How do you win the Eurovision Song Contest? The simple answer is to score more points than any other song by the end of Saturday night.
Mans Zelmerlow wins Eurovision, with a dash of Christer Bjorkmanu
How Do You Score Points?
Points come from votes, and there are two opportunities to get votes; from the jury and from the public.
Each broadcaster has a national jury of five people connected to the music industry, and they cast votes while watching the Dress Rehearsal of each show – Monday is the dress rehearsal for the first Semi Final, Wednesday is the second Semi Final, and Friday is the Grand Final – this is why these shows are generally called the Jury Semi Final or Jury Final. The televised shows (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) are when the public cast their votes.
Each national jury awards points to their top ten songs, with 12 points the highest, then 10 points, then 8 points, 7, 6, 5 ,4, 3, 2, and down to a single point. The public votes from each country rank the songs, and the same points from 12 to 1 are awarded. In total each country can award a single song a maximum of 24 points, 12 from the jury and 12 from the public.
For each Semi Final, the top ten songs in the final scoreboard qualify for Saturday’s Grand Final. And on Saturday the song at the top of the final scoreboard wins!
How Are The Semi Final Qualifiers Revealed?
At the end of both the Semi Final shows, the 10 qualifiers for Saturday’s Grand Final will be revealed by the show’s hosts in a random order. The exact breakdown of those scores however are held back so as not to give any song a competitive advantage ahead of the Final.
On the night of the Grand Final itself, the results will be revealed in two batches. First, the jury votes from each broadcaster will be presented in the traditional Eurovision format with the show’s hosts video-calling every participating nation (including nations that didn’t qualify for the Grand Final) and asking a spokesperson to deliver their country’s jury votes. The first set of points will be delivered automatically onto the screen (10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 & 1) and the spokesperson will then announce who the 12 points have been allocated to.
After all 40 countries have delivered their national jury’s points, the televote scores will be revealed by the show’s hosts. These however will be presented as a combined televote score total from the whole continent which means that the number presented represents the total number of televote points received by that country once all participating nations’ televote scores have been added together.
So for example, a country might be allocated 13 points and that could be as a result of receiving 3 points from nation A’s public, 6 points from nation B’s public and 4 points from nation C’s public.
Additionally, these scores will be presented in order from the country who received the lowest score in the jury vote so we will first hear the televote points for the country who finished 25th with the juries, then 24th, then 23rd and so on. Most of the time, these scores will be fairly low and will rank gradually higher alongside the juries. Occasionally however, a nation that scored low with the juries will receive a high televote score which will propel them high up the table (as happened with Norway in 2019 and Poland in 2016). As the results reach their climax, the votes will be presented slower to build the tension as the number of countries eligible for victory dwindles until it comes down to the country who won the jury vote vs. the country which had managed the best combined score up to that point.
Since the introduction of this system for presenting votes, it has tended to be the latter that ends up winning. The last time the jury winner ended up being the overall contest winner was Salvador Sobral for Portugal in 2017.
The following day, the full breakdown of results tend to be released publicly by the EBU including the results of both Semi Finals.
How Do You Get People To Vote For Your Song?
If you mean practically, each national broadcast will have details on screen.
If you mean in the more competitive sense, well, that’s what makes this a Contest. Each song, each performer, and each delegation need to convince jury members and televoters to vote for their song.
Make An Impression On The Night
On-stage, that means crafting a performance that has the right props, lighting effects, dancers, wind or smoke machines and camera angles to best connect the music to the viewers behind the camera. Even though there will be an audience in the arena, it is the audience watching on television screens at home or in jury rooms that are ultimately going to select the winner of the Contest.
It goes without saying that a huge part of that is also the singer performing consistently well both on the night of the Semi Final and Final but also during the night before when the jury scores the final dress rehearsal before the main show.
Online engagement will be more crucial to victory than ever before
We have seen in the past what the benefits of strong social media campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can achieve but with Eurovision establishing a special partnership with TikTok this year, understanding how best to engage fans on these platforms will be a key factor in persuading them to not only watch Eurovision but to pick up the phone and vote for them. A more traditional press engagement will be equally important with interviews with newspapers, talk shows and radio programmes (particularly with media in other countries – remember you cannot vote for your own country) having a huge potential to attract attention to a country’s entry and make it more familiar to viewers come the main Eurovision shows.
If a country’s delegation can achieve the perfect balance of on-stage and off-stage campaigning in Turin, they will give themselves the best possible opportunity to win the Eurovision Song Contest.
In our next “Explaining Eurovision”, we’ll look at some of the popular terms in fandom, significant moments in Eurovision history, and some of the traditions that continue to fill our Contest.