Sour Candy

US Albums Chart 19 13 10 MAYHEM, Lady Gaga (Peak: 1)

Yeah, obviously it's not a huge effort and Isr*el have definitely calculated that it's worth the money. However, the portion needed for 12 pts varies a lot from country to another. In Italy people voted for San Marino and in Finland they chose Sweden because KAJ are Finnish.

We love Peter!

Stays massive! Although the weeks in top 5 might stop there, depending on how well the Morgan Wallen tracks hold next week.

Yeah, like said earlier it definitely needs third post-release streaming hit. In retrospect, Disease was released too early in that sense.

I think they are looking for changes in the system, so that one person cannot vote for same performance 20 times. At least Yle framed it that way. Yle also wants to make televote more important for the results.

US Billboard Hot 100 03 03 39 Die With A Smile, Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars (Peak: 1)

If you send a Finnish artist you will get 12 points from Finland.

RAI published the televote percentages

#57 (-10) in the UK mids

Mayhem is #43 (-9) in the UK mids. Might just scrape into top 40 by Friday.

Isr*el keeps on losing on charts.

Spotify: #2 Die With A Smile - 4,953,263 (=) #36 Abracadabra - 2,137,670 (-10) #91 Poker Face - 1,490,242 (-11) #126 Judas - 1,340,254 (-19) #185 Just Dance 1,118,881 (-21)

Omg THIS

Spotify could just go and sponsor a SONG CONTEST (they are probably too busy to focus on promoting podcasts anyway but just an idea...)

Ignoring Israel, the highest placing female was Klavdia from Greece, 6th. Then again, Nemo won with a landslide last year and uses they as a pronoun, and this year's winner is openly gay. But I feel that larger the audience gets, the more there will be men who don't tend to vote for female artist and picks male novelty acts instead. Just a speculation of course. I don't mind if the songs are good, but Estonia this year was not.

This is a bit biased towards the Nordic countries where ESC is currently gigantic (half of the population of Finland watching for instance), but notice how Israel isn't there - same pattern as last year.

Came to mind looking at this in detail. My take is that the more popular the contest becomes, the more the battle is "what is good" vs. "what is entertaining on a Saturday night". The most concrete example is of course Switzerland this year getting very high scores from the juries and ZERO points from the televote. I don't think the scoring structure is bad per se because the winner usually appeals to both juries and public on sufficient level, but ESC being so popular and widely in the media brings extra layer to the contest. There are millions of people around the world (now that Rest of the World is a "country") that get drunk and vote for the funniest song they hear and and go to toilet when they hear a ballad lol (and there are still those who don't even watch and vote for Israel regardless but let's not go there here). I don't know how valid this as a case, but this year there were five songs performed 18th-22nd that got only 53 points from the televote in total (Switzerland was in this bunch). Wonder what the world was doing then, definitely not watching/listening to the songs lol... One for the comments points out that juries have their biases too, favoring ballads sung in French and not appreciating ethno stuff (like Albania this year).

I did this just to see how many countries gave the same points to Israel this year compared to last year (yellow = same, red = less, green = more). The results are baffling, because not only the 12s were almost the same everywhere, but other smaller points too, which indicates that in most countries (over 20/36, didn't include Moldova last year and Montenegro this year because they didn't participate in both years) the same people are voting for Israel each year regardless of the song. Croatian people are the true ESC heroes ❤️

What Ireland failing to qualify has to do with this? They were in the grand final finishing 6th just last year.

18th May 2025 01 245 Little Mix 02 91 Lady Gaga 03 49 Robbie Williams and Take That 04 41 Spice Girls 05 28 Rihanna Weekly positions in 2025: 02-04-04-02-01-01-01-01-02-01-01-02-01-01-01-01-01-01-01-02

Both Judas and Poker Face reached their new peaks on Singapore Spotify (27 and 32).

Still waiting for the UK televote WINNER to appear.

Yes, at this point there is one bad apple, and that is Israel taking advantage of the system which basically works pretty well for the general public overall. The MAJORITY of people are still voting for their favourite songs. Like said in the other thread, neighboring countries tend to favor each other anyway. For instance, Bara Bada Bastu has been HUGE in the Nordic countries, but I never expected it to do mega-well in Southern Europe because of the obvious difference in the culture and taste in music and that is completely fine.