Let me start with some tales of Eurovision from yesteryear. My first contest on the ground was the one in Malmö in 2013. I was lucky enough to get one of those fabled F2 accreditations that gave me access to the EuroClub and to the week one press centre, meaning I got to geek out watching rehearsals and join the ESC Insight team for the first time.
I remember in Stockholm how tickets sold out quickly for the live shows but remained available for the family shows with barely a soul interested in them. So much so that ultimately I, who was teaching at the time and organising a Eurovision-themed school trip, was offered 500 tickets completely free for my students.
Even in Kyiv the year saw Semi Final tickets being reduced the week of the Contest for local fans, so that the arena would look full on TV cameras.
All of this is incomparable to the pressure on Liverpool this year. Tickets for every single show, yes including Tuesday afternoon family show rehearsals, were a complete sell out in hours (barring the expensive hospitality packages). EuroClub weekly passes sold out within minutes whereas if we go back just a few years they were available without requiring rapid input of your bank details. This year sees accommodation costs spiral for many to levels we haven’t before seen with the Song Contest even in notoriously expensive cities around Europe, as the fans are desperate to get a slice of their Eurovision buzz this May.
The problem is, there isn’t just one reason behind this insatiable demand, but a plethora of them.
Liverpool At The Centre Of It All
One of the reasons that this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is so highly in demand is due to the efforts of the host city. The way that Liverpool has been going above and beyond to create a full program of fringe events has meant that there’s plenty of reasons to be in the city. This applies for those who identify as Eurovision fans or not; all know that the hottest party tickets in the UK this May will be in and around Merseyside. Liverpool’s commitment not just to creating a special celebration of Eurovision but also the way that they are hosting on behalf of Ukraine is so intertwined with every step of their activities and is something that must be commended.
However these added-value events that have made Liverpool and Eurovision 2023 have also created some of the problems the Eurovision community has experienced. The Liverpool Arena being used for the Song Contest this year was the smallest capacity venue of the seven different options shortlisted – Liverpool’s victory in the bidding process was as much for their work outside the arena than the building itself.
With space taken away for the stage, camera positions and delegations it has been reported that for each show only 6,000 tickets have been made available. Add to that the fact which sees 3,000 tickets throughout the nine shows being held back for displaced people from Ukraine in the United Kingdom and it’s very reasonable to say that the combined ticket access for Eurovision fans is roughly a third of other popular contests like Stockholm 2016 or Lisbon 2018.
The EuroClub location, Camp and Furnace, is a rarity in being walking distance from the Liverpool Arena and offers a versatile warehouse space for Eurovision fans to congregate. The capacity will take a couple of thousand Eurovision fans combined, but I note those epic locations in Stockholm and Kyiv had a capacity approaching 5,000. Camp and Furnace will be nowhere on that scale, and as such it is little surprise those weekly passes sold out in minutes. And that is true even with numerous alternatives in and around Liverpool such as EuroFansClub that have also sold out all their weekly passes too.
Much uproar from the Eurovision fan community has gone to the decision to make Eurovision Village tickets for the Grand Final, selling for a cost of £15, the first time Eurovision Village attendance has been ticketed. Eurovision Villages in recent years have been held in wide open parks or beaches and Pier Head, a stone’s throw from the Liverpool Arena, is an outdoor space offering a 25,000 capacity. It is expected to sell out for the Grand Final, and run at 15,000 for the other nights.
And this heightened demand shows up as well within the accommodation, with reports showing that accommodation prices are at least 82% higher during the Song Contest than other times of the year. The intense demand has led to warnings going out to Eurovision fans to watch out for scams aiming to take unsuspecting Eurovision fans money. But one reason for this situation being strong at this year’s Song Contest is due to the amount of available accommodation. Liverpool in 2022 reported just over 8,000 hotel rooms for visitors, a figure less than Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Kyiv and Stockholm, although slightly more than offered by Turin. It’s little wonder that accommodation in the city centre is hard to come by.
The fact is that this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is being held in a city that, while they are pulling out all the stops to host, is a city with a smaller arena, smaller accommodation offering and smaller facilities for fans than most of the other recent contests. It might be comparable to Turin, but Turin was a very different Song Contest than what we have this year.
The First In Four Years
We have to travel back to 2019 to make a direct comparison to Liverpool today. That is because of the way that the Covid-19 pandemic came to impact the globe in 2020 and beyond. The Eurovision Song Contest of 2020 was cancelled, and the 2021 edition took place with a live audience capped at 3,500 and that was only because the event was an official test event to measure the spread of Covid-19 at organised events. Very few people travelled to Rotterdam and the audience was mainly made of Dutch locals.
The 2022 edition in Turin was still a Covid-affected Song Contest. In May 2022 Italy was still a country with Covid-19 restrictions including mask wearing and the social programmes surrounding the event were not arranged on the scale of pre-pandemic competitions. While many fans did travel to Turin there were also many more who chose not to, and Turin was only a half-step back to Eurovision ‘normality’.
Touch wood the Liverpool contest will be a Covid-free contest and it has been planned as such from the first moment. The Eurovision community has been desperately waiting for four years to finally reconvene once more. The decision-making of people to attend or not this year is not necessarily a rational one. Now, finally, we have that freedom to be a community again – 2023 was not a Contest to miss.
And part of it too also is about where the Contest is. The United Kingdom has witnessed a 180° flip in how Eurovision is perceived locally, with the last decade seeing OGAE UK grow to be the biggest Eurovision fan club with over 6,000 members. The demand for a party for everybody isn’t just the fans from abroad, of which not all would make the pilgrimage, but the thousands of local fans who can’t quite believe the UK’s turn of fortunes from Eurovision zero to hero.
Yet while the UK fan club has been exploding in size, the fact is that Eurovision itself within the general population has also transformed over the last four years.
The Next Generation of Eurovision Fan
We left the contest in Tel Aviv with Duncan Lawrence’s ‘Arcade’ as the victor. Few would have expected that the song would have had global domination and over 1 billion song streams after taking the crown in Tel Aviv, but the Song Contest succeeded that year in giving a platform to a hit song that went truly international. If we add to that other examples in decent years that broke out beyond the bubble we see a whole step change from the generation before previous.
Acts like Daði Freyr and Little Big gave entries that could a generation previous have been dismissed as gimmicky, but instead have fitted into the modern music scene. Winners like Måneskin and Kalush Orchestra sound like complete polar opposites to the Eurovision world of the 90s with rap and rock’n’roll at their core, and even our second-place acts like Sam Ryder and Barbara Pravi utter a level of class and credibility that makes Eurovision easy to defend to even the biggest naysayers.
Add to all of that as well Rosa Linn’s success with ‘Snap’, which is arguably more important than any of the above. Rosa Linn’s twentieth place, but followed by rise to international stardom on the back of the same song, adds so much strength to Brand Eurovision that there are many ways to generate success.
The modern-day Eurovision now boasts TikTok, of course the app that made ‘Snap’ what it is today, as an official partner. There are few brands that are more synonymous with hitting the marketing sweet spot of 18-30 year olds that TikTok boasts so well.
Ultimately, the net result of this in 2023 is one word. Cool. The Eurovision Song Contest has never been cooler than it is today.
Yes, part of the problem this year has been a smaller arena than normal, a smaller city than normal, and fan events with tight capacity. Part of the problem is that the pandemic has made Eurovision fans desperate for 2023 to be the big party and that the hosting UK fan club alone has thousands of members eager for a slice of the pie.
But all of that is nothing without the coolness of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is this coolness that has led to all sorts of people being desperate to get a slice of the Eurovision pie this year, and I fully anticipate seeing sections of the audience with as many selfie sticks as those waving miniature flags (and there is nothing wrong in being that type of fan either).
Before I was born Eurovision was a formal, invite-only affair that came for a festival of cultural celebration and togetherness. One generation ago the Contest in May started the transition to a full week long extravaganza full of fringe events, nightclubs and a schedule busy but managable. Nowadays we are hitting peak Eurovision where those spaces are full and we are scrambling to find any place we can to watch the events unfold with our community.
Even the pre-parties like in Stockholm and Amsterdam and London became complete sellouts despite bigger locations being organised, tearing our Eurovision artists to exhaustion as thousands are desperate to see them even before the big event. The supply simply can’t keep up with the demand of today’s Eurovision fans wanting their fix of the excitement.
Eurovision Fans In The Future
The Eurovision fan of tomorrow will struggle if their expectations are ticket packages every year and EuroClub tickets every night. Few cities in Europe have the space that can accommodate this new quantity of Eurovision fans that exists today. It is easy to bemoan that Liverpool is not London with hotel capacity and huge parks that could easily swallow Eurovision, but we should remember that few cities in Europe do have such capacity (and let’s remember, a city on the scale of London may have the space for all the Eurovision fans that desire, but good luck getting all of that in walking distance).
Some day soon will be heading to a place like Lithuania or Malta or Iceland or Moldova where they will make the greatest possible efforts but will not have that plethora of resources and infrastructure that the big cities of Europe offer. And we will have to cope, throw our privilege to the side, and enjoy the Contest however possible.
It seems prudent now to remember that the quirk of the Eurovision Song Contest is that there is no bigger event on the planet with such a short organising window. Each year the wheel needs to be re-invented to whatever geography we enter ourselves into. The roaring demand for Liverpool we all hope will inspire the 2024 hosts to create a welcoming package for as many of us as they can. But there’s no guarantee that next year’s city can cope with the demand. The expected number of visitors expected to Liverpool is 100,000. That’s roughly the population of Reykjavík.
There are so many ways to engage with the Song Contest and, while we all want it to continue its upwards trajectory of coolness, that coolness means ultimately that the fan experience many of us over 30 grew up with is no longer going to be possible. There’s simply too many people also wanting to join in the fun, and Eurovision is simply too big. Writing the Liverpool Events Calendar for ESC Insight has made it clear that the host city has so many great events planned and so many things that clash with each other in ways that I have never seen before.
Us diehards Eurovisionistas may have to get more creative with our fandom. Throw the privilege to the side and embrace the Song Contest however you get opportunity to do so.