Loreen from Sweden sings "Tattoo" at the final of the 67th Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Liverpool. © Peter Kneffel/dpa
This year's ESC broke attendance records and was also able to score points with the younger ones. On social media, videos of the Eurovision Song Contest had millions of views.
Liverpool/Munich – The enthusiasm for the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is apparently unbroken even after 67 years: The Eurovision Song Contest 2023 broke several audience records. In Great Britain and Iceland, more people than ever before watched the spectacle – and the song contest around its final also hit the scene online. An above-average number of young people followed the colourful competition: On TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, official ESC videos had over half a billion views – and even more clips under the official hashtag.
Several viewership records broken in Europe: 99 percent of TV viewers in Iceland watch ESC
Some love the ESC, others can't 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 the organizer. That alone is not a record, but there were still one million more people than last year.
The fact that the contest took place in Liverpool this year may have had an effect on British ratings. At the final, 9.9 million people watched in front of their television sets, which corresponded to an increase of twelve percent compared to the previous year – a record in the host country. But nothing surpassed small Iceland: about 99 percent of all television viewers watched the ESC there. In Norway it was about 88 percent, in Finland 86 and in Sweden 82 percent. The audience rating in Germany was 7.4 million – about one million more than last year.
Even countries that did not participate seemed to be cheering along. The so-called "Rest of the World voting" received the most votes 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.
- Audience rating of the ESC final in all participating markets: 40.9 per cent (average of all programmes: 17.4 per cent)
- ESC final ratings among younger viewers aged 15 to 24 in all participating markets: 53.5 per cent (four times higher than average)*
Based on data from the European Broadcasting Union
Enthusiasm for the ESC spills over into the net: 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 yet it still managed to sweep the net along. The final was watched live by 7.6 million people on the video platform YouTube. "Online, the digital platforms of the Eurovision Song Contest recorded record participations," the organizer said.
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My areaKäärijä (Jere Pöyhönen) came second at the Eurovision Song Contest 2023. © Roni Rekomaa/imago
540 million views of official videos on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have been recorded, which is "almost twice as many as in 2022." According to the EBU, there were 4.8 billion views of clips with the hashtag "#Eurovision2023" on the social network TikTok alone, which is mainly used by younger people. 105 million unique accounts have been reached on TikTok, it said. The success on TikTok may not have been a 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 discover this special event and that it is a huge springboard for new music," said the so-called Executive Supervisor of the ESC, 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 world's most-streamed Spotify playlist one day after the final.
This year's winner Loreen's song "Tattoo" was streamed 4.2 million times on Spotify the day after the grand finale. The two-time ESC winner surpassed the record of the winning song "Zitti E Buoni" by Måneskin from 2021, which recorded 3.9 million streams at the time. The "ESC effect" works even for the last-place winners of this year's competition: The band Lord of the Lost from Germany made it back into the German album charts at number 2 after their performance.