Recently, I saw someone ask whether there was a Eurovision entry that is genuinely disliked by everyone within the Eurovision community. Some people put forth suggestions, but others came out to say that they, in fact, liked those entries.

When you think of it, in order to make it to the contest in the first place, a broadcaster needs to approve of the song before giving it the ticket. That is the bare minimum, particularly in the case of an internal selection. When a national final is held, the national final organisers need to approve of the song, and then voters decide that it is qualified. Thus, it might be hard to imagine that such a song exists.

Yet at the same time, there are many songs that don’t seem to get much love within ESC fan circles. They are hardly ever talked about, and often fail to score any votes in the annual ESC250 countdown.

So here’s a project that asks an inverse question: Is every Eurovision entry liked by at least one person?

Introducing: A Song for Everyone

To be clear, events and projects that aim to measure the relative popularity of all ESC entries do exist. You know, the ones where you can nominate or vote for any Eurovision entry ever. The aforementioned ESC250 is one of them.

But perhaps one of the problems with these sorts of events is the limited amount of votes you can give. Given that there have been over 1,500 Eurovision entries, it is definitely a challenge to try to whittle them down to only 10 favourites which you can vote for. Although classics and popular favourites appear at the top time and time again, there are also many songs that are well-liked but fail to gather votes year after year. These entries constantly end up on the right side of this humongous all-time scoreboard, and come nowhere close to cracking the top 250. These are songs that may be well-known or even well-liked, but not loved enough to appear in compilations or in concerts, in parties or in playlists.

This is why we created A Song for Everyone. Named after the former UK national final A Song for Europe, we want to see if there is, in fact, a fan for each Eurovision song. We want to prove that every ESC entry suits at least one person’s taste.

In order to achieve this, we need to see which songs people actually like. That’s where you come in.

How to participate

To participate, simply go to the form below and check the box next to each ESC entry that you like. There is no minimum and you are not required to ‘like’ a song in every single year. You are free to scroll past years that you haven’t watched as well as songs you are unfamiliar with. However, we’d like to encourage you to keep an open mind and take the time to remember older entries that you may have enjoyed in the past.

All 1,564 songs to have officially competed in the contest, as well as the songs that failed to advance from the 1993 and 1996 pre-qualifying rounds and the Eurovision 2020 entries, are on the list.

Let’s keep it fun

Because of the timing and format of the project, you may potentially see A Song for Everyone as being “like ESC250 but you can vote for as many songs as you want.” That’s fine and we don’t mind it, but remember that the objective is NOT to find out what the most popular ESC entry is.

Because of this, we ask that you be honest with your submission. We hope that no one feels the need to engage in questionable behaviour just to support or bring down specific entries. Please don’t hesitate to check the box next to ALL your favourite songs; whether an entry is liked by one person or a hundred people is just the same to us.

Submissions that appear to be suspicious will be examined carefully, and if found to be invalid, will be removed. But again, at the same time we understand that not everyone has listened to every single entry, and it is definitely okay to skip the songs that you don’t know. At the end of the day, this is just a bit of curious fun.

What happens afterwards?

The deadline to fill in the form is December 12th, 2020 at 11:59pm CET.

The idea is to share the findings at some point towards the end of the month, but the way in which this happens will depend on the amount of participation and turnout that this receives. More details will be revealed as we get closer to the deadline. By then, we’ll know what to expect and how to plan the next steps.

Time to vote

Alright, are you all set? Once you’ve filled in your nickname and social media handle (to ensure the result is fair), you can begin! Click below:

VOTE HERE

 

P.S. Special thanks to two people:
— Ajit (@inderadjati on Twitter) for the idea — he initially suggested a public spreadsheet until we realised a form would be more practical.
— A.M. (@DoveBugo on Twitter) for providing a full list of ESC entries, allowing the form to be built in a few days rather than a few weeks.