title image: Official Eurovision YouTube account

Weird, isn’t it? It’s the first day of rehearsals for the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, and yet there’s a certain quiet in the air in the online Eurovision fan community. No endless hammering of the “refresh” button on multiple blog sites, no short video montages to analyse, no photo galleries to dissect for every minuscule staging insight they might reveal. There’s not even much in the way of social media content to sift through (though that’s partly due to Elon Musk having successfully turned Twitter/X into a tedious hellscape of AI bots and real fascists).

With even more restrictions in place than in recent years, all we’re getting on these first days of the ESC 2025 rehearsals is an official Reddit blog from the Eurovision team – not even on eurovision.tv itself! – and some sporadic behind-the-scenes TikTok videos that provide a bit of colour and context rather than any meaningful insights into what’s happening on stage. This is ostensibly a response to concerns about artist welfare in the light of last year’s chaos in particular, but it’s also the logical extension of a “less is more” trend that’s been underway since the contest resumed following the pandemic-induced break in proceedings in 2020.

And you know what? Good.

It’s actually nice to have to use our imagination to fill in the gaps for once, and it’s certainly nice to think that there’ll still be some staging surprises left in store by the time we get to the first semi-final a week on Tuesday. It’s not quite like the olden days, and nor should we want it to be, but it’s quite refreshing in its own way.

Admittedly, that’s easy for us to say. We’ve always been more fond of the written word anyway; escgo! and its predecessor esc-chat.com were never ones for engaging in the mad dash from the arena to the press centre to be the first site to upload a rehearsal video, although we always respected the commitment (and physical stamina) that particular competition required. And the gradual clampdown on press accreditation for fan media in recent years has, in any case, coincided with developments in our personal lives – and I speak for Felix and Shi too – that have made us considerably less able or likely to dedicate two weeks to the hustle and bustle of the press centre anyway. Even though, again speaking for all three of us, we have very many happy memories of having done so in the past, and the opportunity was always something we gratefully seized.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there is a – predominantly younger, predominantly online – fandom that’s eager to consume every single morsel of ESC-related information and share their opinion in a matter of nanoseconds. And it’s easy to feel a little sorry for them having far less to work with over the coming week than they might be used to. But you know what? We reckon they’ll cope, and the speculation and anticipation for the upcoming contest will be undimmed.

It helps that the Eurovision team have engaged a descriptive writer for their blogs who’s capable of being entertaining and providing actual information without resorting to bland platitudes. Crucial insights into the size of KAJ’s “opening sausage”? Pyro updates accompanied by fire emojis? Posts about the meat loaf they had for lunch and other silly things like we used to include in our own press centre coverage? Yes please. That will do nicely. And if the end result is a calmer, less eventful contest and a crop of artists who are a bit happier and less stressed out at the end of it all, well, we can’t really argue with that.

Of course, we’ll still be engaging in some of the usual speculation and analysis as the shows approach – after all, you don’t need actual content for that…