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Is These ESC Rule Change Possible?

wyq614

Active member
Joined
March 31, 2012
Posts
770
Location
Beijing, China (Hometown: Qingdao, China)
Hi, everyone, although I haven't logged onto this forum for a long time, as a Chinese man based in China I'm gladly seeing Chinese ESC fandom is actually increasing and our community in China is stronger than ever before despite of Mango TV's scandalous cut of Ryan O'Shaughnessy's show that led to the termination of any ESC broadcast in our country.

Recently we talked about what rule may ESC have a change in the future (certainly with a Chinese ESC fan point of view), I came up with these points:

1- One singer with two songs. I don't know if you feel boring watching the same song and same performance in semifinal and final. To make ESC a bit more dramatic, is it possible that one participant prepare two songs, one for the semifinal and the other for the final (if he/she can make it), to choose which song must be sung in the semifinal and which in the final can be a strategic matter. And it may boost semifinal viewing figures I think, and favors the POTENTIAL ESC fans (people thinking "I don't care who wins, I'm not voting, I just watch the final and listen to the songs), maybe some people are not willing to watch the same performance for two times, they may choose to ignore semifinal and directly watch the grand final.

2- Elimination of highest and lowest score. That is to lower the influence of block voting and rival voting (eg. Armenia/Azerbaijan), and you can avoid having to think of putting certain countries in different pots during drawing time and in different semifinals.

3- Special voting country. Additional voting countries should be invited where there is a ESC spin-off, for example the US with American Song Contest, the host country of Hispavision, etc, thus ESC viewers can experience culture differences and preference differences, see how the countries from outside Europe would vote, and it may encourage more ESC spin-offs.

4- Limited revamp rule. Before entering in ESC some songs may be revamped, and sounds quite different from their national final performance. Maybe EBU should put a limit to revamp, only allowing minor changes to a winning song of a certain NF, so that broadcasters will take NF more seriously.

Believe it or not, in China there's 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 special municipalities and 2 Special Administrative Regions (HK, Macau), we also have the condition to hold an ESC spin-off, and there WERE proposals for that, but till now have not been carried out.
 

tomos2019

Member
Joined
February 6, 2019
Posts
870
Location
West Cornwall
I'm not sure of the likelihood of big rule changes any time soon although it does usually annoy me when countries have changed their entries massively from the national final and a 'rest of the world' slot would be cool. Personally I would like non-sovereign states participation and maybe some sort of language restriction and the latter of those are VERY unlikely but I also wouldn't mind seeing a voting system which maybe even did away with points entirely and it just involved each country ranking all the other entries and then combining them, a bit like the Australian election system but again, maybe would work best for fan productions rather than actually in real life lol.
 

Chalphon

Well-known member
Joined
February 28, 2021
Posts
2,039
Location
Stockholm
Ni hao!

1- No, it's a song contest. Not a singing competition, there are other shows for that.
2- No, I don't see the point in this at all. Besides, the lowest points are disregarded anyway since if your song is ranked last it will not get any points.
3- Now this is intriguing. It would be interesting so add a "world televote" option where anyone around the world could phone in their votes. But all countries outside the competition should count as just one countries points so that it just adds a bit of flavour and not overthrow the whole contest.
4- Yes please.

ESC huang ying ni! Zai jian (can't write Chinese characters on this particular CPU, pinyin will have to do).
 
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