I don't consider Kaarija or Baby Lasagna to be gimmicky at all, they're just fun entries. The performance of 'Tattoo' could equally be described as "gimmicky" imo, with her sandwich press staging.

Maybe the juries should vote on the songs 'blind', without knowing which entry belongs to which country (although in some cases, language would give a hint), or at least try to get jury members who aren't familiar with the entries already or know what the odds are, as I agree they might be influenced by odds in some cases - so take out jury members who are former contestants, and more likely to have followed the build-up to the contest. Idk, just something to refine how the juries work, as a jury vote is definitely still needed (and not just because the current vote presentation is great for the suspense).

6 hours ago, gooddelta said:

I've definitely noticed that the public seem to not care about a good/bad vocal. For sure it helps with your jury score to have a great vocal, but with the public vote I'd put Sissal, Remember Monday and Zoë Më up there all in the top ten best vocals, and they were the bottom three with the public. Extend that to the whole bottom five with Miriana and Melody (and I've also just noticed the public vote bottom five was all women ☹️).

Estonia on the other hand was second on the televote, and the winner if you take out the Israel situation, and the vocal was...not good. But it doesn't matter for that kind of track. If you screw up the vocal on a ballad though, I guess you would be more exposed.

The vocal has always been low down on what matters to me (for an uptempo at least). I'm happy that it helped Remember Monday get a good jury haul this year, but I'm one of those people who does view it as a SONG contest more than anything else (although Switzerland succeeded with both for me, a really lovely entry. I can only think that the zero from the televote was down to the staging not giving enough audience connection)

Tommy Cash, I will never understand his success this year as the song was trash as well. I'll give him the staging being good with the fake stage invasion, but was that really worth 200+ points from the public

Tommy is a fun entry imo. It always stood out to me on my listen through's and the performance was exactly what the casuals look for when it comes to Eurovision (as annoying as it may be for us core "Eurovision starts in January" audience. It's about as novelty as I will get without it being *too* overdone/gimmicky for me.

The casuals I go to Eurovision parties with said it stood out to them the most due to his performance overall and the "security guards" dancing made them full on LOL (like literally laughing out loud) and then the leg dance movement is very memorable to casuals who just want to watch Eurovision for fun and they really don't care about vocals unless it's an obviously flat vocal during a ballad or something. I definitely saw the general appeal with Estonia.

Let’s also not ignore the fact that Tommy Cash was probably the most recognized and popular name out of all the contestants this year, at least in Eastern Europe. A colleague of mine who is a self-described casual viewer (and of only the final) was obsessed with this song before the contest, she got introduced to it online somehow. I guess it was also heavily promoted on Instagram and TikTok, it helps that Tommy has 1M on each of those.

I care little for Espresso Macchiato but found the performance really funny too (especially the security guards thing) and elevated from the national final. I completely get why it was the most (genuinely and not rigged) popular entry with the public. Also it's a huge earworm, people are streaming it too - it's the highest entry on Spotify UK.

The moment I saw it in the semis I thought 'ah, this is going to have WAY more public appeal than I'd even imagined' (I thought it would be below KAJ for sure before that).

I agree with Jahq on the vocals thing - it's somewhat important but really Eurofans bang on and on about vocals all season way above the potential of the actual song itself a lot of the time, and there are countless examples of why with an entry destined for big things, it doesn't matter much. Sure though, for borderline qualifiers it is likely to be more crucial to help push them over the line.

E.g. I don't really think Dizzy would have done any better if Olly had delivered a note perfect performance last year, yet his vocal is cited as one of the primary reasons Dizzy failed - it's just a non-competitive song and whatever staging or vocal they threw at it wouldn't have changed that.

Edited May 19May 19 by gooddelta

The Estonia song is the one that's been constantly in my head since the contest ended so can definitely see the appeal! Plus out of all the Eurovision countries I can get Spotify or Apple music data from it's in the Top 3 Eurovision songs for all bar 2 (and of course the highest in the UK) so it wasn't just a vote-night phenomenon.

As for the Juries, I think taking them out of the Semis has worked quite well, I've not heard the NQs but from the Final it felt like there was a good range of genres just from the public vote - pop, ballads, alternative, novelty and more. Of course one interesting side-effect of this is that countries like the UK have the 'luxury' (if you can call it that) of trying to appeal exclusively to the juries knowing that it will get them above a number of the qualifiers who have to try their best to appeal to both. In an ideal world we shouldn't need juries in the Final either but this year's result showed us that they're unfortunately still absolutely necessary.