My largest project associated with watching the full history of Eurovision was rating every Eurovision Song Contest performance, and then ranking them.
Because the list may soon need to be updated, Euro Yard will do the big reveal of our Top 100 sometime following the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. Prior to sharing some of those results with the greater Euro public, I wanted to take some time to explain how I went about it.
Creating a Rubric
While evaluating the songs and devising my own rubric, I used the same four criteria which the European Broadcasting Union asks its national juries upon which to focus:
- Overall impression
- Vocal capacity of the artist(s)
- Composition and originality of the song
- Staging performance
Source: Eurovision Song Contest Wiki | National Jury | Rules of the Voting Jury
I also added a column on my scoresheet for bonus adjustments. Rest assured, if it matters to you, that this was not a significant source of scoring changes. Through 2023, out of 1,684 songs, I gave any amount of bonus points to just 15 of them, and in most cases, only one point. (This number will climb to 1,721 songs after the 2024 contest, and if lucky, one song will get a bonus point for a quirk, novelty, or marvel that impresses me, or because I have some form of sympathy. For example, I gave Britain’s SuRie a bonus point in 2018 because she was accosted by a stage-rusher during her performance. I also gave one to Jean Jacques of Monaco in 1969 because he was obviously a child and he held up well for his age.)
Next, I had to consider how to weigh these categories. I decided that overall impression of the song had to be paramount, but I also considered that I regard vocals as being very important to me. This was my second-heaviest weight. I go into these performances wanting to be wowed, and while there are recent examples of over-the-top staging and personality overwhelming the other factors (looking at you, Käärijä), generally speaking, the songs I felt had great vocals tended to rise far up the list. Of course, in such a massive contest, there are exceptions to that conventional wisdom as well: for example, I do not think anyone will accuse “A Man Without Love” (United Kingdom, 1966) as being an all-time great song despite having what was probably one of the best overall vocal performances. That just shows that no one factor is determinative in how “good” a song is.
Composition and staging came in tied for third. In the early years of Eurovision, staging was a minor consideration, so unless there was any flair whatsoever, most songs in the first two or three decades of the contest got a base score of 50 percent (30 points) for staging. It would not be until much later that I observed staging starting to significantly help or hurt certain acts.
Devising a Scoring System
I watched all Eurovision acts twice. The first time was in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer of 2023, and the second time was in the winter of 2024. I tweaked my scoring system on the second watch, and it landed as follows:
| CATEGORY | POINTS AVAILABLE |
| #1: Overall Impression | 100 |
| #2: Vocal Capacity | 80 |
| #3: Composition & Originality | 60 |
| #4: Staging | 60 |
| TOTAL | 300 |
An average song, therefore, would get a score of about 150. Spoiler: No song got 300 points, or even close to it. I regard 300 points as a level of perfection that may or may not be attainable by a living human. 250 is probably not even achievable in any sense I could tangibly measure. Even if it existed, such a song may be beyond my febrile comprehension. Likewise, zero points is an accomplishment of catastrophic failure which may be equally impossible to reach; even the worst song could scrounge together 50 or 60 points just by showing up for the contest and uttering any vocalization. I could probably manage 50 points under this scoring system and I haven’t sung on stage since high school chorus.
For the record, my average score through Eurovision history is 153.434. One would think most songs have to be rather decent to get to a Eurovision stage in the first place, though, ya know, there are many notable exceptions. They know who they are and so do you.
Finally, it came time to rank the songs by year and then overall. One might imagine that with that many songs, there would be many ties to break. I used the categories from #1 through #4 as the primary tiebreakers, in that order. If songs were still tied after that, they were ranked on straight-up judgment calls. The more songs I added to the list, the less that mattered. Nobody is going to care if a song is ranked 851st or 852nd; I certainly don’t. Tiebreakers made a much more notable difference on a year-by-year level; some songs finished inside or outside my top ten because of them, and in a few rare cases, the top songs tied.
With this insight in hand, soon comes the time for me to get into some of my favorite Eurovision songs – and the worst. Stay tuned after the 2024 contest.
