? The thing that sets juries apart from the public is their ability to consider every song equally and give appreciation to songs which may be generally liked by the public but just don't have the characteristics to attract massive voting figures.
@@clarinetmoonesc True , but I think it's that they choose a song with their professional insight in to the music industry/ songs, nothing is really neutral I guess but this is more as it should be just about the song, which is how I vote although I am no expert. I just go with the one I liked most.
Judging by the comments on this video and others this time they didn't choose a liked that people didn't vote for, idk what their criteria were as I found it kinda forgettable, but maybe that's why I'm not on the jury lmao.
A jury is good for the professional side of what they think is a good song, but I think it's kinda annoying in a landslide like this where public votes end up pointless and the song is bland, but what can you do. Maybe a system is needed where the Jury votes are worth a bit less as they are fewer people to avoid it at least feeling like this or at least in a case like this do the public vote first idk if that would make it obvious, but maybe there are enough countries to not.
Sweeden had a forgettable song other than it winning, I guess the Juries saw something most of us didn't.
@@clarinetmoonesc : Because they have those 4 criteria to score the songs and they should use them and be objective?
The audience does not need to be objective, or to vote according to any other criteria than what they like. And why audiences like a certain entry can have a lot of reasons that aren't even related to the musical quality of the song itself.
I'm pretty sure that if any other country had sung "Tattoo", even with a similar staging and vocal ability, the jurors wouldn't have given it 340 points. And probably neither the audience. The issue is that, for the audience, simply wanting to see Loreen win again is good enough of a reason. For the jurors, it shouldn't be. But I think this year it was.
@@irenenaya7644 there is no such thing as an objective opinion when judging art, even if it's by a music professional. If the aim was to be objective then surely one person could decide them all, why do you think there are 185 people all ranking them differently
Someone show this video to EBU please. Fantastic video Rachel, thank you!
That’s what I was just thinking! We should all send them the link.
I don't agree with her. We don´t need a jury.
Haha that's very kind.
The issue is that the EBU are in possession of the 100% correct facts about the Juries already, every single year. No changes have happened.
My only hope is that Martin Österdahl has been making some rigorous changes to the system already, and may refine the Juries next year.
This was so interesting, thank you so much for this Rachel. ❤
I agree with your suggestions 100%, the jury is needed but changes are needed as well if they want to keep this competition going without angering a massive amount of people like this year. When you looked into what kind of genre of music the juries were experts in and said that there was not a single person with rap background; as someone who was rooting for Finland, that felt like a stab in heart. 😞 Because he is an amazing rapper and he deserves to be recognized for it, though I agree that he did better with the juries than I originally thought. It was just impossible to catch to Tattoo because Sweden got such a huge lead and that to me is the biggest question mark and like you said, transparency for the reasons should be available to the public. Also agree with you on that Germany, Spain and Slovenia did not get nearly enough appreciation as they should have, their voices and performances were amazing! 😞
Also those comments that pointed out that the televote score were not equal either, I completely agree. This year made it obvious that it was a battle between a song that would be heavily preferred by the jury (Sweden) and the song that would battle against that. (Finland). I have seen SO many comments by people saying that they sacrificed even their own preferred favorites because they wanted to support Käärijä. That speaks volumes about how people felt that the jury points would be unjust even before they were given. This is not the way to go, because this probably robbed some of the other artists from the points they would have gotten if the public had not felt like they needed to give all of their support to Käärijä.
So yeah, I hope we see these changes next year already in some scale. 😞
Thank you :)
I do think that the 'vocal's and vocal ability' box is not entirely representative of the songs.
Katerina from Go_A was marked down for her 'white voice' style of singing in 2021 for a similar reason - too many people on the juries who had a 'westernised' ear and therefore not entirely able to understand the technique as it should be understood.
38:40 Honestly, I find the 8.5 score for Tattoo's 'Composition and originality' category to be quite generous, considering its basic repetitive melody that you mentioned, the ChatGPT-esque lyrics and the fact it sounds like 4 other songs combined to many, Euphoria being one of them. I don't think it deserved a higher score in that category than for example Portugal, France, Czechia at all. In fact, as far as I can tell, it was one of the worst of the night in that aspect, which made its x2 points lead over #2 even more perplexing to me.
I agree. I'm surprised how many people favor Sweden. I actually found her entire performance boring. For me, a beautiful voice doesn't help when it's wrapped in a song that doesn't stand out from what I've heard before and a performance that made me think there was a horny man sitting behind a peephole watching.
I see where you are coming from - however I was trying to be 'realistic' in what a Eurovision Jury would see.
The song is palatable across a range of ages, background etc, so I could realistically see it scoring high for composition.
@@ThePeaceAround : I mentioned the same as @KometBlu in my comment and only now I see your explanation. But how does being palatable across a range of ages and backgrounds have anything to do with "composition and originality"? Shouldn't the jury reward original and well crafted compositions?
I mean, what's palatable across different audiences is already going to be rewarded by the televote.
People forget that the televoters react to the existence of the Juries. Tactical voting is real. Australia won their semi, then got tanked in the final because people didn't expect them to do well with the juries (and couldn't then take the win). Then you got a big groundswell for Finland because they were high in the odds, and a mini one for Norway who some people projected as a potential spoiler if her jury score was high enough. If you compare the points distribution among televoters in the Grand Final vs the Semis, the semis are much closer as people are voting for their actual favorites rather than who could win. You can also compare to a televote only year like 2006 and see the voting being much more representative. If you scrapped the juries, the televote would likely normalize a lot since projected favorites are harder to predict without the obvious jury biases.
I agree there was a lot of tactical televoting - myself included who voted for Finland 20 times.
I think some (not all) people were aware that Finland may struggle with the Juries and therefore would be relying on televotes, and therefore came out in big numbers to vote.
Honestly, Norway was my personal favourite and I don't know why she didn't do better with the Televote. But I'm also not European so maybe it's partly a cultural thing? I'm also a bit surprised with how high Israel placed - not that it wasn't great, it just didn't feel stand-out to me personally.
@@Lynsey17 Norway was my favorite too. She was pretty popular in the fandom at large. But we had this narrative of Käarija vs Loreen, and some people think a vote for someone who won't win is a vote wasted. So we get a severely lopsided vote where people voted for one of the two "favorites" instead of their actual favorites.
As for Israel, I don't get it either. I guess some people see tight choreo and vote? No idea why that was the juries' pick for token bop to get major points.
Rachel - thank you for your insightful, in-depth video.
Two things -
1) let's not be agesist. I'm 63 years old and watched my first ESC in 1970. My favourites this year were Finland, Slovenia and Spain. I grew up in the 70s as a punk, watching The Clash and The Jam, but also enjoying disco, northern soul and The Carpenters. I am ABSOLUTELY open to all genres of music.
2) Although there have been comments opposing this, for me the best national juries would be people who have had an involvement in ESC in the past and understand the zeitgeist, how ESC works, what makes a popular ESC song - performing artists, songwriters, producers, delegation members. Just looking at the UK jury members for this year. Honestly, how invested are they in the contest? Have they even watched it over the past 5-10 years? I get the feeling that that is minimal. Eurovision songs and performances cannot be linked to mainstream pop. ESC is a genre all of it's own and to judge it needs an historical knowledge of what makes a great ESC entry. When you see the camaraderie and mutual support of ESC contestants year after year, that tells me who artists, not just viewers, want to succeed.
Thank you :)
I want to clarify that I'm not being ageist and I apologise completely if that was the way it came across.
We need to have a wide range of ages on the juries. I absolutely loved how there was an 82 year old on the Finnish jury, I thought that was quite cool actually.
65% of the juries were over the age of 40, whilst the remaining 35% (27% being 30s, and 8% being 20s) felt a bit under-represented.
The median age was 44, so similar to the average.
I think having an even spread, like 15% teens, 15% 20s, 15% 30s, 15% 40s, 15% 50s 15% 60s, 10% 70s etc, or something similar, will be interesting and more diverse.
So everyone's opinion matters, and theirs no skew towards a certain age group.
@@ThePeaceAround Aww, Rachel - sorry, my wording may have been wrong - I wasn't accusing YOU, specifically, of being ageist, more the community. I really respect your views and comments - thank you for all your hard work. I love your channel.
I still stand by my other comment, that people with past experience of ESC would possibly be the fairest and most reactive of judges. We can say all we want about the different music genres we get in the contest but, we need to accept that Eurovision music is a genre all of it's own, and we need judges who understand that genre. Looking at the UK jury - do ANY of them have any past interest or knowledge of the contest? That is what concerns me and perhaps answers the question why Kaarija, the fan favourite, received no jury points from the UK this year. There is a real disconnect that just shouldn't be there.
@@thingybob4375 I would disagree with the assertion that Eurovision is its own genre when since in its DNA it didn't set out to be its own genre in the first place. Having the mindset of Eurovision as a genre greatly limits the contest into a box that in reality doesn't fit at all, especially in this current era. I've been a fan of the contest since 2008 and in my perspective, over time there's less and less agreement on what makes a Eurovision song successful than 15 years ago.
In my first years as a fan, I wanted it to sound like mainstream pop so it would be more relevant to people. Over time, it got to that point that it has the respectability that as song quality-wise, and the next stage of the evolution if you will, is more out-of-the-box entries which I've noticed started appearing around 2016. Right now what Eurovision needs is not necessarily jurors with past experience in the contest, but more diverse genre and age backgrounds. That's my take.
Im very happy and proud that a professional musician like Rachel has ranked Spain's entry in the first position. ❤
As a spaniard it certainly means a lot 😢😢😢 honestly the disappointment was real 😂 but we are so proud of Blanca and i absolutely loved the performance 🏹🕊️😊
José Pablo Polo, el productor de Eaea dijo que estaba más decepcionado con el noveno puesto del jurado que con el televoto, y le doy la razón. Como ya nos vamos dando cuenta, el perfil de los jurados por desgracia no es como esta adorable mujer, sino que son concursantes de preselecciones, programas tipo La Voz, etc... Que sólo saben valorar voces y estilos comerciales y probablemente a muchos la forma de cantar de Blanca les desagradaria y pensarían que estaba gritando. Muy fuerte y tristemente no sabemos si de cara a futuras ediciones la forma de cantar aflamencada a la que estamos tan acostumbrados sería un factor que se podría volver en contra en canciones comerciales que mandaramos.
This is brilliant analyses. Must have taken so much time. Your results and findings certainly support the discrepancies and disconnect with the viewers/audience/voters/fans we've seen. So I am not surprised. This is A-grade evidence that the juries need reform.
I have seen some videos looking into the reasons for how things operate or why they happen, but I have to say that this was one of the best I have ever seen. Very well researched, very well explained, very comprehensive and all in all, a very detailed observation of the situation. The only thing I would add to your recommendations, is that the jury and public vote for the grand final performance. If you are going to call a show a grand final and you have two groups voting on that grand final performance, you need the two groups to be voting for the same performance.
Cheers! :)
16:23 This poses an issue because if only 4 countries have rappers, then that still means that the rest of the countries will be biased against rap. Instead of 5, juries need to be 10-15+ with a good distribution of musical styles in THOSE 10-15.
I was thinking about this problem too. EBU can’t regulate the range of backgrounds of just a few countries’ juries to fit a few more rappers in the whole.
I’m not sure the best way to tackle that problem but adding more people is an option.
@@DannyPotato Yeah. That opens another issue where some countries might lack artists of certain genres such as rap or Eastern European music (although I highly doubt that considering rap is trending everywhere, and even West Europe would have Turkish or Balkan migrants who are experts in that Eastern European music)
It will take more than just diversifying the musical backgrounds of the Jurors, I agree with you.
I think in order for the Juries to consider 'other' types of vocals aside from pop, such as white voice, flamenco, rap etc, the criteria boxes for how the mark the vocals has to change and become more inclusive.
@@ThePeaceAround This poses a genuine question though: If the juries are not yet objective, do we need them? Their existence hinges on the idea that they are objective. You’ve shown multiple instances where their song placements were super fishy. All they did this year was push up dated songs or ballads.
I found the televote a lot more reasonable in assessing vocals and quality (not that it was perfect, as was obvious with the bottom points). It punished bad vocals but also failed to reward good vocals with unimaginative songs. This is how it should be. Interestingly, it also punished songs that were *too* different, which is atypical of the televote (Hatari still placed top 6 in televotes in 2019, but Blood and Glitter (a comparatively much safer song) got scraps in 2023).
I don't know my opinion on this. On one hand, Estonia was my third place out of all 37 songs this year and I would've been devastated if it was televote only for her. Same with Spain. However, Sweden getting what was it like 15 countries giving her 12 points is ridicoulous imo, even taking away the conspiracy of Abba's 50th anniversary, I just think that's an unbeatable lead...
this was a great video though, really well structured :)
Thank you - although please ignore the whole Abba conspiracy thing, I think it's a load of tosh.
That's some professional research work, really impressive! I do think the juries (when judging properly) are needed in the competition, even 50/50. Sometimes the televote tend to just recognize what's "weird" and take that as the only criteria, not even considering originality (like Spain this year for example), so the balance between the two is needed. But it's a shame the way the jury voted this year. Anyway, thanks for the great video! I agree with basically everything.
I like your suggestions, age and spreading the genre back ground of jurists. Cool video
What an amazing analysis. Bloody brilliant. Fascinating watch 👌✔️ I will post this on Eurovision Fans page so more people can watch that
Spain was the best performance this year and I know that's right. I can't imagine not having juries and Blanca Paloma coming in last place. I don't know if I would keep watching every year.
I agree with you, I would only add the disappointment for France's score too
Blanca Palomas low jury points are to me more just one more example of how badly broken the current jury system is.
As a spaniard it certainly means a lot 😢😢😢 honestly the disappointment was real 😂 but we are so proud of Blanca and i absolutely loved the performance 🏹🕊️😊
@@ristoravela652 and the televoting giving 5 points and Last place is actually a wonderfull system?
@@ristoravela652 wym? they gave spain way more points than the televote did. Can't pretend from the jury 300 points tbh and can't blame them for the result.
This year quite simply felt like a tug-of-war between the public and the juries and I hated it. My theory as to why so many countries who performed very well got such low televote scores, is that people voting knew that the juries would skew massively toward Sweden, and so poured all their points into whoever among the songs they liked had the best chance of beating Sweden (so between Finland, Norway, Israel etc.). Not enough of the public agreed on which song could beat Sweden to actually do it, because the jury was so massively biased it was almost unbeatable.
Is this what Eurovision is meant to be? Is this really fun for anybody? I think the juries need to be held to a much stricter standard of judging so that the public can feel more at ease voting for all the songs they like. I poured all my points into Finland in a desperate bid to beat out Sweden and I know several friends who did the same, when I liked plenty of songs other than Finland's! I loved Australia, Germany, Austria, Serbia, I would have loved to distribute my points among them, but I felt like I couldn't because of this stupid power struggle against the juries.
I appreciate all the work that went into this video, it confirms what I think most people can feel in their gut; that we desperately need reform before next May. Because what's the point in voting at all if the jury can just landslide the public's will out of the way? Why should we pay money to the EBU if they're going to stack it so that whoever they say wins, is the winner? I'm annoyed and heartbroken and I'm sure some of the bitterness will fade in the next few months but man. It shouldn't have been this way.
I agree with all you said. And I feel cheated. Why did we go through this charade in the first place, if our votes would just be cast aside? I am still fuming. I think the juries need to go altogether or be revamped to include at least 10 people or more, one from each music genre. Unless they're changed, I won't be voting in the future ESCs. All this bs sucked the joy out of it, got to take a lot of time off from any ESC related stuff to stop seething. IMO no past winners should be allowed in the future, they already won! To me it felt like Sweden brought a gun to a knife fight, choosing Loreen. All winners just aren't the same.
I see where you are coming from, but Sweden did come second in the televote and had a strong fanbase voting for it.
@@ThePeaceAround I cannot help thinking that the current 50/50 system is somewhat illogical, as the two scores do not reflect the same reality. Juries need to distribute their votes among 10 entries. Televoters can vote 20 times for a single favourite. There can potentially exist a big gap between 1st and 2nd places in the public preference. Finland could have got 60% of the televotes and Sweden 30%, and the results would have been computed as 12 and 10 points, disguising a strong preference. In my opinion, a 25/75 system, favouring the public, would be a more democratic choice.
@@ThePeaceAround That's often what people forget when they said they felt it wasn't fair that Sweden got a landslide jury vote, completely forgetting Loreen ahs a massive fanbase in the Eurovision community (and a "safer" alternative to Finland for those who don't like the song).
@@ThePeaceAround That doesn't necessarily contradict the argument by @Raine re: the massive vote clustering. I guess I never saw so many acts being so utterly disappointed & literally huddled around a very meagre low-to-semi-low point campfire and I think the voter wars are part of the reason why. Of course, with Sweden coming in 2nd in televote, it kinda calms down on the rage over jury vote weights but eventually it came down to two highly polarized camps just voting the living daylights out for their fave, leaving nearly all other artists grasping for the leftover crumbs.
Really good points are brought up in this video. Not only the deep insight on the jury voting and crucial aspects of it, but also some appropriate methods for improvement. Well done, Rachel!
This is just amazing! Thanks for your dedication. I think we all can agree that voting system isn't perfect and it was great to see detailed analysis with a lot of data considered instead of "JuSt reMoVe RIgGeD JuRIes". As for me I think that as for now 50/50 percentage is essential. So far only 2017 and 2023 had concentrated jury votes (no drama in 2017 because of same favourite), while televote can't notice more than 10 songs every single year. I have previously thought that it would have been amazing if juries voted during final, so that both them and televote evaluate same performance (For example juries listening to entries and taking notes about possible favourites during jury final and then actually voting after all grand final performances. I also agree with you about needed diversification of genres and age groups represented by jury members, so once again thanks for great analysis and extremely reasonable suggestions ❤
I definitely think the juries should remain. But they need to consist of a bigger and more diverse group of people. They should also be more open to songs that don't fit typical pop songs and ballads. This being said, I'm okay with the order of the jury vote this year, even more so than with the one of the televote actually. But the point differences shouldn't have been as big as they were
Maybe letting the people choose half of or all the jurors like Ukraine did this year is a good way to increase diversity.
You gave Croatia a 5 for uniqueness. That is a 10 for me. Great content.
I voted for Croatia because I felt it was 1. a good message 2. rememberable for Eurovision and 3. I felt this was them as a band. I almost voted for Belgium. I also liked Germany (I thought they would get a lot higher up the board, maybe not winning, but on the left), France and Czechia, and Finland off the top of my head from what I can remember correctly from my scoring list.
@@steam_jane5580 I just found the Croatian song very melodic in the second half and that part where it goes all crazy is the most inventive part of any song this year. 5/10 for uniqueness almost looks like a typo.
I probably should have explained myself better in the video regarding Croatia.
What I was trying to do, was use the criteria that the juries have to mark the songs - and my point is, that the criteria is vague and constrained.
I gave Croatia a 5/10 for uniqueness of composition, because the song contains only two chords, and maintains a similar drum pattern and rhythm throughout the 3 minutes.
HOWEVER
If the Jury criteria boxes were more detailed, expansive - perhaps an additional box for lyrical content, overall message etc - then the score would have gone up, maybe even a 9-10?
Us eurofans rate the music based on possibly a wide range of reasons - so perhaps the jury should have the opportunity to do that as well.
Perhaps the score of 5/10 by following the criteria also might demonstrate to you guys why Croatia was scored in 25th overall by the Juries.
@@ThePeaceAround Thanks for the reply. I love your content, to which I give 10/10 for uniqueness
This was a joy to watch and super interesting and insightful!!
I agree that the jury composition should include people from different backgrounds, but I don't think it's necessarily because jurors from pop backgrounds can't appreciate or fully understand other genres of music. They're educated listeners (one would hope) and they should be able to judge songs for their merits, regardless of genre.
I think that they just don't want to. They favour their style of music because it's good for business, or it's closemindedness, or some sort of "tribal" thing. Which is sad, of course.
With respect to the current year's voting and the flood of votes towards Sweden, I think there's another factor that may come into place, which is part hype and part the "Loreen factor" itself. Jurors might have voted this entry so highly just because of the reputation that precedes the artist, and not for the song's merits in itself.
And I think that, up to a certain point, you also fell under the "Loreen factor" effect. I am really intrigued on that 8.5 you gave "Tattoo" for uniqueness of composition. What makes it more unique than entries such as Portugal, Armenia, Czechia, Australia or even Israel? Just rewatched your reactions to all of these, and in all cases you mentioned a lot of more interesting elements than you did for Sweden, which you described as "Euphoria part 2" and mentioned the lack of musical evolution. There seems to be a gap between your analysis and the score. Maybe it's just that sometimes it's really hard to score down entries from artists you've grown to love. Still, your analysis and scoring was way fairer and honest than the jurors!!
This year the jurors decided that Sweden was the winner, and no matter what else other contestants brought to the stage, nothing was going to change that. Spain's entry made it painfully clear. I can't really conceive a world in which Spain would be ranked below 5th place on average by jurors. That would mean at least 200 points. And I don't like Flamenco, I find the style of singing quite exasperating, I don't see myself listening to "Eaea" much in the future. So as part of the public, I wouldn't have voted for it. But if I was a juror, I would really suspect my objectivity if I didn't rank that song quite high. They have those 4 clear criteria, and Blanca Paloma knocked it out of the park in at least 3 of them ("overall impression" seems to me the only criteria in which there's quite a bit of room for subjectivity and personal preference). Like Joker Out's singer Bojan said, "Robada!!" ("Robbed")
This has been way too long of a comment, so I'm gonna make it a bit longer 😃
Just to say that I've been following this channel since 2021. And there's been quite a few reactors that I have watched but you are the only one that I consistently watch time and again. Your knowledge, love of music and respect for the artists are always amazing! Thank you for sharing them with us!! 😍
As a data scientist, I greatly admire your initiative. From what I've gathered, you're venturing into something potentially fruitful. However, there are a few missteps in your method that you could rectify (its a lot of work).
The primary task you're working on is developing a predictive model to forecast jury scores using various factors you've selected. You've shown a clear understanding of potential biases in this process and are making efforts to compensate for them, which is commendable.
The most crucial challenge I notice in your current approach is the lack of cross-validation of your model with data from different time periods. This step is pivotal as it allows you to understand how well your model generalizes its predictions across diverse data sets. At present, you've built your model using jury scores and public votes collected post-event. Of course, there's no feasible way to revert this, but there are viable alternatives to address this limitation.
One approach is to replicate your prediction process for the upcoming year's competition before the jury and audience votes become public knowledge. This will give you an unbiased gauge of your model's predictive power. Alternatively, you could select a previous Eurovision Song Contest event whose details you do not remember, such as jury and audience votes or contestants, and run your prediction process. This method offers another impartial way to assess your model's performance.
There are several additional factors that can be optimized in your model, and certain biases will still persist. However, these modifications would steer you closer to achieving your objective.
Edit:
Certainly, your perspective as a trained musician adds invaluable insights to the scoring process. However, the methodology you're using to calculate scores might benefit from a more sophisticated approach.
Generally, in data science, we would apply machine learning algorithms to establish correlations based on expert ratings like yours, rather than relying on educated guesswork. The advantage here is that a machine learning model can systematically and efficiently detect complex patterns and relationships in the data, something that could be quite labor-intensive or even infeasible manually. Therefore, it might be beneficial to leverage these computational tools for your analysis, rather than attempting to approximate correlations based on your expert scores.
Edit2: If you decide to do something like this, i strongly recommend you to get a little bit of help in setting up your next "test", so your work on it will be even more valuable. There are a lot of small things that are not immediately obvious, that could help a bunch.
🤮🤮🤮
... you're not offering yourself to help 'cause you're too modest or because, I quote, it's a lot of work? 😓We can all agree she did an amazing work and probably the best she could. So please, rather than just mentioning them, make your tools available to Rachel and possibly share these new results with us, thank you.🙏
@@GiancarloCorvale Sure, i would help out if its needed / wanted.
It sounds like a fun thing to do.
I haven't offered my assistance earlier because I genuinely don't want to impose on a project where someone else has already put in all the effort.
@@GiancarloCorvale This is exactly what I thought when I read it.
Thank you for the advice - I'm just a humble auditor and don't know too much about data science :)
A lot of this was also just for fun as well, although it did take a long time to put together
I think uniqueness of composition is strange criteria to have, like Croatia is definitely "unique" whether or not people think it's quality 😂
I think uniqueness is an important one because it's basically the only criterion that promotes experimentation, and experimentation enables evolution and progress. Of course some of it is going to suck, probably most of it to be honest. But experimenting is the only way to find fresh new ideas and avoid getting stale.
Not that Eurovision is ever going to be where the actual groundbreaking stuff happens but at least this might avoid it falling completely behind its times and losing relevance. (Which I think is something it really struggles with.)
I voted for Croatia but also liked Belgium (nearly voted for it), Germany (thought it would get higher up the board), France, Czechia and Finland if I remember correctly what was on my scoring list.
I would put what I feel is a good song above a purely unique song, but I feel uniqueness is part of Eurovision being an experience and I would put it above the forgetfulness of Sweeden other than it winning. This year I saw something in the most Unique song when voting, but not always. A Unique song winning even if bd is at least somewhat interesting and No Unique songs would take away from the Eurovision experience and you might actually miss it??
How I would interpret Croatia's 'uniqueness' of composition would be more negative as the song only contains two chords.
However, it is unique in other senses, such as the vocal processing, lyrical content etc. This is why the system needs to change to include more criteria, so other parts of the entries are being assessed fairly.
@@ThePeaceAround Yeah I totally agree. More specific criteria would improve the system a lot. By the way, love the level of detail in your analysis and how passionate you are in videos! ❤️
Thank you so much! You have done the concrete thing everyone has been looking for to bring to light the problems with the jury system. I've only watched half way through, I'll get back after finishing. I hope this will get a lot of attention, this is so well presented.
Wow Rachel, you really achieved and even exceeded ESC Tom's level in Eurovision nerdiness 😊. I loved every second of it (I adore also Tom's work thoroughly).
I agree the points you gave and would also like to stress the question that how can juries based on musical background rank the same song with the same criterias by all jurors of one country in their TOP2 and another country by all jurors to their bottom3. That is what happened with Cha Cha Cha by juries of Norway and San Marino.
Posibly because of Norway voting politically.
@@AleLuciani nah, it’s very much Norwegian taste. I watched their Eurovision rating show and the opinion was pretty unanimous.
@@AleLuciani No, it's because they actually have knowledge with different genre music and the wisdom to score accordingly. Unlike others.
I'm sad some Europeans don't have more musical knowledge.
I've seen people saying Spain's song didn't have a rhythm (for those who don't see it, it's a 12/8 : 3 3 2 2 2).
And this is just an exemple, it's not only about taste, it's about judging things we don't understand.
I honestly can't stand this song... I like Spanish music, I acknowledge Blanka was perfect vocally and the uniqueness of the song, but for some reason I find it very disturbing....
sometimes it’s not about musical knowledge, but about personal preference. even if a song should be perfect in theory, it won’t appeal to everyone. music is not only about notes and rhythm, it is about feelings that are transported to other people, which is different to everybody.
the juries are there to judge these music theory things, but the fans don’t need the knowledge to vote. we can’t just say that others shouldn’t vote for their favorites, because they don’t this expertise
wtf "it didn't have a rhythm"? there was clapping throughout the song, if they can't follow that they clearly have bigger problems than flamenco.
what they mean is "my brain is too smooth to handle anything other than 4/4"
I agree and that's the magic (or some would say problem) of music, a song can be technically good but not be something you vibe with or feel works. Everyone listening habits and tastes are different
Your analysis is incredible!!! Thank you for hard work!
Your videos made my Eurovision experience better this year. 🥂
I appreciate the enormous amount of work you put into this analysis , Rachel. My issue is that you as a trained classical musician was still able to put songs out of your genre high on the list. Why would this not also be the case for jurors being able to see the quality of songs out of their respective genres?
Politics and personal issues
I think the way I mark songs in my reviews uses a wide range of personal criteria, and the Juries at Eurovision are only given four!
Lyrics should be a box on it's own!
@@ThePeaceAround : You still managed to give a fairer score than the jurors did (there's a huge comment on the main thread about it).
I think it's not that jurors from pop music can't appreciate other genres. They just don't want to.
So happy I found this channel. Brilliant analysis.
A thing I think tends to happen is that juries weigh each category differently for all entries. For example, with Blanca Paloma, because it wasnt the taste of some juries they didnt give it points based on overall impression even if they objectively thought it was good objectively looking at the other criteria. While in Alika's case the vocals would be what was weighed the most. With Käärijä it would be the originality and Loreen would have gotten a lot of points for staging. To counter this you could make sure that every criteria is take into equal account, but that is way too hard to do because of unconscious biases. What I suggest is assign jurors to each criteria and then jury points average out and each criteria has equal weight.
One thing that went unaddressed: ODDS. I'm convinced Finland did this well because it was high in the odds so jurors saw it as a safe bet. Same with Sweden
There is some potential in that.
Good content! You just earned yourself a new subscriber!
I haven't ever followed the trio of "like, comment and subscribe!" instructions of TH-camrs because I don't like algorithms skewing my search results or suggestions. This is the first ever video that has inspired me to do all three. The work that went into this video was absolutely spectacular! Thanks, I'm definitely going to recommend this to all my Eurovision friends.
Thank you Andrew, that’s super nice of you 🥰
Love this analysis. You have really done the work 👏❤️
I personally think the "overall impression" is key here, and it is, at the end of the day, the decisive factor to score the performances. And that's what would explain the results. I'm a native spanish speaker, but not from Spain, and what I always thought it was gonna happen with Blanca Paloma ended up happening, people didnt like it. The overall impression is that they didnt click with the performance. Technically flawless but nobody's favourite.
But even if the overall impression wasn’t amazing, it still should have scored very high in terms of the other criteria.
That’s a totally fair argument tbh. In my personal opinion there is still some bias to work through there as well through. I’ve personally sung and listened to songs with a similar musical structure to Spain (complex time signatures and lots of dissonance) and it absolutely clicked with me, and talking to some of my other Eurovision fan friends they agreed that it was cool but felt that in some places the harmony just sounded bad (where the hard dissonances were) and that they found it hard to connect with. I definitely think that exposure to similar harmonic and musical structures in particular is imperative to really connecting with Spain’s entry for this year-its definitely an acquired taste, but more of the jurors should be familiar with similar ethnic music styles in order to score them fairly. What is accessible in terms of widespread appeal and understandability in these regards is usually best left to the televote.
Main points: age bias and pop bias (+ English language bias) in the juries. Hope Eurovision and broadcasters will think about a more broader musical background + age for the years to come.
I’m a year late watching this but my goodness, this is fascinating. Thank you for all of this work. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
brilliant analysis. good job... eurovision officials must take it into consediration for the future
The competition is still a song contest, so the "handiwork" of song-writing should still be a part of the judging. I still think we need to have juries, but there are changes needed.
The juries need to be bigger. Their identities and individual votes needs to be publicized after the final. The juries need to include more than just "music industry" people. This will ensure transperancy and a juryvote that is slightly more diversified.
I also think there should be a re-balancing of jury vs peoples vote. Perhaps a 40-60 or 30-70. As I said before the quality of the songwriting/creation should be scored, but in the end the popularity of a song should be the major part.
Juries never score songwriting, rather political stuff and other weird stuff, like message, placing fan favorites last and jury favorite first
@@user-gs3yf7dv8r That is why I think transperancy of the members of the juries and their individual votes are important. To get such issues out into the clear
@@user-gs3yf7dv8r that is not true, Sweden was also a fan favourite, and the juries placed it first, and Finland was also a fan favourite, and they put it 4th, a very respectable placement, and surely they did not put all fan's favourite last.
i humbly disagree. too much often, quality of music has nothing to do with popularity. 70 30 would flatten the musical offer to low level cheap pop songs. music is an art, and rap explicitly declares that working on voice as an instrument is a waste of time.
Of you are gonna unbalance the jury vote might as well eliminate it enterily. The televoting is also very flawed, People vote for polítical reasons, for their favourites that exced a lot of the time the musical aspects of the entry. It will become a popularity contest.
I don't think there is a bias AGAINST non-english entries, I think there is a bias FOR english entries, as they do better in the charts, so I would adjust your predictions this way. I don't agree the jury helped Finland, they didn't impede Finland, that is different. They however massively belped Sweeden no matter how you look at it.
The reason I had the bias against non-English entries, is because in the past we have seen native language songs come very low in the Jury rankings.
I think this partly due to the fact that there isn't a box criteria for the Juries to mark 'lyrics' of the entries. This would encourage them to get an understanding of what the song is about and potentially give the song more of a chance. I think that's a pitfall of the jury system, and therefore negatively impacts on non-English songs.
How do we know that the Juries are doing there research, into for example, Croatia?
@@ThePeaceAround I think it's safe to assume most of them don't look into that, look how they treated Konstrakta.
Wow, thanks for taking all the time to put this together! Very interesting results, indeed. I guess even if some things were different, Sweden would have won regardless probably, but it would have been even closer.
As I said on the poll, the juries definitely are necessary. But a more balanced and more transparent process is required. If necessary, increase the number of juries and make sure more groups are more fairly represented (over 50% pop is ridiculous, we also need jurors who are less biased towards ethnic/native language entries). I also would like to see how the juries would have voted in the semi finals.
Completely agree there :)
I mentioned in another comment that it would be cool to have a 'rest of the world' jury as well as televote.
Perhaps some musical experts from India, Nigeria, South America etc. How would they vote?
@@ThePeaceAround VERY interesting idea! Would it be very different, and how does it affect the final score? Call the EBU, they need in on this.
This is just an EXCELLENT analysis. The EBU needs to hire you as Jury Coordinator or something!
Thank you Rachel, that was an extraordinary effort, extremely well analysed and thought out.
I definitely agree juries need to be balanced and from a range of musical genres and ages. ESC acts have evolved over time and so should juries. If ESC is to be a true song contest then it requires a true and accurate representation of current and ethnic European sounds.
Thank you so much for all your work and time you put into your reviews and analysis Rachel. It is an impressive effort and I look forward to more in the future. ESC wouldn't be the same without your insight.
Again a thourough analysis and food for thought. Thank you so much!
First of all, thank you for this deep analysis and for providing all of those details! I think that, if the way each juror in each country voted was made public, they would try to be more objective and everything would be fair. Also, it seems to me that this year there was a "Loreen bias", for example when they promoted the official Eurovision cd a few weeks ago they put Loreen's song first and many major ESC related blogs and websites were addressing her as "royalty". I also agree with what you suggested at the end of the video. Lets hope that things will get better and more fair next year.
Comment for engagement! I will definitely watch all of it!
Thank you so much for the analysis. I can't imagine how much effort it took to create.
You mentioned some points I didn't even think about. It all makes a lot more sense to me now. I find it a fascinating event with all the new music and I think the unpredictability makes it interesting for the broad public as well. Some changes need to be made within the jury group, but I always agreed the jury are needed to vote, even if they don't always match the public.
Again, thank you so much for your effort.
Im still so angry about this score board almost all of the contestants robbed. And juries made that night one of the disgrace night of the esc history. Jury selected a winner one night before grand final and televote didnt effect anything. Im still devastated and pissed off about germany's, spain's placement. What was 3, juries are you insane? Germany's vocals are one of the hardest vocals in that night and chris, which is lord of the lost's vocalist, sing that song absolutely perfectly and they gave them just 3 points, unbelievable. Even poland and uk had more points than them its just ridiculous. Im sick of that pop songs domination in the esc and in the juries. Juries effect to the score must be %30 not more not less in both semi and grand finals. That video is pissed me even more when I learned all about juries.
What an analysis - "shut the front door" (a quote from lovely Rachel herself; if anyone watched her "EUROVISION 2023 - REACTING TO THE GRAND FINAL TELEVOTE RESULTS", you know what this is about) 😉😃😊
In large part, I agree with what you said at the end:
A jury is definitely needed, preferably a mixed one. And while I do think that the EBU could try a 60/40 % (public/jury) voting system (instead of 50/50), before that they need to take a closer look at the jury members - age and background. I was surprised to see that the average age of the jury members isn't younger. That really is a problem in regards to the age of the participants.
And yes, too many with a pop music background. I understand the pop background to some extend because there IS a lot of pop music at Eurovision. But the lack of ethnic and indie/alternative background is not ok. Ethnic songs have always been there and I feel like every year there're more and more Indie/Alternative songs. Especially those songs often have more quality than generic pop songs - and juries need to reward that (not saying that an e. g. pop music producer can't appreciate a nice ethnic song like "Duje" or an Indie song like "Carpe Diem", but be realistic 🙃)
It's also impossible that 7,7 % (which may not seem much, but it is to me) of the areas of expertise from jury members are "unknown" and "others" - it NEEDS to be transparent who they are and what musical background they have.
Another point that annoys me: The lack of explanation on why they give points to an entry. Again: transparency, please!
To your "jury reasonableness test":
While I don't think "Tattoo" deserves 8.5 for "Uniqueness of Composition", maybe 8, if not 7.5 (I mean you basically pointed out why), "Mama ŠČ" deserves more than 5, maybe 7. I think that songs is pretty unique and smart. But that's my opinion. ✌🙂
So yeah, overall I think many of us can agree that "Tattoo" got more points than it maybe should have and "Eaea" and "Blood and Glitter" should've got way more than they did.
There is a general problem with jury and Sweden. For the last 10 years, the jury has placed Sweden outside the top 3 only twice! Whereas Sweden WAS only once in top 3 in televoting! ITS ABSURD!! Why is nobody talking about this?! There must be some changes either with power of jury or requirements that must be met by members of the jury.
Thanks so much, Rachel. Excellent and very insightful analysis! I would just add to your conclusions that juries need more musical diversity ( as you touched on )and even be chosen by public rather than broadcasters who could favour certain individuals with inside connections. Thus, jury size needs to be expanded to perhaps 7-10 individuals on each one, and there really needs to be serious consequences for any collusion or blatant biases. Looking forward to your analyses!😊
Really interesting analysis! I think the main controversy this year is that Loreen got twice as much as the second place in the jury (was her song really twice as good as everyone else's?) . in 2017 Portugal got a huge jury vote but the second place was 'only' 104 points behind so possibile to catch up. In the end Portugal won also the televote so the jury vote was quite in sync with the public. It seems just very 'convenient' that majority of the juries were all convinced Tattoo was the best song but absolutely different opinions on second third fourth ecc. So maybe a bias is 'previous winner or previous contestant' that the jury votes regardless because they were already successful in the past? With regards to the ages of the juries I agree that maybe some are a bit old but for example in Italy the average age of the population is 46 so an older age jury is probably representing the general audience better. If all the contestants are 20 years old it would'n't be fair that the jury is too, nothing against gen z but the majority of them have never heard of Elvis, the Beatles, Bowie, Queen can you really consider them experts then? At the end of the day the focus should not be on who wins but the fact that so many artists are getting together sharing their music. I think Kaariya and many other artists will be very successful so we should just be happy for all of them (I know lord of the lost have sold out their concerts so they are getting the recognition they deserve).
1:50-1:54 THANK YOU!!!! Someone finally said it.
On a side note, lets all agree that Rachel has done an amazing job this year. Thank you for the effort you put in. Next stop 20k subs !!
THIS IS PROBABLY THE BEST ANALYSIS VIDEO EVER! THANKS RACHEL
Surprisingly interesting (as I'm not a real Eurovision super fan, never watch the semis for example, but I do love Excel stats). From what I gather I tend to agree with the comments suggesting bigger juries, maybe 10 jurors instead of current 5. Also adding some actual criteria for countries in how to form a jury would be good. For example giving a target for an average age based on the contestants' age average over say the last five years, and requiring representation for at least five different music styles, but leaving the details open. And yes, transparency about all aspects would be crucial too.
I'd also be happy to add a rule that any contestant who's already won the competition once could not take part in the future. Not because of them necessarily making superior songs, but because of the effect their past victory is likely to have on everyone and everything. Loreen was from the start predicted to do super well because of Euphoria, not because of Tattoo. Is any juror likely to not give a high score to a previously proved winner? And if they then still do produce another good song and perform well and win again like happened now, they will inevitably face a lot of accusations for unfairness. It will never be purely about their latest song, and for me that ruined the feeling this year. I'd also hate to see it become a trend, where more countries just keep sending their previous winners, if it's proven to work.
For background, I'm a Finn but didn't really like Käärijä's song, as it's not my style. My personal favourites were Serbia, Germany, Australia and Spain.
Agree the reason I didn't want Loreen to win is that it gives a signal that if you want to win you have to bring a big star or previous contestant but that means new talents would not have an opportunity to show themselves.
I like the idea of the juries, but I would rather they focus on awarding well written, technically well sung and complex compositions instead of being so similar to the public! I liked their support of Australia, because the public will never give them the points they deserve But I adored Spain's song this year and in 2015: these ladies both had incredibly complex vocals and sounded so beautiful ( and the instrumentals were great too) but they were overlooked in favour of less technically complex singers. I understand the public overlooking them for funnier acts, but why the judges? Apart from supporting Australia, what's their purpose if they don't award technical brilliance?? This was a great analysis. :)
Thanks for the video, very intersting. Only note: you said little about originality. The Swedish song is very unoriginal. I'm not talking about plagiarism, but about already heard melodies. An expert member of the jury should notice it at once. Therefore the juries' result, this year, is really disappointing, since originality is one of the key components of the vote.
Great video and suggestions for how to improve the juries! I definitely agree in diversifying the expertise in juries and would also like for the juries to be bigger. Even if we have more diverse experts, five jurors per country is still not much. I also think that the final vote from jury should come from the same show as where the public vote comes from. It’s ridiculous that five people who see a different performance currently have the same amount of power than the rest of the world who see the final main performance and pay to vote based on it.
The pricing of votes between different countries is also problematic. 20 votes costs 20 euros in Finland, 6 euros in Sweden and 36 euros in Estonia for example. That comes in play with the televotes when richee countries can afford to vote more for their favorites.
All in all I really hope EBU takes even some of the criticism to heart and change things up for next year. It doesn’t look good when even one of their jurors for this year (Konstrakta) is posting the petition to remove juries from Eurovision to her insta stories.
The problem is partly logistics. A big part that is. To get almost 200 people together across 40 give it take countries at the same day takes 6 months+. And arranging their stay plus overseeing their voting that day.
How do you sort that out?
Adding more people will increase the costs and logistics even more. Not saying it’s wrong or right but that’s the reality. Who’s gonna pay? It’s our national broadcasters and they’re not bathing in gold. They have a yearly budget and those change. The hosting city?
The sms and IVR tariffs are a national matter. It’s the public broadcaster the companies they use the taxes etc in each country you have to go after.
Looking at the fees, they’re pretty similar in most countries and not super unreasonable. But ok I’m no expert in each countries prices and deals with the broadcasters I have to admit😅
As an alternative skewing musician and singer myself, I really appreciate your comments re the vocal talent of Chris Harms, coming from a classical music expert! Really enjoying this deep dive (currently about half way through)
A potential solution besides increasing and diversifying the "professional" jury is adding a "demoscopic" jury similar to what they have in Sanremo and Benidorm.
I was thinking exactly about it two minutes ago.
Agree SanRemo jury is not perfect but usually their results don't differ that much from the televote so it seems to be a fair representation, the jury is more concentrated on the lyrics and composition which is how it should be.
This was an incredible video! I have learnt so much and I think you're spot on. What a great analysis, I'm so happy to see someone being so objective about the results and that your opinions mirror mine (which aren't objective at all 😂). You've gained a new subscriber!
I wish we could also dedicate some deep analysis to televoting. Everyone is up in arms about jury voting because Sweden can first and Kaarija second, but no one seems to shed a tear for those countries which constantly get slaughtered in the televote, whether in the final or semifinal.
The juries aren't perfect, and the recipe for reforming the juries is quite easy. And admittedly they're also more easily corruptible (as we saw last year). Nonetheless, they have constantly proven to provide a bit of balance and fairness to Eurovision.
The televote on the other hand ... Lets think for a second how Blanka (not of the Paloma kind) fared in this...
1:04:13 I’ve watched many live streams from jury-final and different yt videos of that and only one who I’ve heard doing badly was Norway not been able to sing that high whistle sound well. Finland had better vocals than before according to many youtubers escYounited for ex. I’m also sad that Portugal was really overlooked by the juries because from many videos I’ve heard that she did amazing performance in jury evening. I so wished that jury performances could be published on Eurovision Song Contest yt page too so we all could compare. Eurovision should make their juries more ”seethrough” there should not be need to google different members professions etc. I’m hoping 30%/70% jury/televotes in the future.
The fact that finland could’ve won every televote and still not win is RIDICULOUS! People spend money voting . Why bother if our vote doesn’t matter
He would have won if Loreen would have gotten under 187 points by public, but how realistic was this? +She charts in more countries and is higher in the charts
Loreen already had a fan base who voted for her, also giving out Ikea vouchers might of helped. 😏
Thank you for such a measured and well-researched view, in the midst of a landslide of reflexive 'abolish'/'70-30' takes - which would likely have a number of unintended consequences (and likely introduce new problems).
Improving targeted elements of the current system is undoubtedly the right approach - ESC needs to build confidence in it. However, even with better transparency and diversity on juries, people need to accept there will ALWAYS be a chance the televote's choice won't win overall. The principle of the current system has worked well for a few years now, and the winner has pretty much always been the public's favourite or a fair compromise. We absolutely shouldn't be turning things upside down because of one year where the jury's vote swayed the outcome. The split system gives ESC a unique flavour, is fairly simple to understand and more often than not works just fine. Broadly speaking, it's fit for purpose.
Though I do agree juries need to represent an improved variety of genres, I would also say that the jury system as it stands is a better guarantor of rewarding musical quality and variety than the public tends to be - there are a handful of strong, niche songs EVERY year for which the juries turn out to be the main source of recognition. Ditching 50-50 should be the very last thing ESC tries - and it should only do so if it has a very clear rationale for why the new percentages are the correct ones, and the exact effect the change is intended to have.
Any rationale that boils down to 'this is the amount of change that was needed for Finland to win in 2023' should not be taken seriously, otherwise there'd be calls to tinker with it every year. Which is why it's so good to see someone address the deeper structural weaknesses instead. Someone please put this video in front of the main minds at the ESC!
I am so glad you really took this from an objective and stats based viewpoint. It definitely makes your argument more compelling when you're not just insulting the songs you didn't like, but actually setting out a clear argument on why things happened.
My only issue with the televote is the way that running order can massively impact voting, it would be great if we could fix this...
I would love an in-depth follow up on what could be done to improve the jury system (e.g. expanding on what you did at the end, perhaps with stats examples)!
I think that the system of rating and ranking the songs that you did in part 3 of the video is in my opinion exactly the way jurors should rank the songs. And I also think we need more jurors and more diverse jurors.
nice work :-). I took some popcorn and streamed it on my TV! See you next season!
a few remarks:
The juries are small because that gives a bigger chance on a larger spread of the points (and a smaller chance on zeroes). This year was quite different from other years because of Sweden getting so many points but also for the televote handing out no zeroes.
Try to take the lyrics into account as well. It is a song contest, so the content and message of the song are important as well.
There is politics as well to consider, also in the juries. The way the Greek jury handed it out their votes almost ridiculed them so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some EBU guidelines given to them (and also to Moldova-Romania)
Thank you for doing a really good video about this, that explains kind of what happened - and that the jury system definitely has it flaws as far as getting the juries to represent the music in the contest, and a better age range. This really explained what went wrong, and exactly how. This needs to reach the EBU and different delegations so that they can take some of this into consideration for the future of the juries 🙂
For some reason this year's Eurovision results have left a massive sense of dissatisfaction accross the fandom. I, for once, felt totally disconnected as voting went on.
Is that because your preferences were not doing well, perchance?
A large part of it in my opinion is so many songs getting for low scores, televote or jury, in part because Sweden and Finland ate up so much of them. To me this year felt largely like the Sweden vs Finland contest and that didn't leave much spotlight for the rest of the contestants
@@sapphicgal3245 I would agree. However, I reckon Finland gained traction simply because people wanted to avoid a foregone conclusion. This meant that anyone wanting to not see that, voted for Finland as the best option for doing so.
Tbh, the jury actually saved some hyped songs from finishing in last place, i'd be more surprised by the televote results
Would never watch an hour long video about the results from anyone but you Rachel, I don't trust anybody else with statistics and musicality 😂
Impressive analysis, thank you so much Rachel🌹
A couple of comments: I would not compare jurys age average being 45 so much with the age of the contestants, but the audience. But it is too high, I agree.
So somebody commented saying the televotes were also ”wrong”. That is a bit weird idea. Jury members are supposed to rank the songs and performances based on these mentioned criteria, but the whole idea of televotes is that each ESC fan just votes his/her personal favorite no matter what. I think that should be self evident idea of fan voting. It can give a result somebody disagrees with, but never really be ’wrong’.
I agree about the televote! There is absolutely no need to control people's taste. Like this year there were no "joke" entries and the variety in genres was quite good. So let the people vote what they love! And also, this year there are multiple songs that are charting and you can bet your ass record labels and artists are paying attention.
I think the Eurovision audience is diverse and has a wide range of age groups, and so should the Jury.
The average age of the Jury was 45, and the median age was 44.
However, 65% of the juries were over 40 years old, with 8% being in their 20s - I would have preferred to see a more even distribution of ages.
Excellent analysis! Thank you very much for taking the time in doing this. I also agree there's need to be more diversity of music and age in the jury
What a great video! Thank you Rachel, that was so interesting. I couldn't agree more with most of what you mentioned in this analysis.
Still can't recover from Spain's jury placing... I had to rewatch her performance a few times to make sure there wasn't any massive mistake there. Nope, there wasn't..
Jury actually gave Spain a lot of points, the televote did not tho. Just think about it
@@thehunter6321 Still should have been higher with the jury.. top 3 I think. I don't even want to start thinking about the televote. That was a very sad moment 😔
Hi, Rachel! I am Yiota from Greece. I am a heartbroken Finland's fan. My compliments! You, your videos and analysis are amazing! Very professional and clean always. I discovered you last year.
Regarding the juries: me too, I conclude that unfortunately juries' actual work is to promote the winner EBU has decided-made a deal
to be and by that control who gets next Eurovision's profitable investment. And thanks to juries we have
controlled odds for betting. If I forget all about this, and I choose so, I totally agree with you that that juries should be of younger ages and represent more music genres. I don't ageee with the 50% percentage. It's a song contest. What people want to hear and dance to. So, their vote must be stronger. 45-55, 40-60 are more appropriate percentages. And by that you sonehow limitate bias, alliances , favouritism -which are very strong and real in juries-based on social, political, sexual criteria
In alternative I could even see the jury only at the semi finals, not the grand final. Make sure all quality songs partecipate at the grand final and then get people decide freely.
But that would kill the betting system..😅
And sth personal. You stubbed me twice in the heart with your last comments.😂
First, I was born in 1974. I think if i didn't have that privilege, I wouldn't have Finland as my favourite, such a genious multi-genre song and a charismatic performer. Brilliant! You see, my generation is very lucky, seen and heard so many different musics. Disco, funk, punk, rap, pop, rock, metal, hard rock, electro, techno..throughout 70s 80s 90s 00s. For me all other songs were good pop, disco songs, but not original, not creative enough. Finland killed it this year. And Spain wow, electro-ethnic.. So plz don't be harsh on middle aged juries😊
And second what's the problem with Greece and Cyprus? Even you commented.
Are we the only neighnbour countries supporting each other in Eurovision?
And do non-Greek people know that Cypriots are practically and in essence Greek? Same language, same culture, same religion?
That thousands of students from Cyprus study for free and live in Greece?
They vote too, you know.
Sorry for the long comment. You are great! Keep rocking in social media ❤
Omg I love how in-depth your analysis is. And it confirmed so many ideas I already was thinking of. Great work and amazing stuff!
Excellent video. Congratulations for all the effort put into it. Best jury is the public. Setting up a diverse jury is a way too difficult and it doesn’t make any sense that few people have the same power of the public. At the end it’s the public that buys or streams the tracks. So no more juries and all entries in native language. This would be an Eurovision contest I like
Televoting does not necessarily represent the public vote, but a percentage of passionate supporters of certain songs who vote 20 times, which is against democratic voting in any election
If everyone has the same amount of votes, how is it not democratic? At the end of the day, each country's televoters give 12+10+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 points, no matter the size of the country or the number of the voters.
Thank you so, so, bloody much for this video.😍 I really appreciate the super in-depth analysis of the individual juries and their scores, the jurors' backgrounds, etc. It's so refreshing to see somebody earnestly argue that we should have juries, but why and how they need to change in such a thorough and detailed way. I especially like how you were able to explain how juries can become biased, whilst also implying that this more due to laziness or inconsideration rather than insidiousness (which is something I think way too many do).
I also admire you risking potential backlash by arguing that maybe the juries were generous towards Käärijä. 😅
*On the topic of what needs to change...*
That excel spreadsheet 38:18; I honestly love the idea of jurors having to vote this way. Having them objectively (as possible) rate the songs and performances in the four criteria, and then working out the average score they've given each entry, and using that to calculate a juror's top 25/26. When there's a tie in a juror's score (like Italy and Israel are in that spreadsheet), a juror could use their personal opinion as a tiebreaker. And then combine all members' top 25/26 to make a jury's top 25/26 and score. I think that could make it as close to objective as possible, ensure that they're voting according to the criteria, help to leave out political biases, all whilst giving some room for personal opinion so it doesn't all become monotonous.
When it comes to diversifying the juries, I'm certain that the first way to make that more possible is to increase the number of people that make up a jury from just 5. Have like 10 or 15 people per jury. Even if nothing else changes, they should definitely up the number of people per jury. I've got no better way of saying this, but having just 5 people feels wrong a gut level. For such a big decision, it should be down to more than just 5 people.
Imagining they do that, maybe one way to guarantee a more diverse range of musical expertise in a jury is to have a fixed quota of what kind of people make up the jury. Like we can have the pop expert, the rock expert, the classical expert, the rapper, the music producer, the EDM DJ, the folk music expert, the TV production expert, etc. Like we can't guarantee a diverse selection of genres in the contestants each year, but maybe we could guarantee it in the juries if we have a fixed quota year to year.
Maybe quotas are also how they could solve the age issue. They can work out what the average age of the competing artists over the last 3-5 years, and have an age quota to try a make a jury's average age close to the artist's average age. E.g. This number of jurors have to be aged 18-25, this many aged 26-32, this many aged 33-40, etc. A bit like the age groups in the Melfest app vote. And the number of jurors per age group could be adjusted year by year to accommodate the changing average.
I've got another idea, and I'll preface it saying that I don't know if this is feasible or not. Somewhat in line with Tiago M's comment at 54:05, what if the EBU picks the juries, instead of the broadcasters? The EBU could put together a committee that assembles and put's together each participating country's jury, instead of the broadcasters? This way the juror's identities could be kept secret from everyone during the contest, even the broadcasters. This could be a way to prevent bribery, vote swapping and alleged "lobbying" from certain broadcasters, given that some of them have shown that they can't be trusted to play fairly at this point.
Again, maybe this is unfeasible and fantastical in ways that I don't realise, but it's an idea.
Head of Ukrainian jury is a member of very old and well-known rap group, so at least one representative of the genre))
I think it definitly is more about changing the skew of the juries and making sure there are people with varied backgrounds in various genre. Definitely need more rock, hiphop, rap, indie/alt, even edm etc jurors in the mix. Which also means expanding the numbers slightly. Idealistically we'd want a lot more - which let's be honest is not what broadcasters and delegations want to do because of costs. However adding at least 2-4 and expanding 5 people to 7-9 seems more feasible and would allow there to be enough spots for more of a spread of professionals who specialize in different genre to fit (which hibges on selection of course but pulling from a varied pool should be a requirement).
Also, while I agree on aiming for a slightly lower age average, mathematically a 30 average is not realistic, unless maybe in the high 30s like 38/39 because even if you get more 20 and 30s on the jury, you still should include some older people from 40-60+ population for diversity, just not overwhelmingly so. Thus making and average of 40-something more realistic imo. The aim is preventing an older skew but making sure there is still a diverse mix. Limiting juries to only 20-40s to achieve a younger average discounts people who are older and comes off as equally ageist. And while some older people may prefer more traditional songs, not all of them do. Speaking as a young person looking at the older people around me, tbh they appreciate rock and non-pop music more than some of my peers - I mean they were young once too and they lived through the heights of rock n roll and other experimental periods so hoping the esc community don't entirely discount them due to their age.
Speaking about the juries, one thing that didn't come up, is the corruptibility of the juries. The reason why juries were reintroduced in 2009 was the block-voting. But isn't jury scandals like what happened in 2022 a much bigger threat to credibility of the competition than block voting? Though the block voting is visible, I don't think it would ever have determined the winner of the competition. To win, a song must get votes from different parts of Europe. But if the juries have deals of exchanging votes, that can change a lot. Plus, I don't see why so few people should have so much power. At least the juries should be bigger, perhaps ten members each (that would also permit more versatile juries regarding genre, age, etc.), and maybe their vote should weigh less, perhaps 25% of the total score.
Block voting is really code for "shit, Eastern Europe can actually make good music people like?"
@@KyrieFortune I think, that if we dive deeper, we would find out, that people vote artists from neighbouring countries not because they are from neighbouring countries, but because they are often already known in the region, and represent similar taste and esthetics.
But even if there was such thing as block voting, it would be a lesser evil than juries making shady dealings with the other.
Maybe I'm being too cynical but I think changing jury members won't fix the fundamental problem and it's that juries are just normal people who all have their biases. It's simply too much work to make sure each member of the jury from all countries is competent and won't let any political or personal beliefs skew their judgement. Finland this year is actually a good example of how jury clearly inflated Kaarija's points just to keep the intrigue for the televoting part. It all feels so fixed. That's why I believe reducing juries influence would be more effective than trying to make them more diverse.