This year’s ESC broke viewer records and was also able to score points with the younger generation. Eurovision Song Contest videos have had millions of views on social media.
Liverpool/Munich – The enthusiasm for the Euro Vision Song Contest (ESC) is apparently unbroken even after 67 years: The Euro Vision Song Contest 2023 broke several viewership records. In Great Britain and Iceland, more people than ever before followed the spectacle – and the song contest around its final also hit online. An above-average number of young people followed the colorful competition: official ESC videos had over half a billion views on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook – other clips under the official hashtag even more.
Several viewership records in Europe broken: 99 percent of TV viewers in Iceland follow ESC
Some love the ESC, others cannot understand the great interest in the event. But the number of viewers seems to drown out the critics: 162 million viewers watched the three live shows in mid-May this year, according to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which acts as organizer. That alone is not a record, but there were at least a million more people than last year.
The fact that the contest was held in Liverpool this year may have had an effect on British ratings. The final was watched by 9.9 million TV viewers, a 12 percent increase from last year, a record in the host country. But nothing surpassed little Iceland: around 99 percent of all television broadcasters watched the ESC there. In Norway it was about 88 percent, in Finland 86 and in Sweden 82 percent. The Ratings in Germany was 7.4 million – about a million more than last year.
Even non-participating countries seemed to be rooting for it. In the so-called “Rest of the World Voting” most of the votes came from the United States, Canada, Kosovo, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Mexico, Hungary, Slovakia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Chile. In total, people from 144 countries voted, including 37 participating nations.
- Rating of the ESC final in all participating markets: 40.9 percent (average of all programs: 17.4 percent)
- Rating of the ESC final among younger viewers aged 15 to 24 in all participating markets: 53.5 percent (four times higher than the average)*
Based on information from the European Broadcasting Union
Enthusiasm for the ESC spills onto the internet: 7.6 million people watch live on YouTube
The idea of the world’s oldest televised international music competition is more than half a century old and still managed to sweep the internet with it. 7.6 million people watched the final live on the YouTube video platform. “Online, the digital platforms of the Eurovision Song Contest recorded record participation,” said the organizer.
Official videos were viewed 540 million times on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, which is “almost twice as many as in 2022.” According to the EBU, there were 4.8 views on the TikTok social network alone, which is used primarily by younger people Billions views of clips tagged #Eurovision2023. 105 million individual accounts were reached on TikTok, it said. The success on TikTok was probably no coincidence: According to media reports, the EBU had published some exclusive material there.
ESC as a springboard for musicians: Official Spotify playlist most streamed in the world
“We are happy to see that every year more people around the world are discovering this special event and that it is a huge stepping stone for new music,” said the ESC’s so-called Executive Supervisor, Martin Österdahl, about the event. In fact, the ESC is also a good advertising platform for the artists. The official Eurovision Song Contest 2023 playlist on Spotify, for example, was the most streamed Spotify playlist in the world one day after the final.
The song “Tattoo” of this year’s winner Loreen was streamed 4.2 million times on Spotify the day after the grand finale. The two-time ESC winner surpassed the record set by Måneskin’s winning song “Zitti E Buoni” in 2021, which had 3.9 million streams at the time. The “ESC effect” works even with the last place winners of this year’s competition: the band Lord of the Lost from Germany managed after their performance re-entry in the German album charts at number 2.
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