How to win the Eurovision Song Contest, according to the experts

The Eurovision Songfestig Was watched by around 163 million people last year – which means that there may be 163 million different opinions about what makes a perfect participant.

Are you leaving for a soulful ballad, guaranteed Europe -foggy eyes and full of love and peace?

Or do you opt for a cheesy extravaganza, complete with saucy takes regional costumes and striking staging that the entire continent (and Australia) have in their living rooms?

According to Bennett there is some validity here, where every Eurovision song falls under six broad lyrical themes: “Love, unity, self-assertia, parties, history and songs about making music”.

He adds that “Songs of Self-Assertion of Lyrical Self-Opowerment are doing very well”-Failed with the winner of Austria 2014 Get up like a Phoenix (Conchita Wurst).

Acts can be tempted to cross the staging, but according to our experts this may not be the way to secure the victory.

Songwriter Thomas Stutgaard wrote together The winner of 2013 of Denmark only Takingop (as well as This year’s British entry What the hell happened by remembering Monday). He partially resigns his success to the simple staging, which he says it made it easy to remember.

“If you asked a child to pull that staging, they could. It was a girl without shoes on, two boys who played the drums and a flute man. Very simple, but it worked.”

Vocal coach Carrie Grant, who Led the British jury in 2014 And became sixth in the competition as part of Sweet Dreams in 1983, it agrees.

“There is nothing worse than having an artist whose stage has a lot of money, but their performance doesn’t guarantee it,” she says. “It makes those performance look worse.”

The winner of 2014 (and the personal favorite of Carrie) was Conchita Wurst – the first act to won the competition without supporting singers or dancers on stage since 1970.

What Conchita noticed was that she was a bearded Drag Queen. Carrie believes that Eurovision fans are of things that are quirky and that “embrace the LGBT community”.

But she adds that Conchita was not a gimmick, but instead “a brilliant singer who could deliver what we can call ‘money moments’ in vocal coaching.

Minor-key songs are increasingly dominating Eurovision.

Bennett invalidates the idea that “major is equal to happy, minor equal to sad”, adding that “small keys are more a steno for emotional depth”.

In 2023, 85% of the finalists performed in small tests, according to the press association. In the past 20 years, only two major -key numbers have won – 2011s Walking scared (for Azerbaijan) And the love of 2017 for both.

Professor Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, a researcher in music cognition at Princeton, emphasizes source sensitivity – our instinct to associate the sound of a song with his intended context. A few bars of a techno number, for example, and we have a mental image of a dark nightclub, and the type of DJ that could occur there.

This means that certain small keys now immediately signal “Eurovisionness” to the public.

Remember that on Monday what just happened, it was written in a songwriting camp, with several songwriters who work together in a rural retreat to write the perfect song for this year’s British act.

The song was deliberately written in an important key to standing out in a sea of ​​minor numbers-comparable with the entry of the United Kingdom, 2022, Spaceman from Sam Ryder (B major).

Repetition is important to get a song in the Spirit, says Margulis. But songs must prevent them from being too repetitive. Margulis says that what makes a song catchy is “not only when they are heard repeatedly, but also when they throw in a kind of surprise turn”.

Bucks Fizz’s 1981 winner for the UK, You decideis a classic example. First, the number of Key changes, quickly followed by one Memorable costume change In which the skirts of the female singers were scammed to reveal shorter skirts – a joint visual and musical turn.

Previous Eurovision winners were often mocked because of their nonsense texts, such as the winner of Sweden from 1984 TheBut Bennett states that this emphasizes the strong focus of Eurovision on melody.

“Eurovision really needs great melodic hooks. You want people to sing melody throughout Europe. The need for a very accessible, catchy choir is essential.”

The most important changes have long been a way to introduce novelty into Eurovision numbers. In the 2000s, several winners followed this formula, including Olsen Brothers’ Fly on the wings of love for Norway (2000), and Serbia’s prayer In 2007.

But as Bennett notes, although they are still present in about one fifth of finalists, no song with a last choir changing has won since Molitva almost 20 years ago.

The Song Van Stengaard for this year’s UK Act remembers that Monday is certainly full of surprises. BBC music correspondent Mark Savage said that the song “A dizzying series contained important changes and pace shifts”.

The song is the songwriter’s answer to the question he asks himself when he writes for Eurovision: “How do you stand out in a competition where everyone wants to stand out?”