The clue is in the name – Eurovision Song Contest is first and foremost a song contest. It’s why in the first episode of our brand-new series Eurovision Uncovered, we took a deep dive into the songs that make it to the Contest and what makes them tick.
One of the questions both I and Sem Anne asked each other early in the process was whether the myth of the ‘Eurovision formula’ is true. Of course, the wider public has its own idea of what a Eurovision song sounds like – but the Contest’s music has evolved dramatically this past decade. Is there any evidence to prove this myth?
We thought finding the formula for success would be overrated. What interested us was how formulaic Eurovision could get. In this contest, every song is unique – so is there one that stubbornly, confidently refuses to be unique at all? We didn’t just want to find the outstanding Eurovision entries – but the most outstandingly average one of all.
What’s the answer? The most average Eurovision song of the past decade is ‘Dizzy’ by Olly Alexander.
EBU / Corinne Cumming
But how did we answer that question? That’s where things get dizzying. Music is art, but art can also be science, and we needed to work with science to create a formula of our own.
Our search led us to transform the past decade of Eurovision entries into a wall of numbers. By doing this, we discovered new ways of explaining over 200 songs from the Contest — and the things you can’t explain by numbers alone. We discovered how the algorithms behind music recommendations work — and what they lack. And, by searching for the contest’s most soulless entry, we found where its soul truly lies.
This is how we did it.
Music by Numbers: Internal Musical Statistics
I know what you’re thinking – making all of these memorable Eurovision entries into data points seems sacrilegious. And in one sense, it is: you can’t plot the emotional resonance and nostalgia of something like ‘Saudade, Saudade’ on a graph…
…but you can analyse the underlying forces that construct the feelings. ‘Saudade, Saudade’ feels tender and soft because it’s mixed more quietly. It feels sadder because of the key, the instruments used, and the notes played. It feels reflective because the energy is dialled down. It makes you want to cry into your pillow at night because of all of these things.
That may just be me. But the point is that emotion is just one way of discussing and analysing a song – another way is analysing the sound. Companies like Spotify have taken this approach and turned those sounds into different scores that shape how we listen.
Scores like these:
‘Saudade, Saudade’, explained in numbers
Those scores, some of which are listed above for Maro’s gem from 2022, are baked into Spotify’s algorithms. They set parameters for how Spotify designs your “Upbeat Mix” or categorises your “Princess Power Pop Vibes” playlist. And, when Spotify randomly recommends a song that’s just right for you, it’s predictive – and these numbers are how it figures you out.
To get those numbers, we used Spotify’s API to find them for each of the 204 songs that have competed at the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final, from the introduction of the split jury/televoting system in 2016 to the Contest in 2024. Within Spotify’s recommendation system, it’s called “raw audio analysis” – and that’s just what we’re going to do, too.
We’re going to analyse each of the metrics listed in that chart above to find the average of all of them. Then, once we’ve got all our numbers in, we’ll calculate which Eurovision song of the last ten years is the closest to the averages overall – that’s our winner.
Genre? I Hardly Know Her
We’ll start with the one thing we tracked that isn’t a number. But don’t let that fool you – the idea of genre is, first and foremost, categorisation. Genres themselves, though, can be misleading.
For example, nobody would say that ‘Deslocado’ by Napa and ‘Viszlat Nyar’ by AWS are anything like the same song. One is dreamy and sun-kissed and feels like a love letter to a holiday spot you’d like to go back to. The other sounds like what you’d hear if you were inside your checked luggage as they sent it down the belt to fly there – certainly not like a summer long gone. Even though the English version is actually called ‘Summer’s Gone’.
But, within that, both songs would generally fall under a “Rock” label. To keep things simple, we’ve categorised all of the 204 Eurovision entries we analysed from 2016 to 2024 into 10 genres.
Eurovision Songs by Genre, 2016-24
And, on this count, the locals appear to be bang-on-the-money. The Eurovision Song Contest may be more diverse than ever, but even in the modern era, it’s a case of pop vs everything else.
111 of the 204 songs in our list were categorised mainly as pop (every song could only get one genre, so apologies to genre-smashers like ‘The Code’ or ‘Cha Cha Cha’). While it is a broad church, this does showcase how pop sensibilities still run the Song Contest. The rise of songwriting camps in recent years, which we cover in Episode 1 of Eurovision Uncovered, seems to be contributing to pop’s continued dominance.
Through everything else, EDM stands out as the next most popular option, while the Indie/Alternative genre also covered about a tenth of the list. If we’re searching for Eurovision’s most average song, then in a world where pop beats every other genre combined, it’s going to be a bop.
Pump Up The Volume
Time for the numbers, starting with loudness. This is largely a representation of a song’s volume; just how much you’ll want to have the speakers turned up or, if you’re like me, turned down to hear yourself think.
But it doesn’t measure how loud a song really is. What it really measures is how a song is produced. This is the perceived volume that whoever made the song decided not to reduce through compression or mixing, but left intact to impact the listener. Looking at the Top Ten loudest Eurovision songs in our dataset, then, it doesn’t look like a moshpit:
The Top Ten Loudest Eurovision Songs
As you can see, Spotify assigns a score between 0 and 1 to every song for all our metrics: 0 being nothing, and 1 being deafening. And none of the songs in this Top Ten scream deafening. For instance, there are three songs that fall squarely in the girlbop category: ‘La Noia’, ‘Slo Mo’ and, louder than both, Laura Tesoro’s ‘What’s The Pressure’ from Belgium in 2016. Again, it’s not about the sound itself, but how the sound is produced.
The loudest song of them all? None other than the UK’s Sam Ryder. Yes, ‘Space Man’ and its guitar solo is the loudest Eurovision song on record in the last decade, coming in at a 0.956. Ironic for a country whose main expression of anger isn’t screaming, but under-the-breath tutting.
The Top Ten Quietest Eurovision Songs
The quietest? By a million miles, it’s Salvador Sobral’s ‘Amar Pelos Dois’, the Eurovision 2017 champion, coming in at 0.014. If you’ve listened to Eurovision Uncovered already, you know this isn’t the last we’ll hear of him.
In truth, loudness is not a great indicator of contest success, with a correlation of around 1% to whether a song is more friendly with televoters than jurors. But we can get an average of all of our entries for loudness: 0.711. Two songs got that score exactly – ‘Miss You’ from Jeremie Makiese for Belgium in 2022, and MELOVIN’s ‘Under the Ladder’ from Ukraine in 2018.
The Pursuit of Valence (Happiness)
You might have read the word “valence” in the chart with a bemused look on your face. Well, valence is the fancy term Spotify uses to calculate the mood of a song – whether a track is happy or sad. Again, it’s a 0 to 1 score here, with 0 being floods of tears and 1 being tears of joy.
The Top Ten Happiest Eurovision Songs
To our Top Ten, and there’s some great crowd-pleasers: 5minuust x Puuluup from Estonia in 2024, Moldova’s quirky ‘My Lucky Day’ in 2018, and Alexander Rybak’s ‘That’s How You Write a Song’, which is almost violently happy. By that logic, I’m surprised Jendrik’s ‘I Don’t Feel Hate’ didn’t make the Top Ten – but it is 17th.
The winner, though, is almost inevitable.‘Trenuletul’ from 2022, a runner-up in the public vote and the song that made the overnight train from Chișinău to Bucharest a tourist spot, took the top spot for Eurovision’s happiest song. And doesn’t that just feel right? The melody’s in your head already, isn’t it? Go on, hum it, hum it to yourself, you know you want to!
The Top Ten Saddest Eurovision Songs
It’s always at your happiest moments that the sadness hits hardest. The ten saddest songs include tearjerkers like ‘De Diepte’ and ‘Mon Amour’, and the very angry‘Samo mi se Spava’ and ‘Doomsday Blue’. ‘O Jardim’ is here, too – Portugal’s follow-up to Salvador Sobral (also in this list) that decided to turn the sad sadder.
The saddest, in Spotify’s view, is ‘When We’re Old’, a tender ballad by Ieva Zasimauskaitė of Lithuania about growing up with your partner. The average for Eurovision is 0.440, which honestly feels like it says more about us as viewers than the Song Contest itself – not sad as such, but just a bit “meh”. ‘Dizzy‘ by Olly Alexander ticks that box with 0.440 exactly.
Time for a Dancebreak
Chatting to Eurovision Uncovered, music scholar Dr. Samuel Murray from the University of Leeds divided Eurovision songs into two camps. He said that the first camp was songs that reflected real life – personal stories that we could relate to. The second camp? Pure escapism. And there’s no better escape than a little dance.
The next metric from Spotify we considered was danceability – quite simply, how much a song made you want to get up and move a bit. And in a Eurovision era where we’ve seen the ‘dancebreak’ go from quirky bit to a legitimate song component, you’d think those girlbops would be right at the top.
The Top Ten Most Danceable Eurovision Songs
Not quite, but there is one: Blanka’s ‘Solo’, which was ahead of its time with its Jet2Holidays aesthetic. Everything else doesn’t quite fit that box – but it does make you want to dance. Many of these songs, like The Roop’s ‘Discoteque’ from Lithuania in 2021 and Mikolas Josef’s ‘Lie to Me’ in 2018, had dance routines of their own.
Ahead of them all, the song that makes everyone move – but only with their hands. Konstrakta’s ‘In Corpore Sano’ is not your typical Eurovision song, or even your typical song, in any way – but, much like the Friends theme tune, clapping the chorus is almost a compulsion.
The Top Ten Least Danceable Eurovision Songs
The bottom ten is a bit easier to predict – this pack of songs is full of slow-tempo ballads. It does feature one of my personal Eurovision favourites, though – ‘No Degree of Separation’ by Francesca Michielin. Italy. 2016. Bellissimo.
But none make you want to sit down more, ironically, than ‘I Stand’ – Czechia’s 2016 ballad by Gabriela Gunčíková. With a score of 0.17 for danceability, it’s a real outlier compared to the average score of 0.579. Coming in as close as possible to that baseline boogie is, somehow, Kaleen’s ‘We Will Rave’ – a song about dancing, sung by a dancer, including a dancebreak. Right.
Good Energy Matters Most
For Eurovision songwriters, creating energy is crucial. It’s because energy is the biggest indicator of how a song will perform with the viewing public – there is a correlation of six percent between getting pulses racing and points received from Europe’s punters. That’s why energy is the last metric we’re covering.
The Top Ten Most Energetic Eurovision Songs
This Top Ten is a list of some of the biggest floor-fillers in Eurovision history. There’s even a song that made it to the Eurovision final without competing – Joost Klein’s ‘Europapa’, which brought Dutch gabber to the stage and all the energy that comes with it.
Most of these songs were huge televote magnets, but less appreciated by juries. ‘Dark Side’, the most energetic song in our list, had to score 218 televote points to make up for its 83 jury points. And perhaps most importantly, Europe’s favourite dentist Serhat is here: his 2019 entry ‘Say Na Na Na’ proves that there is some joy to be found at one of the most joyless places in the world.
The Top Ten Least Energetic Eurovision Songs
The ten least energetic Eurovision songs of the last ten years is definitely a different kind of playlist. Songs like ‘You Let Me Walk Alone’ and ‘Growing Up is Getting Old’ from Germany’s Michael Schulte and Bulgaria’s Victoria respectively are both famous “phone lights on” tracks from the past few years.
The most average score for a Eurovision track’s energy from our dataset was 0.677, proving that most countries prefer to up the tempo to get you to remember them. Three female popstars from sun-kissed countries are all 0.002 away from that figure – Azerbaijan’s Efendi, Cyprus’s Tamta, and Greece’s Marina Satti. As if ‘Zari’ is anything average.
But winning again, like it did for being quietest, is Salvador Sobral. And what makes that so fascinating is that ‘Amar Pelos Dois’ is statistically the least formulaic Eurovision song of all time. Despite that, though, that song didn’t need a formula to do well – because it won Eurovision in 2017 with the highest points total on record for any song at the contest ever.
So if Eurovision is meant to follow a formula, as we mentioned on Eurovision Uncovered, Salvador’s success spits that idea right back in its face. In our search, we found it is the least average Eurovision song ever. And, almost inevitably, the most successful.
And the Winner is…
While Amar Pelos Dois is exceptional, we’ve been hunting for the exceptionally ordinary. And now we’ve gone through all the numbers, we can tell you what the ultimate average Eurovision song of the last decade would be. Put simply, it would be a fairly loud, fairly energetic, fairly danceable and slightly downbeat pop song. When you take into account that most Eurovision songs are written in a minor key – some deliberately in the case of Remember Monday’s entry this year – and that largely checks out with what our notion of a Eurovision song is.
But does a song exist that squishes all of this together?
The Top Ten Formulaic Eurovision Songs
‘Dizzy’ fits every criteria listed above like a glove. It’s a typical Eurovision entry in so many ways, and features many of the trappings that are seen as shortcuts to contest success. A synthpop instrumental, a dance-break section and glitzy staging – all of them are there in ‘Dizzy’. So with all of those boxes ticked, surely ‘Dizzy’ did well?
Of course, if you were watching Eurovision last year and were British, you knew how the result turned out. Some points from the jury, yes, but zero points from the public. That might seem like a lucky coincidence, but the second most average song in our ranking – ‘I Feel Alive’ from Israel’s Imri in 2017 – only scored five.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, though, that average means unmemorable. In the top 10 most average songs we found, there’s a televote winner. KEiiNO’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ from 2019 is still a fan-favourite to this day, and arguably has almost everything ‘Dizzy’ had – the synthpop instrumental, a…well, yoik-break…and the glitzy staging. But while ‘Dizzy’ scored nothing at all from the public, Norway went home with 291 points from the fans.
What’s the difference?
Authenticity: The Key to Eurovision Success – and Failure
Spotify’s numbers are one way to look at music. But it’s a pretty cold way. Because, as we said at the top, music is art – not science. Numbers like these do give us a way to stratify songs, but they also give Spotify ways of synthesising them: turning emotion into concrete numbers that are for algorithms, not songwriters.
That’s hot for computers, but an awful lot colder for listeners looking for their next favourite songs. Because the algorithm of music can only take you so far.
The one thing you can’t model for and can’t predict is authenticity.
That’s where the success of analysing Eurovision songs through stats falls short. Authenticity is something that you can’t measure, but you can only feel, and there’s a feeling of uniqueness and storytelling and personality in ‘Spirit in the Sky’ that you can’t quite feel in ‘Dizzy’.
It’s a bit like LEGO: Norway’s entry in 2019 took the same building blocks the UK’s entry had in 2024. But they made something unique with them.
In the first episode of Eurovision Uncovered, everyone we spoke to said pretty much the same thing. Whether it’s through songwriting camps or just from someone in their bedroom, it doesn’t matter as much where Eurovision songs come from as feeling like they come from somewhere. That authenticity is even key for the delegations – Luxembourg’s Assistant Head of Delegation, Elisabeth Colter, told us that for “authenticity…there is no price”.
Authenticity is what takes Eurovision songs beyond sound into something deeper and richer. And as songwriting at our Contest evolves and goes into exciting new directions, that’s what we need to value and keep intact. The Eurovision Song Contest is a show we love because it’s not about box-ticking, but thinking outside of the box.
And in case you needed a reminder…the most average song was staged and performed inside one.
EBU / Sarah Louise Bennett