ETNW 2013 - The rules

Welcome again to the Eurovision That Never Was 2013! Submissions still haven't opened, but you might want to read all this before you send me your entry in any case...

For those of you who still have no idea what ETNW is about, well... have you ever heard a song and thought “That sounds just like the kind of thing Israel would have entered in the early 90s/Andorra would have come up with had they been taking part in 1987/Poland would have sent to Baku if they were still in it”? If so, this is your chance to see whether others agree with you.

The fourth edition of ETNW will have the same set-up as the previous three, more or less, but entry requirements have changed slightly. (See below.) And if this doesn’t cover everything, ask me and I’ll answer. And let everyone else know, too, on the MB. If need be :)

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1. Songs from any country and any year can be entered for any country and any year.

2. Songs can be in any language and any length.

3. No songs that have taken part in Eurovision or a national selection process.

4. No cover versions.

5. Singers may have taken part in a national selection process but not taken part in Eurovision itself.

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And now the explanations…

Above all else, remember that the idea of ETNW is to enter songs that make people go "hmmm, that really does sound like something Iceland might have entered in 1959!" or "yep, I can see Ukraine picking something like that in 2001". The more plausible your combination – a French song recorded in 1988 being entered as Monaco 1989, for example, as opposed to, say, a song in Maltese recorded in 2010 being submitted as Latvia 1970 – the more likely it is that voters will view it as ‘authentic’.

That, of course, is the big unwritten rule of ETNW: when you vote, it’s not [just] about what you do or don’t like, but [also] what you think comes across as most authentic based on the year and country a song’s been allocated to. True, it’s subjective, and some people have struggled with it a bit in previous contests, but last year’s results in particular showed that most were happy to embrace the idea. Like it or not, it is the point of the contest.

Well, one of them. The other main one is that although it’s designed to find songs that feel like they could have been Eurovision entries, ETNW as a contest – like all MB contests, really – still encourages ‘new’ music. So while the earlier rules about ‘no Eurovision composers’ and ‘no national final singers’ have been dropped, I’d recommend you look for something that’s totally unconnected to ESC but would still fit rather than something (or someone) closely connected to it that just never made it.

And just to clarify point #5 of the rules, I’m drawing the line at ESC performers as credited on screen or forming part of a duo/group/whatever as credited. I’d still prefer it if your singer never made it onto an ESC stage at all, but if they were Obscure Backing Vocalist #3 for Croatia in Tallinn in 2002 or whatever and that’s their only claim to ESC fame (apart from a million national final appearances), I won't kick up a fuss. Of course, the voters might… ;)

Submission aren’t yet open, but this is what you’ll eventually need to send me:

1. An MP3 of your entry
2. The name of your song and singer
3. The year and country you’re allocating it to
4. Your MB nickname
5. NEW! A bio for your entry following a standard template which I'll post separately.

(These bios will be posted when each semi-final/final goes live and will give you a chance to provide some background to your entry as well as to explain why you think it's a good fit. See the next post though for more details.)

And that's about it till submissions open. Until then… start trawling through those MP3s!