The audience arrives in one night and is gone in about three weeks. What is left afterwards depends almost entirely on decisions taken before the broadcast: which recording is the release version, whether the radio edit and the instrumental already exist as files, whether the credits and the splits are registered, and whether the artist name is spelled the same way in every metadata field. The contest is a distribution event with a fixed end date. I composed and produced "Stefania" for Kalush Orchestra in 2022 and composed "Teresa & Maria" for the 2024 entry, and the pattern after the broadcast looks the same both times.
How large is the audience, and how long does it stay?
The 2025 contest reached 166 million viewers across 37 markets, with a grand final viewing share of 47.7 percent, the highest since 2004. That is a television number, and it behaves like one. It is concentrated in a single evening, spread across three dozen countries, and it decays fast.
The chart record shows the shape clearly. "Stefania" won with 631 points and 439 from the public vote, and on the UK Singles Chart it peaked at number 38 and stayed two weeks. Two weeks. In the same period it reached number one on Ukrainian airplay, number one in Lithuania, number two in Finland, and number 85 on the Billboard Global 200. The Polish platinum certification arrived in 2024, two years after the broadcast, because certifications count accumulated activity rather than the spike.
So the honest description is a very large, very short pulse in a set of small and mid-sized markets, followed by a long tail that only exists if something is there to catch it.
Why does a large audience convert into a small amount of money?
Because the audience is counted in viewers and the income is counted in streams inside a recorded music market whose economics are public. Global recorded music revenue reached 31.7 billion dollars in 2025, up 6.4 percent, with streaming at 69.6 percent of the total. Spotify paid out 11 billion dollars in 2025, and in the same report the 100,000th highest earning artist generated a little over 7,300 dollars for the year.
Put a three-week pulse against that distribution and the arithmetic stops being mysterious. A song that spends two weeks in the thirties of one European chart and tops the airplay chart of a market of 30 million people produces a real but modest number, and it produces it once.
The same Spotify data contains the more useful fact. On average an artist sees more than half of their royalties coming from outside their home country within two years of debuting. Export is the normal condition rather than the exception. The question is not whether attention crosses borders, it is whether there is a catalogue on the other side of the attention. A contest entry with nothing behind it collects the pulse and returns to zero. A contest entry released by an artist with eight finished tracks, an instrumental set and clean credits collects the pulse and keeps a fraction of it.
What has to exist before the broadcast, not after?
This is the part that sits in the studio, and it is where most of the loss happens. The following should be finished files before the show, not requests made during the week when everyone is travelling.
- The release master, separate from the broadcast mix. 24-bit, 48 kHz, true peak ceiling at -1 dBTP, integrated loudness measured to ITU-R BS.1770 and set for the destination rather than for the meter. Broadcast and streaming are two different targets: European television works to EBU R128 at -23 LUFS, streaming services normalise around -14 LUFS, and one file cannot be optimal for both.
- A radio edit. Under 3:30, with the intro shortened rather than the last chorus removed. Programmers reject on length before they reject on taste.
- An instrumental and a version without the lead vocal. Television requests these within days, and the request always arrives when the session is packed away.
- Stems from bar one, including the silent ones, at the project sample rate, named by content.
- One ISRC per version. The radio edit, the contest version and the album version are three recordings, and giving them one code destroys the reporting that pays.
- Credits and splits registered with the performing rights organisation and written into the distributor metadata, with one spelling of every name. Two spellings of a composer name is the most common reason a royalty sits unmatched.
None of that is creative work. All of it decides whether the pulse leaves anything behind.
What is a contest version, and why is it a different record?
A contest version is an arrangement rebuilt to a three minute limit and to a stage, and it is not the same product as the release. Tempo often moves, keys move when the vocal has to survive choreography, the intro is compressed to a few bars because the camera cut arrives early, and the ending is written to land on a beat rather than to fade.
I was the sound producer of the contest version of Ziferblat's "Bird of Pray" for the 2025 entry, which Suspilne documented when the revamp was published. The general point is that a revamp is a delivery job with a hard deadline and a hard duration, and the decision that matters commercially is which of the two versions becomes the streaming release. If the contest version is the one the audience hears in May and the original is the one on the service, the pulse arrives at a record the audience does not recognise, and the retention drops.
What does export infrastructure actually do?
It opens rooms. Music Export Ukraine places artists at showcase festivals such as Eurosonic, Reeperbahn and WOMEX, runs education programmes and connects professionals to counterparts abroad. That work builds the relationships that turn a spike into bookings and licensing conversations.
What it cannot do is repair delivery. No showcase fixes a track that has no instrumental, no split sheet and two spellings of the composer name in the distributor's metadata. The two halves belong to different people and both have to be done, which is the least dramatic conclusion available and also the accurate one.
What to do with this
If a broadcast is coming, treat the file list above as the deadline rather than the show. The verified list of records behind this is on the [credits page](/credits.html), with a source for every role, and more on how I work is on the [about page](/about.html).