The Age of Authenticity: How Rent-A-Song Died Its Painful Death

If you were to grab a time machine, find me a few weeks after last year’s contest and say that in 2023 Azerbaijan would send a song to Eurovision that not only did not have any Swedish/Dream Team writers but actively had four new Azeri writers, I would probably dismiss you as some sort of fabulist. But the fact the country best known for pilfering other countries’ songwriters is one of the many countries who have sent an entirely domestic and brand new set of songwriters to the contest tells you enough about the seachange that has been seen in the contest in recent years – a turn away from the rent-a-songs of old and a turn towards more authenticity.

If we look at the songs from this year, only three of the songs do not have the actual singer or a band member credited in the lyrics or music – firstly, Albania is written by two Albanian songwriters, one of whom has a previous credit for writing “Ktheju Tokes”.

The other two who stand out here for reasons I will go into are Switzerland and Cyprus. Switzerland is written by a team of three songwriters, none of whom are Swiss – Ashley Hicklin, an Englishman, has credits on a total of seven Eurovision songs so far, including songs for Belgium, Lithuania, Spain and Austria. Mikołaj Trybulec of Poland is the second writer with past credits, having written two songs for Poland (including this year’s entry Solo) and a song for the Czech Republic. Switzerland are not exactly a newcomer when it comes to outsourcing their Eurovision writers from abroad or finding songs written by Eurovision veterans – the likes of She Got Me and Tout L’Univers come to mind.

The second song with zero connection to its songwriter is Cyprus’s “Break A Broken Heart” – and between the four songwriters, none of which are Cypriot, there are TWELVE past Eurovision credits – including songs for Sweden, San Marino, Andorra, Germany and Denmark. The writers are also notably all Scandinavian. In case you can’t get what I’m inferring here, it’s almost definitely a song that was taken from Melfest and bought in here. Then again, Cyprus aren’t exactly known for their artistic originality in the contest – last year their entry had TEN writers. Ten. I shit you not.

Anyway, if you’re noticing one pattern here: neither of these two entries are expected to do particularly well in this contest – as it stands, both have win odds of anywhere between 150/1 to 300/1. There’s not a very strong amount of noise being made about them and it’s likely both will place solidly midtable, never to be spoken about again. However, the current runaway favourite to win is Sweden’s song “Tattoo” by former Eurovision alum Loreen. The song’s six-strong team of writers (including Loreen) has almost TWENTY past credits, the majority of which belong to Eurovision’s answer to the town bike, Thomas G:Son. I suppose the songwriting cabal of Swedes has to start somewhere, and it makes sense that in an industry where this is the strongest type of music, only Sweden can succeed with these songwriters. The rule is less “no Swedish songs”, more “no Swedish imports”. Perhaps this is down to the fact Swedish writer are likely to send their better songs to Mello to stake it out there, and provide their weaker efforts to other countries.

If you look at 2012, ten years before the most recent contest and take a look at the top 10: only two of those top 10 songs were songs that were both written by their artist and did not contain any past or future Eurovision credits in their songwriter’s books – those being Albania (consistently a chamber of originality in this contest, and holding a national final that won’t allow for rent-a-song content to get a foothold) and Turkey, who have absconded from the contest. Sweden was written by G:Son and co, Russia’s baking grannies had no role in their song and the writer wrote prominently for Russia and Belarus through the 2000s, Serbia was co-written by someone who now has three separate writing credits in Eurovision, and Azerbaijan and Spain were both straight up imported in from Sweden. Hell, even ITALY, the hosts of one of the most impenetrable national finals in Sanremo, sent a song written by Nina Zilli and.. four foreign writers, some of whom went on to write a string of mediocre entries. Aside from that, some less egregious examples include the fact that Estonia was co-written by its artist and someone with credits on a 2004 entry and Germany was written by three Brits, one of whom went on to write Ireland’s 2016 entry, Sunlight. Ew.

Compare this to 2022’s top 10 – NINE out of the top 10 songs were co-written by their artist and did not feature any previous Eurovision songwriters (barring those who had written their own past entries). The only exception to this rule was Spain, but even then it was one songwriter of five who had a credit on the previous year’s Spanish entry so it’s nowhere as egregious. The winners, Ukraine’s folk-rap “Stefania”, was entirely written by Kalush Orchestra members, and the runner up from the UK featured a song written by Sam Ryder and two domestic songwriters. The rest of the top 10 featured only the artists and brand new songwriters. Yes, even Sweden had only novices. Yes, even the novelty entry from Norway was entirely new! Of course there were a few rent-a-songs, but they did not do well – Poland’s “River” fared the best of these, pulling 12th place. Azerbaijan’s “Fade To Black” received an incredible 0 points in the televote and likely would not have been in the final if not for some votebuying from the ever-ethical Azeri delegation. The previously-mentioned Cyprus with its ten songwriters failed to qualify, so if we take Azerbaijan’s actual justified result this would give the once-mighty rent-a-song cabal a 1/3 qualification record! Pretty terrible really.

Even if we look at 2021 – songs like Zitti e Buoni, Voilá, 10 Years and Shum succeeded while being authentic and written by their artists, thus forging a stronger connection which made the juries and televoters alike flock to them strongly. At the other end of the table, songs like Amen and The Ride failed to clear the hurdles set for them in the semi finals, while El Diablo, Mata Hari and Adrenalina (songs written by a litany of foreign rent-a-song writers) ALL underperformed expectations horrifically, even in spite of the placement of Flo Rida on the latter. The only one of these songs to perform well was Moldova’s “Sugar”, but let’s be sincere here, that’s only because of the purchased votes.

The moral of the story really seems to be that giving singers a chance to write their own songs and bring in songwriters from the country’s music industry is the way forward. Unless you’re the Swedish delegation, in which case just keep doing what you’re doing.