ESC Covers and two facebooks (Eurovision coverage and EuroVisionMusic) launched the COVER2COVER singing competition just over a week ago. We have started promoting and advertising the competition in various ways and some artists have reacted with certain questions and it is important that we look at that.

First up, it is a COVER2COVER competition, so we are NOT interested in your original songs. They may be special to you but this is a EUROVISION cover website and so we are just interested in Eurovision covers. We do know that for the majority of South African artists, it may be difficult to know what a Eurovision song is. There are just 1605, so it is a tiny amount of songs compared to what are available worldwide. Eurovision started in 1956 so it is 65 years in the running and in the early years there were seldom more than 20 songs per year. Lately we get 40 to 42 songs a year. It is still just a fraction of songs. Now some have asked for a list of the 1605 songs – there IS NO SUCH LIST, the best we can advise people are to go to google and type in SWEDEN or SWITZERLAND or whatever name of a participating country AT EUROVISION and then you will get a list of that countries entries. GERMANY has the most, namely 65. Some countries like SLOVAKIA or CZECHIA have less than 8 and one country, MOROCCO has just 1. There is a huge difference between a EUROVISION song and a EUROPEAN song. If people struggle to know what a Eurovision song is, they can write to us and ask. I personally know all the songs since 1980 and some from 1956 to 1979. Norbert knows them all.

Another question is about the backtrack. The 14 backtracks of the songs in CATEGORY 1 are available to buy at R50 each from a company – for details go to the post we did on the launching of the competition. In CATEGORY 2, artists must have their backtracks as they recorded the songs. In category 3 we have the 12 backtracks of the EUROVISION CLASSICS and if you want to record one of those, we will send you the backtrack for free. But we had some people ask for all 12 backtracks – sorry that is not possible. You can anyway just enter a maximum of 3 songs and we only supply the backtracks if you are seriously want to record it. There are karaoke tracks available of many songs and you can use them, just remember that often the backing vocals are in English and so that limits you. But you can do a bi-lingual song, do the verses with no backing vocals in a language of your choice and the chorus in English. We love such bi-lingual songs.

We also had a question over age – there is no age limit, from 1 year to 100 years – anybody can enter.

Now Eurovision tries to be NON POLITICAL and we do not want political lyrics – such songs will be disqualified. So nothing about farm attacks or black lives matter. You can write over certain issues like Global warming or the Covid pandemic or such, but in general keep the lyrics about nice positive things.

Lastly EUROVISION has a certain tradition and since 1956 the winner has never received money – ABBA winning in 1974 got just a trophy. The winner still gets just a trophy but it is all about publicity, marketing, awareness, being seen by people, noticed by record companies etc. If you only want to enter to win money like with Idols or The Voice, then this is not for you. This competition is based on EUROVISION and its principals and we will do as much publicity as possible – and it is all for free – if you have to get this much publicity, you will have to pay people a lot of money. All three of us working on this, do it as it is our passion, our hobby, etc. I personally took part last year in a TV documentary done by YLE, the Finnish TV broadcaster. All of us who took part did it totally for free and in the end, we got a thankful and a face mask from the company. This website and the two facebooks are FAN BASED, we do not even allow advertising, so there is no money coming into the website and facebooks, We do it because we love it. We have had some artists going to EUROVISION and performing at Euro cafe, Euro club, or Euro village in the past and if that is possible, the winner will get this, but we simply do not know as yet if EUROVISION 2021 will happen in Rotterdam in May 2021 and if they will allow these places to be open. We do not make promises which we cannot keep, so that will be a bonus if it happens. But some of the stuff on Eurovision get views of like 50 million and that kind of viewing is due to the fact that around 200 million watch the Eurovision final each year. Just a few days ago we published that the Russian entry for Eurovision 2020 (which was canceled) has now 138 million views.

We will do regular updates on the COVER2COVER competition.

It was launched Saturday so today is only day 3. We have tried to inform as many South African artists as possible, but the reaction has not been what we expected. So yesterday we started contacting individually Eurovision  artists overseas and have written to 7. 2 have already replied and said they will do home lock down video. A third even already posted her video – she said she made it recently and since it is the exact song we suggested, she asked if she could enter it and we said yes. So just to clarify – we never said it had to be brand new videos. Any video of a Euro cover you had recorded since the lock down (end of March) can be entered. It cannot be a professional video. The other 4 overseas artists we have send them cover suggestions today.

Videos for categories 2 and 3 are in the planning  stages and should be available to post from next week. We have given other people a chance to do then, not just Cole van Dais who did the first one. One will be done by someone from Zimbabwe, now living here and a male will probably do category 3.