ISSUE
By Ella Jackson
Since 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has provided Europe with a stage on which nations perform themselves through music. At once a political project and a flamboyant variety show, Eurovision invites divergent modes of listening. Some hear the music through the lens of current Europe, while others simply engage in an occasion for ritualized Schadenfreude: the guilty pleasure of watching a nation rack up a grand total of “nul points.” What has remained relatively consistent is Eurovision’s reputation as a kitschy parade of tacky music overshadowed by extravagant staging. Such judgments often rely on a familiar cultural narrative of decline. Popular music has long been said to be getting worse, as Theodor W. Adorno already argued in his essay “On Popular Music” (1941), written during the rise of consumer culture. He lamented that popular music was “predigested” and built from interchangeable formulas that produced the illusion of novelty while remaining structurally predictable. As Eurovision has evolved alongside the growth of mass media and entertainment industries, the performances it has offered have increasingly combined standardized song structures with elaborate visual spectacle.[1] One might reminisce about the apparent candidness of earlier Eurovision performances, such as Germany’s 1982 winning entry, “Ein Bisschen Frieden,” which required little more than a barefoot singer, a white guitar, and a peaceful message. Today, it appears that the visual might outweigh the musical, as most performances rely heavily on backup dancers, flame jets, and fireworks, as seen in Germany’s provisional 2026 entry, “Fire.”
Similar anxieties of decline are often projected onto Europe itself. In contemporary political discourse, Europe is regularly portrayed as entering a period of “managed decline” amid crises such as Brexit, the renewed presence of war on the continent, and ongoing debates over migration and nationalism (e.g., Geuss 2005; Ergen and Schmitz 2025). Commentators describe Europe as facing geopolitical fragmentation and diminished global influence, while public opinion surveys suggest growing pessimism among Europeans about the continent’s future (European Commission 2026). As a widely consumed annual show, Eurovision is a convenient site onto which these parallel anxieties about cultural and political decline can be projected.
With these anxieties in mind, I conducted a harmonic analysis of all Eurovision winning songs since the start of the contest and discovered a striking musical shift over time. Earlier winners overwhelmingly rely on major-like tonalities combined with themes of celebration and unity. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, Eurovision’s winning songs increasingly project minor-like aesthetics.[2] “Major” and “minor” keys are basic categories in Western music used to describe a song’s tonal character or tonality. Without going into technical detail, major keys are often associated with brighter or more stable sounds, while minor keys are often heard as darker, more introspective, and unstable. But these categories are not fixed, with many musical traditions, such as the blues, routinely mingling major and minor elements and producing more complex tonal affects. Still, precisely because these broad categories remain widely legible to listeners, they provide a useful lens for examining Eurovision trends.
Between 1956 and 1999, roughly 77 percent of Eurovision’s winning songs are major-like. Since 2000, that proportion has reversed, with approximately 75 percent of winners exhibiting minor-like tonalities. At first glance, this shift seems to confirm the very narratives of decline that often surround both popular music and Europe itself. If minor keys are heard as sad or melancholic within a contest built on spectacle and celebration, their growing prominence can feel like evidence that Eurovision has traded the carefree “fun” of postwar Europe for self-serious drama in the twenty-first century. But the relationship between musical tonality and emotional meaning is far from straightforward. Major does not simply mean happy, nor minor sad.[3] Nor does contemporary pop’s self-serious emotional intensity signal artistic decline. These associations are cultural conventions shaped by listening habits, aesthetic expectations, and musical traditions. Rather than simply accepting or dismissing such heuristic listening, I suggest that what I term the “minor turn” invites us to ask why this affective aesthetic now resonates so strongly within Eurovision.
Drawing on my systematic listening of Eurovision’s 72 winning songs from 1956 to 2025, I first document the tonal reversal and then consider several developments that may help explain it: the rise of televoting and the politics of musical authenticity, broader trends in global pop music, and Eurovision’s expansion into a wider musical geography after the Cold War. Thus, this article both relies on heuristic listening of minor songs and provides structural explanations for the tonal shift observed. Such an approach exposes how evolving musical conventions, audience perception, and the contest’s structure interact. Furthermore, while musical key remains informative, it works alongside lyrical themes, visual staging, and musical texture to shape a song’s affective impact. For this reason, I treat major and minor tonalities less as discrete sonic categories than multisensory experiences. What occurs over time, then, is not simply a move from “happy” to “sad” but a transformation in how optimism itself is expressed.
Hearing the “Minor Turn”: Method and Limits
Because the contest was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19 but produced four winners in the tied results of 1969, the dataset contains 72 winning songs in total for 69 iterations of the competition. I classified each song as broadly major-like or minor-like. The qualifier “-like” is necessary because popular music does not always operate within the strict major/minor distinctions of Western classical tonal theory. Popular music frequently operates more flexibly and in what we call “modes,” which can function affectively as major or minor-like. Many Eurovision songs draw on modal scales or move fluidly between tonal centers. It is common, for example, for minor-like verses to alternate with major choruses, or for melodies and chord progressions to imply different tonal “homes.” My listening revealed that some songs deliberately blur these boundaries through modal mixture or deceptive cadences. For this reason, my categorization began with harmony-based listening.
In many cases the tonal character of a song was relatively clear. However, when harmony alone looked indefinite, additional musical and performative features were considered. These included genre conventions, lyrical themes, staging tone, key changes, and tonal stability across sections of the song. Together these elements often indicated the dominant tonal affect of the performance. A few examples illustrate this approach. The Netherlands’ 1975 winner “Ding-A-Dong” conveys an upbeat and reassuring message about singing through sorrow, yet it is harmonically grounded in A minor. Because the tonal center remains stable throughout, I classified it as minor-like, despite its cheerful subject. Spain’s 1968 winner “La La La” is less harmonically consistent, featuring minor-like verses contrasted with bright major choruses. Because the song ultimately resolves harmonically into a major ending with an uplifting key-change, I classified it as predominantly major-like. In cases where tonal dominance was less clear, additional factors such as lyrical theme, staging, and overall affect helped determine the overall tonal character. For example, Luxembourg’s 1983 winner “Si la vie est un cadeau” combines balanced minor verses and major choruses, but its reflective lyrics frame life as a fragile, conditional gift shaped by uncertainty and emotional complexity. In such cases, I categorized the song as predominantly minor-like, as its affective orientation aligns more closely with minor-associated expressive conventions. This approach inevitably simplifies the complexities of popular music harmony. My classification therefore does not pretend to be objective in a music-theoretical sense but identifies the dominant tonal feeling of major or minor in each song. The categories used here should thus be understood as heuristic rather than definitive. Their purpose is not to provide a complete harmonic analysis of each entry but to reveal broader patterns across Eurovision’s musical history. Similar observations have begun to appear outside academic research. For example, a journalistic analysis of Eurovision finalists reports that minor keys were rare in early decades but became dominant after the early 2000s, accounting for a majority of entries in most years since 2005 (Jones 2025). Such analyses typically rely on automated musical metadata, which assign each song a single global key (major or minor) based on audio feature extraction. While useful for identifying broad trends, this approach does not account for the flexibility in key, ambiguity, or structural mixture that frequently characterizes popular music. The present analysis therefore adopts a key classification that is informed by close listening and interpretive approaches to tonal mixture.
Televoting: Connecting with the Home Voter
The “minor turn” coincides with several rule modifications implemented at Eurovision in the years around 2000. For example, in 1999, language restrictions were lifted, allowing singers to perform in any language, real, imagined, or mixed. The in-house orchestra was abolished, leading to performers being accompanied by backing tracks for the first time. But the most pertinent change might be in the voting systems. Until 1996, results were determined exclusively by national juries composed of music professionals and selected “expert” citizens. Thereafter, several countries experimented with televoting. By the early 2000s, public voting became widespread; and since 2009, Eurovision has operated under a 50/50 combined jury and televote system. The competitive singer must now consider the home voter.
Scholars have discussed the shift in music consumption from collective, public contexts toward more individualized listening practices, as well as transformations in how music is mediated and experienced (e.g., O’Hara and Brown 2006; Bull 2007; Dibben 2016). Eurovision, too, became something streamed on laptops, phones, and television screens in private spaces. When audiences vote directly, performers must appeal to them not only through musical competence but through displays of vulnerability and authenticity. Songs that feel emotionally immediate, confessional, or personal may be more likely to resonate with dispersed audiences who encounter them (Dibben 2016). Particularly because a song “represents” a country, these emotional narratives can invite viewers to identify or sympathize with the nation behind the performance.
Of course, “authenticity” is a quality listeners ascribe to a performance, often tied to perceptions of sincerity and emotional credibility rather than any intrinsic musical property (Moore 2002). Still, certain musical features have historically come to signal emotional depth in popular music. Matthew D. Morrison demonstrates that many of the aesthetic features Anglo-American popular culture associates with emotional authenticity originate in Black expressive traditions (2019). These traditions circulated widely through commercial popular music, often through processes of appropriation that unfolded within unequal racial structures. In other words, what contemporary audiences recognize as “authentic” in pop music is deeply connected to performance practices forged through Black musical labor and suffering. In this sense, the introspective or complex associations attached to songs that avoid predictable harmonies or juxtapose conflicting tonal centers can be traced to expressive conventions developed in Black musical traditions. Minor-like tonalities often carry this quality, resisting the teleology of uncomplicated affirmation. Even songs that are predominantly written in major keys frequently introduce darker harmonic colors that complicate the emotional tone of the music. Borrowing from minor-like aesthetics can lend a performance an air of seriousness or maturity. With the shift to televoting, Eurovision performers adopted Anglo-American musical cues associated with emotional sincerity, using authenticity as an effective strategy of appeal. For viewers unfamiliar with a country’s language, politics, or cultural context, such signals offer a clear point of connection and surely play a decisive role in securing votes.
The Global Grammar of Europop
If Eurovision’s “minor turn” does partly reflect the contest’s growing alignment with global pop aesthetics, we might compare Eurovision trends with Anglo-American musical trends. Consider the rock ‘n’ roll features in the song that earned Yugoslavia the victory in 1989, the swing qualities in Norway’s 1985 win “La det swinge,” the distinctly American-inflected vocal delivery in the performance by Sweden’s winner Måns Zelmerlöw (2016), or the occasional and awkward incorporation of rap. More generally, studies of Anglo-American pop music suggest a similar “minor turn” there. In the 1960s, roughly 85 percent of hit songs were written in major keys, whereas by the early twenty-first century that proportion had fallen to approximately 40 percent (Schellenberg and von Scheve 2012). Eurovision’s growing preference for minor-like tonalities therefore mirrors a broader shift already taking place in global popular music. In fact, this broader trend appears even more pronounced in Eurovision, likely because of its institutional dynamics of televoting and the demand for emotional immediacy within a framework of national representation.
At the same time, Eurovision does not simply reproduce trends in American pop but attempts to celebrate local and continental forms of Europeanness. The global aesthetic markers of pop are repackaged in local traditions, giving rise to what some have termed Europop. Emerging most prominently in the 1970s, Europop showcases national styles absorbed into a cosmopolitan European sound. At Eurovision, singable refrains, oompah-based Schlager, and non-sensical hooks such as “Ding-a-Dong” (Netherlands, 1975), “Boom Bang-A-Bang” (UK, 1969), or “La La La” (Spain, 1968) dominate the stage during that time. Paul Morley calls Europop “the sound of comfy living” for relatively affluent Europeans (Morley 1990, quoted in Raykoff 2020, 108). Europop indeed signals middle-class comfort, unity, and celebration. In doing so, it negotiates a delicate balance between global pop conventions and local cultural identity. A Eurovision song must sound contemporary enough to circulate internationally while still drawing on something recognizably European.
Still, as Eurovision participates in global pop, it also inherits the listening conventions attached to that repertoire. As Morrison suggests, these conventions are not neutral (2019). In adopting them, Eurovision reproduces some of the racial inequalities embedded in Anglo-American pop. The contest has rarely foregrounded Black performers, and Estonia’s 2001 winner, Dave Benton, is the only Black champion to date. Sounds that originated in other, often Black, musical traditions—rock ’n’ roll, swing, rap, or minor-inflected tonal languages—are absorbed into the messaging of Europop, where they are repackaged within a largely white and middle-class vision of Europe. A parallel logic of incorporation operates in the post–Cold War period along an East–West axis, as sounds marked as “other” to Western Europe are folded into the contest.
Expansion and the Changing Sound of Europe
The comfortable and optimistic vision of postwar Europe became more complicated as the contest expanded its geographic scope. In fact, the “minor turn” coincided with Eurovision’s rapid inclusion of new participants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia joined in 1993, followed by Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, and Slovakia in 1994. Latvia entered in 2000, Ukraine in 2003, Bulgaria and Moldova in 2005, and the Czech Republic, Georgia, Montenegro, and Serbia in 2007. The imagined Europe that Eurovision stages thus became larger and more politically and culturally heterogeneous.
The expanding musical geography of the contest has introduced new stylistic influences. Many Balkan and Eastern European popular styles draw on modal and minor-inflected folk traditions, which occasionally surface in Eurovision entries, especially in instrumental interludes. Often, while the chorus remains in a major key and legible through global pop conventions, the underlining riffs and instrumental interjections reference local sounds, predominantly in what Western music theory classes as minor modes. Turkey’s 2003 winning song “Everyway That I Can” incorporates traditional-sounding motifs—albeit alongside an unusual attempt at rap; Serbia’s 2007 winning entry “Molitva” evokes the melodic contours of Balkan ballad traditions; and Russia’s 2008 song “Believe” similarly draws on darker harmonic colors than the bright major-key Europop of earlier decades. These examples do not suggest that Eastern European music is inherently “minor” or “sad,” but they do illustrate how Eurovision’s expansion has introduced new modal and stylistic influences into the contest’s sound.
The thematic landscape also became more varied around the time of this geographic expansion. At least on the surface, Eurovision lyrics appear “darker,” perhaps even “sadder.” As Figure 2 illustrates, earlier Eurovision winners overwhelmingly paired stable major tonalities with “light” lyrical themes of love, celebration, hope, nostalgia, or peace. After 2000, an increasing number of songs featured breakup narratives, identity struggles, desire, war, and fear. However, this shift should not be interpreted as an uncomplicated move from optimism to pessimism. While Figure 2 captures a clear redistribution of thematic categories, it does not account for how these themes are articulated. The relationship between tonality and affect remains complex: minor does not inherently signal sadness. And many recent winners, such as “Rise Like a Phoenix” (Austria, 2014) or “The Code” (Switzerland, 2024), frame personal struggle within narratives of resilience or transformation. What changes, then, is less the presence of optimism than the way this optimism is expressed. Particularly in the 70s and 80s, Eurovision songs often communicated optimism through dance and sing-along choruses, whereas more recent songs tend to frame hope through personal vulnerability, conflict, or emotional complexity. The gradual disappearance of the famous Eurovision “la la la” chorus trope, dated to around the year 2000 (Jones 2025), further underscores this transition from collective and immediately legible expressions of optimism to more interiorized and emotionally complex performances of hope.
Newer or smaller nations participating in Eurovision often approach the contest as an opportunity to narrate themselves before a global audience. While the “Big Five” [4] automatically qualify for the finals, other countries may perceive higher stakes in competing. In 2007, Serbia won with a solemn prayer, while Russia won in 2008 with calls for hope and resilience in times of turmoil. Ukraine has won repeatedly drawing on emotionally charged narratives: desire in 2004, historical trauma in Jamala’s 2016 lament “1944,” and maternal love in 2022. However, those newer participants are not the only ones part of this trend, as well-established countries in the contest have joined in with break-up songs such as “Tattoo” (Sweden, 2023), “Arcade” (Netherlands, 2019), “Only Teardrops” (Denmark, 2013), “Wasted Love” (Austria, 2025), or “Amar Pelos Dois” (Portugal, 2017), which foreground personal vulnerability. Taken together, these musical and thematic shifts help contextualize Eurovision’s “minor turn.” The expansion of the contest to new participants has allowed for new stylistic influences and narrative perspectives to be introduced that diversify Eurovision’s sound world. Audiences interpret these sounds through familiar listening conventions that associate minor-like tonalities with emotional depth or seriousness. The “minor turn” therefore emerges not simply as a musical change but as the product of several interacting forces: an expanding musical geography, evolving narrative strategies of national representation, and culturally learned habits of listening.
The Minor Turn Reconsidered
It is difficult not to hear this tonal shift through the lens of a Europe negotiating shifting borders, political tension, and renewed violence. The “minor turn” becomes audible around the turn of the twenty-first century, which is precisely when Eurovision expanded eastward, and global trends started relying increasingly on minor-like aesthetics. So, at first glance, the increasing presence of minor-like tonalities might appear to confirm narratives of fragmentation, conflict, or cultural pessimism. But, although I am often tempted by these generational impressions of cultural and political decline, I argue against them here.
Indeed, the evidence presented here suggests a more nuanced interpretation. Eurovision’s tonal shift coincides not only with geopolitical change but also with transformations in the contest itself: the rise of televoting, the influence of global pop aesthetics, and the expansion of Eurovision’s musical geography. Minor-like tonalities increasingly provide a vocabulary for emotional complexity, personal storytelling, and stylistic hybridity. The contest has adapted to new audiences, new musical influences, and new forms of national self-presentation. The winning Eurovision songs are becoming increasingly complex: harmonically, thematically, and affectively. Of course, the iconic Europop “garbage” persists—and I sincerely hope it does! Campness, singability, and unapologetic kitsch remain essential to Eurovision’s charm. But recent Eurovision winners do not simply recycle the past. They absorb new aesthetics, political stakes, and modes of emotional expression. Eurovision still glitters in a minor key.
Ella Jackson is a PhD student in critical studies in music and sound at the University of Virginia. She holds a first-class BA in music from the University of Oxford (St John’s College) and studies the intersection of sound, identity, and power, with a particular focus on music’s role in mass politics and ideology.
Notes
[1] For broader discussions of Eurovision’s relationship to the culture industry, American musical influence, and debates around musical sameness and value, see Raykoff (2020), 82-108.
[2] For a general sense of the distinction between major and minor keys, compare the major key song “Do-Re-Mi” (“Doe, a deer…”) from The Sound of Music with songs such as “Hotel California” (Eagles) or “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (Eurythmics), which are in minor.
[3] For more on the major/minor identification and its associations, see Tagg, 2014.
[4] France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, as the European Broadcasting Union’s largest financial contributors, are referred to as the “Big Five.”
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