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The annual ESC Top 250 was a bit of confusing affair.Confusing, because we had 2 lists of ESC Top 250.
In its 15th year, Songfestivalblog.be the organiser of the list, stopped collaboration with ESC radio and move its annual list to EFR12 radio.
ESC radio, left with no regular program for 31/12/2023, decided to organise a list of its own and broadcast it parallel to the list of Songfestivalblog.be.
For both list you could vote in the Eurovision manner. 10 songs, with 12 points for your favourite song.
While Songfestivalblog.be used a form you can only send once by login to your Google account, ESC radio asked you to send them an email, with your 10 favourite songs.
I voted on the songfestivalblog.be. I never knew that ESC radio is also organising its own list and I never checked on which station this will be broadcast and assumed that it would be broadcast on ESC radio.
On 31/12/2023 at 11 am CET, I tuned in to ESC radio and started listened to the their broadcast, only to discover, 2 hours later, that I am not listening to list I voted for. At that moment I switched to EFR12 and continue to the list of songfestivalblog.be.
We have 2 lists. Both been voted by the fans but the lists are far from being identical.
Around 80%-90% of the songs are on both lists and the rest are songs that to be found on 1 of the lists.
From the songs which are on both lists, there is quite discrepancies between the ranking of the song on each list. Some songs are low on 1 list and high on the 2nd list.
For example: Sudden Lights’ Aija(Latvia 2023) – ranked in position 229 n the ESC radio’s list, but achieved position 31 on the list of songfetivalblog.be. If you go through both list you can find many of these discrepancies.
Of the top 10 each list, there are 8 songs which are on both lists but there some small differences between the ranking on each list. The 2 songs that are different are EAEA(Spain 2023 – ranked 130 on ESc radio) + Voilà(France 2020-ranked 12 on ESC radio), which ranked at 10 and 9 position on the Songfestivalblog.be list. On the ESC radio they have been replaced by Arcade(Netherlands 2019 – ranked 12 on Songefestival.be) + Diodato(Italy 2020- ranked 13 on songfestival Blog) who ranked respectively 6 and 4 on ESC radio.
And than we have the winner. Even on that subject, the lists disagree. As Ewan mentioned in the podcast – on the songfestivalblog.be Tattoo – Sweden 2023 was 2nd and Cha Cha Cha(Finland 2023) was 1st.
On ESC radio the results reflect the results of ESC 2023 in Liverpool. Cha Cha Cha comes 2nd and Tattoo takes the crown.
Songfestivalblog.be, was here first, they have been doing this for 15 years. However this year we had a new player in the game and one can argue that ESC radio’s list is as valid as the list from Songfestivalblog.be.
The thing is that one ESC top 250 on 31/12 is more than enough. The existence of more than 1 list will just increase the friction in the community, as each person can choose the list which more reflect his/her/them taste and each person can argue that one list is better than the other list. Do we really need or want that?
Below you can find the links for both list:
Songfestivalblog:
https://songfestival.be/top250/top-250-2023/
ESC Radio:
https://www.escradio.com/2024/01/esc-radio-top-250-tattoo-voted-no-1/