Changes to Voting

It seems as though a lot of voters seem to be voting in very predictable ways. It looks as though people are actually voting for big names or certain genres over actual songs. One certain genre always seems to attract votes whilst other genres don't seem to have a look in. When you vote you should pay attention too all the songs, there are some really brilliant songs people are entering in the contest, but they don't seem to do as well because they're not of a certain genre or the artist is not a big name. This contest is a SONG contest and not a popularity contest. The results of the voting have become something that the contest itself does not stand for.

I completely appreciate that different tastes do come in to a play and I do want all participants to express this. So I spent a lot of time trying to think how the results could be changed and to make sure that people thinking outside the box would get the points they deserve. So here are some of the changes that will be made in the next contest;

• The Final will go back to 15/16 Participants. The main reason it was originally this way was to encourage voters to listen to all the songs and vote in their preference. This edition I changed this as people complained about not having enough space sin the final for semi-finalists. Clearly people did not listen to all the songs or be willing to be open-minded in the voting. I gave the chance to see if this could work and it didn't.
• The semi-finals will be purely participants voting, non-qualifiers from the previous contest will be put into the same heat to ensure that people who did not qualify from the last contest will have a good chance the next time round.
• Final chance; 2 finalists will be chosen by finalist voters, the other 2 will be chosen by jury.
• The final will be 50% voters 50% juries. The voters will hold full power of their votes and give the 12 - 1 points like normal. Juries will be giving their points in shares of the total given by voters based on jury percentage. For example if we had 23 voters and the total was 276, the country that got 10% of the jury vote would get 28 points (27.6). 
• The juries will rank ALL the songs, so every single song in the final will be given points by the jury.
• The jury points will be shown in the email sent to participants with the results. The jury votes will unfortunately cannot be put into the voting slideshow, but once you've seen the jury vote and the slideshow you will also have a link in the email to see the combined votes and rankings.

We hope that these changes will see some fairer results and also make the voting procedure more exciting. We look forward to trying out the new format.

If you have any concerns or comments, please contact us at songfestival@hotmail.co.uk