Last year's Eurovision Song Contest was watched by around 163 million viewers, meaning there are potentially just as many different opinions on what the perfect performance should be.
Is the right path an emotional ballad, filled with messages of love and peace that will surely bring tears to Europe's eyes?
Or is a better choice a forced, glamorous performance, complete with seductive variations of traditional costumes and a stage spectacle that makes the entire continent (and Australia) dance in their living rooms?
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Perfect song
Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, United States (USA), analyzed hundreds of Eurovision finalists and identified two dominant musical styles.
One is the so-called Euro-madhouse - fast-paced songs (more than 120 beats per minute), with a pronounced drum beat and synth-pop arrangements, such as Sweden's winning songs Euphoria (Lorin, 2012.) i Heroes (Mons Selmerlev, 2015.).
The second is a slow ballad, usually around 70 beats per minute, like the Portuguese victory song. Love for Two Salvador Sobral, 2017 and Arcade Dutch representative Duncan Laurence, who won in 2019.
There is a cliché that Eurovision songs should always be about love and peace, and the idea of what a perfect Eurovision song should sound like is further supported by the track Love Love Peace Peace, which was performed in the review section of the 2016 competition.
Bennett believes there is some truth to this, as almost every Eurovision song follows one of six basic thematic categories: "love, unity, self-affirmation, fun, history, and songs about how music is made."
"Songs that celebrate personal strength and self-confidence do very well," as confirmed by Austria's winning song from 2014, Rise Like a Phoenix, performed by drag queen Conchita Wurst, adds Bennett.
Simple and effective stage performance
Although many performers want to impress with lavish sets, experts warn that this is not always a winning combination.
Composer Thomas Stengård, co-author of Denmark's winning song in 2013, Only Teardrops, as well as songs What the Hell Just Happened performed by a group Remember Monday, The representative of the United Kingdom (UK) in this year's competition, attributes his success to a simple performance that was easy to understand.
"If you let a child draw that scene, they could easily do it."
"It was a barefoot girl, two guys playing drums and one playing the flute."
"Very simple, but effective."
Vocal coach Carey Grant, who headed the UK jury in 2014 and was a member of the group in 1983, agrees. Sweet Dreams took sixth place at Eurovision.
“There's nothing worse than a performer who has a stage that's been spent a lot of money on, and the performance isn't up to that standard,” she says.
"That's why the whole performance can look worse."
Her personal favorite is drag queen Conchita Wurst's performance in 2014, who was the first winner since 1970 to perform without backing singers and dancers on stage.
What set Conchita apart from the other contestants was that she was a drag queen with a beard.
Cary Grant believes Eurovision fans love unusual things, as well as anything that "celebrates the LGBT community."
However, he adds that Conchita was not just a hottie, but "an extraordinary singer who could perform what we call 'memorable moments' in vocal training."
Tone is key
Minor keys are increasingly prevalent in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Bennett disagrees with the simplistic view that "major represents happiness and minor represents sadness", and explains that "minor is just a simpler way of expressing emotional depth".
According to data from the multimedia news agency Press Association, as many as 85 percent of the 2023 finalists performed sad, minor-key songs.
In the last 20 years, only two songs in major scales have won - Running Scared 2011 (Azerbaijan) and Love for Two 2017 (Portugal).
Professor Elizabeth Helmut Margjulis, who researches the art and aesthetics of music at Princeton University in the US, highlights the importance of how the listener understands, that is, connects the sound to the context of the song.
For example, a few bars of techno music immediately conjure up images of a dark nightclub and the type of DJ who performed there.
This is why certain minor keys today immediately evoke associations with the "Eurovision sound" in the audience.
What the Hell Just Happened, this year's song by the group Remember Monday it was created during a songwriting camp, where multiple writers collaborated to create the perfect track for this year's UK representative.
The song was intentionally composed in the major scale to stand out in a sea of minor scale songs, similar to the song space man (in B flat major), which brought UK representative Sam Ryder second place in 2022.
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Surprise is a good trump card.
Repetition is important for a song to be memorable, says Margjulis, but he adds that excessive repetitiveness should be avoided.
Margjulis believes that a song becomes truly infectious when it is "not only heard often, but also when it contains some unexpected surprise."
A classic example is Making your mind up, a song by a pop group Bucks Fizz brought victory to the UK in 1981.
The song had a changing key, and then the group performed an unforgettable costume change - the band members ripped off their long skirts to reveal miniskirts underneath, which was both a visual and musical surprise.
Previous Eurovision winning songs have often been mocked for their nonsensical lyrics, such as Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley, which Sweden won in 1984, but Bennett argues that this only confirms how much importance Eurovision places on melody.
"Eurovision really needs strong, memorable melodies."
"You want people all over Europe to sing that tune. You need a chorus that is easy to understand and catchy."
Changing key has long been a way of introducing novelty into Eurovision songs.
This formula was applied in several winning songs during the 2000s, including: Fly on the wings of love the Olsen brothers (Denmark, 2000), as well as Prayer Marija Šerifović (Serbia, 2007).
But Bennett points out that while this arrangement accounts for about a fifth of the songs that make it to the final, no song that has a key change in the final chorus has won since Molitve, almost 20 years ago.
The song that Stengard wrote for this year's UK representatives, Remember Monday, is certainly full of surprises.
Mark Savage, a BBC music journalist, described the song as "a dizzying combination of key and tempo shifts".
This song is actually the author's answer to the question he always asks himself when creating for Eurovision:
"How do you stand out in a competition where everyone wants to stand out?"
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