Even through these summer months the ESC Insight Newsletter will be looking high and low for the best Eurovision Song Contest news and delivering it straight to your inbox every fortnight. Make sure you read the latest edition, and use this link to sign up for newsletter deliveries.
In this week’s edition we review the five host city bids for Eurovision 2016 and keep up to date with the latest Eurovision event, the Young Dancers Contest from Pilzen. In addition we have Robertson’s Reflection, the regular column by Newsletter Editor Ben Robertson, which this week asks just how small can a Eurovision host city be?
Malmö was the smallest Eurovision host city in recent times, with a town population of just under 300,000 scaring off many fans to hop across to stay in downtown Copenhagen. Accommodation on the eastern side of the world famous bridge did not run out of supply despite the panicking of many fans. Malmö did benefit of allowing Eurovision take over the city and fullness of branding around the transport hubs was beyond even those recent and success Song Contests. Being brave, studies have also looked into if Iceland could host Eurovision in their adorable yet tiny capital Reykjavik, population 120,000. Finding a suitable venue would be a logistical and financial challenge, but otherwise Icelandic students were confident of making a successful and welcoming contest.
This issue is one thing that the small towns in Sweden don’t have, all have small yet functioning and perfectly appropriate ice hockey venues which would make for a perfect Eurovision spectacle. Other challenges will exist, such as the problems of holding the Contest well away from international airports and finding solutions to accommodate those hordes of fans. Iceland’s capital may be tiny but does have an active tourism business. Having been in Gävle and Linköping myself I can say that however nice enough they both are, tourist centres they are not. One may try and put up an arena in a few months, but it is harder to produce viable hotel rooms for the future that need a constant year-on-year business to survive.
Make sure to read the full newsletter on the link above and feel free to discuss below. Is it possible for the modern Eurovision to move to a tiny location away from big airports and infrastructure?