The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual international song competition, first held in 1956 in Switzerland, that brings together contestants from various European countries and beyond. The contest's popularity has since skyrocketed, with over 200 million viewers tuning in each year to watch performances that showcase Europe's top musical talent and creativity. The 2023 edition of the contest will mark its 68th iteration, and is set to be held in the Spanish city of Valencia. The contest is expected to include performers, songwriters, and producers from over 40 countries, each vying for the coveted title of Eurovision Song Contest champion. While the event will be held in Valencia's Palacio de Congresos, it is set to be a national affair, with each of Spain's 17 autonomous communities involved in various aspects of the planning and production.

Published annually since 2008 "The Complete & Independent Guide to the Eurovision Song Contest" contains every statistic imaginable. This new edition for 2023 has 330 pages of historical records and analysis of voting, divided into four parts: Section 1: Qualification for Eurovision for the current year. We look at each country's qualification process, whether by internal selection or by nation competition. Where a national broadcaster has held a competition to select their artist and song, we give details of how the competition was organised, the points or voting percentages given to the top 3 and a brief profile of the winning performer. We also give QR code links to the official videos. Section 2: In this section we focus on this year's Contest in Liverpool. We full details of the writers and composers of each song, followed by full voting tables for each semi-final and the final, split into public and jury voting. Then there is a round-by-round record of the scoreboard to show how each country moved up and down the leaderboard as the points are announced both for the jury points and the always exciting public televote points. Section 3: Here's where the data really gets crunched. Starting with a full year by year record of each country's entries, the section moves on to records such as most successful & least successful countries, whether internally selected artists do better than those who qualify through national competitions, winning margins, how well (and more commonly, how badly) the Big 5 perform, languages songs have been performed in and which type of act generally does best, we do a deep dive into complex statistical analysis & include data on average points received for each position in the running order since 1975, the closest & most one-sided voting relationships, how points awarded by juries differ from those given by the public, geographical and bloc voting and finally every country's voting record in every Contest - If you're curious about whether some countries always favour others, this is the section for you! Appendix: Contest Details and Voting Record. A full record of every Contest since 1956. For each year we list the artists, the songwriters & composers. Then the points awarded by each country to each performer in table format. We include the semi-final details for each year since they were introduced. A complete record of every point awarded.

Get ready to sing your heart out because the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 is back and Liverpool is ready to host the most colourful and upbeat music competition in the world! Liverpool is the birthplace of legendary bands like The Beatles, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Atomic Kitten, so it's no wonder why it's the perfect city to host this event. But Liverpool is not just about music, it's a vibrant and historic city with a rich maritime history and a thriving arts scene, making it one of the top tourist destinations in the UK. We've got you covered with a guide that will help you explore all the must-see attractions in Liverpool, from the exciting arena location map and seating plan to the top ten activities that will keep you entertained before and after the show. Whether you're travelling by road, rail, or air, we've also included useful travel information to make your journey to the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 in Liverpool a breeze. So get ready for a unforgettable experience in one of the most exciting cities in the world!

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest examines how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective. Established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is the world's largest popular music event and one of the most popular television programmes in Europe, currently attracting a global audience of around 200 million people. Eurovision is often mocked as cultural kitsch because of its over-the-top performances and frivolous song lyrics. Yet there is no cultural medium that connects Europeans more than popular music, the development of which has always been tied to cultural, economic, political, social and technological change – making Eurovision the ideal tool to explain the history of Europe in the last sixty years. This book uses Eurovision as a vehicle to address topics ranging from the Cold War, liberal democracy and communism to nationalism, European integration, economic prosperity and human rights. It analyses these subjects through their cultural, political and social relationships with Eurovision entries as expressed through lyrics and music, as well as by examining public debates that have accompanied the selection of the entries and the organisation of the contest itself. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest also considers how states have used Eurovision to define their identities in a European context, be it to assert their national distinctiveness, highlight political issues or affirm their Europeanism or Euroscepticism in the context of European integration. Based on original sources, including hitherto unpublished archival documents from international broadcasting organisations, this is a novel historical study of interest to anyone keen to know more about the postwar history of Europe and its cultural history in particular.

This book uses the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), as an analytical entry point to understand and illuminate post-War Europe and the drive to create an identity that can legitimise the European project in its broadest sense. The ESC presents an idealised vision of Europe, and this has long existed in a strained relationship with reality. While the trajectory of post-war European integration is a high-profile topic, we believe that the ESC offers a unique and innovative way to think about the role of culture in the history of post-War European integration and tensions between the ideal and reality of European unity. Through the series of case studies that make up the chapters in this book, analysis brings these interlinked tensions to light, exploring the roles of culture and identity, alongside and a productive conversation with the political and economic projects of post-war European integration.

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion explores human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used and judged. ‘Guerrilla’ is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict and confrontation. Guerrilla Music provocatively explores research involving music practices, stories, communities and musickers worldwide that resist, defy and subvert by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. Contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal and universal highlight the potency, passions, actions and life worlds of music, musicians and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation and difference by exploring the social semiotics of music making and communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, and what musicking means in the twenty-first century.