Two years ago, I had the privilege of being on-site press at Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (UMK) – witnessing its first ever arrival into the flash, Eurovision-ready Nokia Arena in Tampere.
One performance took my breath away and made me feel things in a Eurovision performance I had never felt before.
That, my friends, was Sara Siipola’s performance of ‘Paskana’.
While modern Finnish Eurovision has been awash with songs turning the volume up to full and creating this larger-than-life persona on stage, Sara was keeping it intimate and real. The stage show, co-ordinated by Yle’s in-house team alongside legendary creative director Fredrik ‘Benke’ Rydman, focused on lighting from one solitary bulb dangling from the ceiling, and Sara’s interactions with it.
The warmth of the colour, the use of the light to captivate the viewer, the way the song grows to a crescendo where this solitary light source is thrown in anger – it commands attention and makes the emotions of the song pour over in its conclusion.
It goes up there with the greatest staging I have ever seen at anything Eurovision related. And it reminded me on the importance of staging at the modern Song Contest, and how that craft perhaps isn’t appreciated highly enough. Perhaps the Marcel Bezençon Awards need to include a fourth category, not just prizes from the press, the commentators and the composers, perhaps staging should be given the recognition it deserves.
‘Paskana’ didn’t end up at the Eurovision Song Contest. While winning the jury vote at UMK that year, it couldn’t compete with the televote power from Windows95Man’s iconic firework-squirting-out-of-denim-shorts-on-overblown-key-change. But UMK proved something with that staging and concept – this National Final finds the most creative ways not just to stage a song, but to stage one that brings out the best the artist can be and the story they want to tell.
In this article, I’m going to try to find the answer to how they do that.
From LA to Cha Cha
Thankfully, we got to speak to Matti Myllyaho to prepare for this article. This 2026 edition of UMK is his second as Show Producer, albeit his first solo in the role, and comes from the back of being a part of the UMK team since 2020.
He grew up in Vasa on Finland’s west coast, only a forty-minute drive from the Swedish-speaking villages where KAJ grew up, and took up ballroom dancing from age 5 before fading out of that love and into competitive swimming. That brought the opportunity of an American college scholarship at the University of Tampa, from which he studied International Relations. Post-study, Matti worked for the Finnish Consulate in Los Angeles, with responsibility for helping Finnish exporters in the entertainment and music sectors find ways into the LA scene. Part of this involved some collaboration with Yle, so when the pandemic hit in 2020, and cross-Atlantic journeys halted, Matti came back to Finland, where the UMK had a vacancy as a Production Co-Ordinator.
While he has worked on the UMK production since 2020, this has not been all just behind-the-scenes Song Contest bureaucracy and decision-making. Indeed, I can guarantee if you are reading this article, you have had Matti on your TV screens. That is because Yle were searching high and low for a fourth dancer for Käärijä’s performance of ‘Cha Cha Cha’ without success, when the choreographer remembered about Matti’s ballroom dancing routes and brought him in to complete the human millipede that took the roof off the Liverpool Arena.
While Matti has a creative side, he describes his job as “half Excel, half imagination,” in which he ultimately has to “manage people’s creativity” to succeed in this UMK project. He’s keen to point out many of the other top names that Yle has on board with him. Tapio Hakanen remains Head of Music for UMK, working hard this winter to establish contacts and build interest among next year’s prospective cohort. Choreographer Reija Wäre, with ten years of UMK experience, he believes has an “amazing method of directing artists” to get them ready for a show of this scale. Ari Levela, visual director for UMK since 2020, and Juha-Matti Valtonen, a multi-cam director with UMK and Eurovision experience, also get praise for being the “best in their league in Finland”.
This hugely experienced team, who have grown up developing UMK into the huge format it has grown into since the pandemic, ensures the show brings in chart-topping songs and technically great stage shows each year. However, this very experienced team with hundreds of TV productions behind them and a “routine dynamic” as Matti puts it, needs someone to come in as the “electric shock” to this team.
That person is Sergio Jaen, the young creative behind both Bambie Thug’s staging of ‘Doomsday Blue’ and ‘Wasted Love’, which won Eurovision in Basel. It was Sergio’s creative for Ireland in 2024 that caught Matti’s attention in Malmö, with the Finnish team in Malmö knocking on the Irish dressing room to find out who was behind one of Eurovision’s most memorable modern moments. Here at UMK, Sergio has the title of Creative Consultant. The Finnish team has the expertise and experience to produce a great show, but Sergio’s role is as the visionary, offering a different cultural perspective and freshening up the final three-minute products.
The journey to get to those three minutes takes much longer, though, and there’s an argument that no National Final does preparation for the show as much as Finland does. Even choosing those artists themselves shows dedication to the task.
A Data-Driven Approach to Selection
Song submissions for UMK take place even before many of us consider the following year’s Eurovision season to have begun, with the deadline for entering your creation to Finnish broadcaster Yle for this season on August 24th 2025. In total this year the team received 491 songs, a record number of submissions for the UMK format.
The reason for the early submission window is that the team wants to make decisions on their seven competing acts at UMK by mid-September, to ensure there’s enough time for everything involved in UMK to be completed in time for the February show. Matti describes the selection process as being inspired by how Switzerland internally selects their Eurovision entrant, inspired by the Swiss broadcasters’ “market-research, data-driven process” to help choose its act.
The number of submissions to UMK has increased each year since 2021
Matti walks me through the process step by step.
- An original filtering of the submitted entries leaves around 25 songs remaining
- These 25 songs are reviewed by five demoscopic juries, representing different backgrounds across the industry, one of which is composed of visual creatives.
- These juries, alongside a main UMK jury, rank the songs without knowing who the artists are
- The top 12 to 15 of these artists are then invited to meet the production team for interviews
- While the ranking from the jury phase is “definitely respected”, the final choice also results from how the interview session went as well as the UMK team’s desire to build a “well-rounded diverse group of seven songs that we want representing the Finnish music scene.”
And this process happens quickly, with Matti obliged to make the phone calls inviting acts for UMK 2026 while attending the most recent Eurovision Conference in Croatia last September. The following week, the acts would already be working with broadcaster Yle on one of the important and unique parts of the UMK experience, the music video, for which the first props and designs need to be in the pipeline by early October.
When each song at UMK is released, it is released at midnight Finnish time on all streaming services, alongside a music video, also released simultaneously, with production-level quality to the nines. Of the seven competing songs, only one gets released each day, getting 24 hours of glory and attention all to itself.
“I guess that is the core of the format where, because we only have seven artists, we are able to focus on the release of every song and make sure that every individual release, the song and the music video, gets the attention that they deserve.
UMK is not only about the live show, it’s about the whole journey of first introducing these artists. We want to make sure with the music video that the release of the song is supported by a visual world and their most artistically represented form.”
While January, when each UMK entry is finally revealed, might feel a long time after September, when the artist is selected, producing these music videos requires quick decisions. In that sense, Matti describes the process of the music video creative as “very fast”, a “test drive” for the relationship between Yle and the artists and their creative vision. By February, the team gains more time to “digest, discuss and reflect” and go into “deep artistic conversations about what resonates with each artist”, meaning by the time of the live UMK performance, the team feel they have reached the pinnacle of their symbiosis with each artist.
“Quirky Confidence” and “Rebellion”
The build-up to UMK itself involves lots of work between the UMK team and each artist, with each act invited to work at Yle’s studio to work on their stage performances. Each act will have a unique prop, and here they will practice not just their performance but also work with Yle’s own vocal coach, multi-cam director, and choreographer at this stage to support the artist in the live show.
Matti wants to make it clear that for the 2026 edition, many of the selected artists have never performed with in-ears before, so Yle has taken the time to help them develop this skill and get them natural at it before the National Final. But through the months of preparation, Yle are bringing in steadicams for acts to practice interacting with, practising spotting cameras from across the other side of the arena, and spending months with choreographer and stage director Reija to not just perform, but to master their performance.
“Imagine if we had the exact same artist cast that we have right now, but we had only a little proportion of the time that we now have for the artists with Reija in the studio. I think the performances and their quirky confidence would look very different than it actually ends up looking. Because we have really trained them, we have coached them, Reija has coached them to perform. So I think that definitely makes a huge difference.”
That it is Yle itself that is putting in all this effort in-house to work with the artists at UMK to get them ready for their three minutes on stage is perhaps a little unique in this Eurovision bubble. While record labels for each act collaborate with the Yle team, their influence is limited to creative decision-making. Record labels are not allowed to pump in extra money for pyro bursts or extravagance beyond Yle’s means to win over the public with spectacle. Instead, the Yle team puts in high effort into each act, trying to make each number as good as it can be, and providing parity both economically and in terms of time and effort into each production. And that effort is often exactly why the act and label have taken interest in the UMK process in the first place.
“I think most of the time, the most typical kind of scenario is that an artist is either, you know, very new to their career or that they want a rebrand and they’re like “free hands, let’s start from scratch.” And that’s actually something that labels and A&Rs really appreciate.”
And this is one of the reasons that, despite UMK becoming a huge hit and bringing in record viewing figures nearly every year since the pandemic, there’s no suggestion that this show will branch out into a multi-week format. Matti sees that evidently “this format works in a way that we focus on quality over quantity”. He describes the experience not as a National Final in the traditional sense of putting up a stage and letting everyone have a go, but as creating an “artist bootcamp” to help artists develop and grow.
And growth isn’t just about creativity, it’s also about the “raw skills that are involved in being a pop star”, with big television and arena opportunities like UMK, rare opportunities in the spotlight. And this is beneficial to record labels, as they look for their artists after the intensive UMK experience.
“This is the feedback we get from the labels. They say that once an artist has gone through UMK, they are now ready for any TV performance because they have a very skillful understanding of the craft of live TV performance.”
Our discussion takes us to compare UMK to Melodifestivalen, Eurovision’s most-watched selection process, taking place over six weeks across Sweden, yet broadcast each week on Yle’s main channel, this week on delay immediately after UMK finishes. UMK’s more narrow approach, with seven acts rather than thirty, allows it to focus in on a way that Melodifestivalen, by nature of its much bigger scale, can’t replicate.
“We don’t feel a sense of pressure that we need to fit into one specific brand. If you look at Melodifestivalen, as much as I respect and appreciate Melodifestivalen and they’re like way ahead of us in many things, there’s definitely a more traditional sense of aesthetic in Melodifestivalen, and I’m not saying that is a bad thing.
“It’s just we feel super liberated in maybe being a little bit experimental and it’s not like we have to necessarily meet a certain expectation. And I guess that’s coming from also being, and always feeling, like the underdog. I guess Finnish people, not only in Eurovision but in general, we’re like: if anyone mentions us in the news, you know, we’re like, “They know we exist!” So that’s the spirit.
“And I love that UMK has a sense of rebellion in it. It’s a bit of “no rules” in a way and we don’t feel obliged to be an all-around family show. Of course we want to be inclusive to younger audiences. But there’s a sense of, we don’t have to do it the same every year and we can switch it up a little bit.”
A Cohesive Quality Like No Other
Throughout our time together, Matti is quite self-critical of the processes and compromises UMK has to go through. The biggest compromise is that of time. Before each act is chosen, Matti would ideally like to hold a workshop with the shortlisted candidates, where their live skills can be tested. Then, after the acts are chosen, the first discussions with each act to start their creative journey have only a one-hour scheduled meeting. Describing that process as a “speed date”, they try in that limited time to get to the bottom of who the artist is, what’s important to them, and what they want to convey to the audience. In reality, it takes months to find that final concept.
Furthermore, the team would love the opportunity to be in the Nokia Arena for longer, with the artists only getting into the space the Wednesday before the show, meaning time is limited, and the improvement curve Matti explains is “very steep” for artists to take what they have learnt theoretically in the studio into the live arena setting.
Matti also realises that sometimes there is internal frustration on his part because the show team and music video teams are separate, and he has to act as a “glue” between the operations to try to integrate the ideas that worked in the music videos into the live performances and generate cohesion. Sometimes Matti feels the team “ends up showing a different side of the same coin”, and believes that “we could be better at being more loyal to a single aesthetic” for each competing act.
It’s amazing for me to hear these self-criticisms. The conclusion of this article is written just as I’ve returned to the press centre after seeing the final dress rehearsal for UMK 2026. The stage show on stage, the marriage of creative vision that pushes Eurovision to the edge, this is as creative as it gets in the Song Contest industry.
Antti Paalanen high above the Nokia Arena stage (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)
The show kicks off bang on 20:00 CET with Erika Vikman absolutely owning the stage as we all know she can. But just the idea of bringing last year’s Eurovision winner JJ into that ‘Ich Komme‘ crescendo, both at full pelt staring down the stage at each other in an overblown statement of a show opening.
I could write a list of technical brilliance and diverse technology in each act, but I want to tell just one tonight to look out for. Komiat. What a show opener. They are placed as far out into the audience as possible, on a authentic looking summer festival stage with great attention-to-detail in its design, pointing at other stages and surrounded by dangling lights. The way they perform much of this number towards the stage, but showing the fans behind, all waving hankerchiefs in unison, is a beautiful start to the competitive action and a heartwarming, tasteful and positive start to the show that can’t help you falling in love with all this show should stand for. It brought a tear to my eye, and lead singer Aleksi could not stop smiling throughout thanks to the crowd’s enthusiasm.
Whereas other broadcasters would dream of producing such visionary productions and top-quality output, the Finnish team, while proud of what they do and their quality-over-quantity approach, still has the inner understanding that the preparation for the biggest show in Finnish music entertainment is compromised by time. But I don’t think any broadcaster comes close to giving their National Final acts the time, energy and high-quality support that Yle does here at UMK.
I realise that February 28th is going to be a Super Saturday to rival all Super Saturdays in the Eurovision world, but I believe anybody in the Eurovision community needs to see these performances and allow themselves to be wowed by the attention-to-detail, and the freedom and creativity that have gone into each number.
And then, ask yourself: if this is what they produce under compromised time, imagine what Yle could produce given all the time in the world.