Eurovision Song Contest

Controversial topic haha. But I think the fandom cooled off by now, and the video is really well-done in its research, and interesting.

Here are some of my thoughts on it:

• I think the first point is really important. Since the split voting is presented like that (2016), this is the first time that the jury favourite (and not televote favourite) won. And I find it a bit funny that so many people want to change it now because that happened one time although the whole point of the system is that this can happen. While there definitely have been many fans e.g. of Switzerland 2021 where there hasn't been an outrage to increase the jury portion of the score.
• Even although I agree on his general message and think that the 50:50 system like this is good, I think he misses the point at around 10:30 and it's a valid criticism. No-one denies that the scores are all relative to each other and not an absolute measurement of the quality of the songs, and that they all being terrible or awesome could produce the same score.
  But that comment is clearly valid. Those songs aren't just songs that are good, they are, just speaking from a musical perspective, much better than most of the other songs. And they should, by a good jury, get much more points, relative to the other songs. I think the juries also have the responsibility to vote songs with a great musical quality highly, so that the televote doesn't have to do that and can just vote what they like most. I think I voted for Spain a single time; if juries didn't exist, I would have definitely voted more, just because their musical performance is so outstanding.
  So yeah, I think that is actually a very valid criticism, and one place where the juries didn't really work as intended and should improve.
• I also think exactly this is an argument for the juries though. If you look at what the score for those songs who don't appeal to the mainstream that much but have an extraordinary musical performance, like Spain, Portugal or also Estonia, they would have been at the bottom (or at least much lower) in a televote only final and suffered far more. That alone shows in my opinion why that would not be a good idea; even if songs don't appeal to the mainstream, if they have such a quality and musical performance, they do deserve a higher spot and it needs the jury to prevent them from tanking (which would be unfair imo). I think that's also what he meant when he said that the 50:50 cancels each other's problems out: There are favourites on both side that can be at the bottom in the other side; in the split vote, they are prevented from that and usually land in the middle.
• While he says that the running order influences the televote, I think that's also an argument for juries since the televote is way too influenced by something like that. I even did a graph on that back on reddit, showing how the televote scores of SF2 songs completely changed in the final.
• His other ideas for a more balanced system seem pretty good. I mean everyone knows Eurovision doesn't really have a fair system, let alone that the weight of a vote vastly differs, depending from which country it comes from, but I mean that's part of it. I think a much more ideal system would not include points at all, but whole rankings from each country that are calculated with each other (kind of how it's done with the individual juror's rankings). But I don't think that needs to be done, even if it would produce fairer results.
  The idea of more countries getting points is good though. I wouldn't give the same amount of points to several countres; maybe rather do something like 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5, or set the maximum amount of points to something like 20.
• I actually would really like a televoting system in which the televoters have to rank all songs from first to last place. In the first year I was really watching it live, I actually thought it was like that and was really confused by just having 20 votes in general. I'm always splitting my votes into like 6-7 songs, because I think there are so many great ones, and while I know it's not really possible, I think that would produce a much better televoting.
• The running order this year was pretty bad imo. Alone having both Italy and Estonia directly behind each other was frustrating. Having Spain and Sweden behind each other was also… a choice. In general, I feel like they didn't get a good flow.
  Despite that, I see the general sense in it. Maybe it would be a possibility to make it more random? Maybe split it into thirds or quarters. On the other hand, them being able to give favourites a good place makes it kind of more fair between those favourites.
• As a last thought, I completely forgot / didn't realise how few points the jury gave to Shum. So while in general, I think 50:50 is good, I do see the point that juries should be more open to other styles that also match their requirements, and that they're sometimes too focused. But I mean, I don't think just being salty and wanting to change the system because the personal favourite didn't get as many points as one hoped for is a good idea, in general there are way too many (good) songs to always have the result agree with you.

But yeah, thank you for sharing it. It was an interesting watch ~~and a good procrastination opportunity~~.