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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Eurovision is irrelevant to the US market. Those songs do not chart here.

They chart nowhere. That’s not the point. Noticing that key changes are still popular at what is one of the most popular song contest in the world is however very relevant to a discussion about the public taste.

They most certainly chart in Sweden, here's the chart from May 14th (the day after the the Eurovision finals) [1]. This is "Svensktoppen", a very long-running list of top-played Swedish songs in Swedish radio. Off the top of my head, positions 1, 3, 4 and 5 were all candidates for Eurovision (and the song in position #3 was the one that competed in Eurovision).

In Swedish, this key change is generally called a "schlagerhöjning", where "schlager" [2] is the broad genre word for the type of songs that compete in the Eurovision. The term is old, obviously there's a rather wide genre spread these days but it used to be more same-same.

Edit: added a "Swedish" above, I did not realize that the chart only lists Swedish music, saw another comment mention this. Very weird of me.

[1]: https://sverigesradio.se/topplista.aspx?programid=2023&date=...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlager_music

So what? The US has less than 5% of the global population. Pretending the other 95% of the world is "irrelevant" seems odd.

Espacially for art, since a song can have decades of success without the need to make billions on the us market.

But probably 50% of the global population listens to US music.

I don't have the numbers but I would be cautious there. Some US music is listened in other countries, but not all of it. Not everything is easily exportable.

Also there are local musicians popular in each country. And there are musicians from countries other than the US that are international but unknown in the US.

Anyway, Eurovision is quite irrelevant in Europe too :)

Edit... for native English speakers, consider this: there're songs in which the lyrics are more important than music. That kind of music is usually boring if you can't understand what they're saying.

Anecdotally, most of the music I heard when I was travelling in South America wasn't American music. Same thing with South East Asia.

Look at the Billboard (or equivalent) charts for Germany, France, Argentina, or any other non-Anglo country; maybe 10% of the entries are English language or from American artists.

This article is about US charts, so any conversation about the other 95% of the world is, by definition, irrelevant.

They don't chart that much in Europe either. Eurovision is tone deaf.

I'd rather say that what works in that huge party simply doesn't necessarily work outside of it, at least not everywhere. The ESC is still crazy successful, at 161 Million viewers this year worldwide.

At least in the UK - people are watching with a mixture of morbid fascination and ironic glee. I've never met anyone who thinks it's a valid forum for good pop music.

Is chart performance really the only marker we have left for cultural relevance?

Eurovision is hugely popular and continuously and commercially successful outside of the charts world.

It's coz everyone wants to watch a good clown fiesta, not because it has any relevance to music

I didn't know charts matter anymore.

Well shucks, maybe they should just cancel it then.

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