12 Points Citizen Science

Rate the Song Contest. Compare with friends. Power real research.

Cast your 12 points. Give science a hand.

12 Points is your companion app for the world's biggest song competition — an unofficial, fan-made citizen science project from researchers at the University of Southern Denmark and NYU Abu Dhabi. Rate every entry from every competing country, build your personal scoreboard, compare your taste with friends, and (if you choose) help advance real academic research on musical taste and how groups make decisions together.

Free. No ads from us. No paid tier. Geeky, and a little bit glittery.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Rate every entry from the semifinals to the grand final, on a 10-star scale. Vocals, staging, songwriting, pure camp — your ballot, your rules.
• Browse all competing countries on an interactive map and dive into each entry's video and community discussion.
• Build a personal scorecard and share it with your group chat, your followers, or anyone who needs to know your verdict.
• Compare side-by-side with friends — see who really has taste and who just has loud opinions.
• Change your mind as often as you want. Songs grow on people.
• Once you've rated every entry in a contest, unlock a rich statistics dashboard: see how different countries and demographics voted, compare your ballot against the community and the official juries, and find out who would have won under alternative voting systems like ranked-choice, approval, or Borda count. A fan dashboard and a working introduction to the mathematics of collective choice.
• Join the forum and argue (politely) about staging choices.

A FAN APP THAT'S ALSO A LABORATORY Every year, ESC brings together one of the most enthusiastic, cross-cultural audiences on the planet. That's a once-a-year window into how millions of people from dozens of countries evaluate the same set of songs — a goldmine for researchers studying musical taste, cultural difference, and collective choice. If you opt in, your anonymised ratings help our team study:

• How musical taste varies across cultures, countries, and generations.
• How recommendation algorithms could get better at matching songs to listeners.
• How groups can make fairer, better collective decisions. Opting in is entirely your choice. If you don't, your ratings stay on your device — you still get the full app experience, analytics included.

PRIVACY BY CONSTRUCTION

• Research participation is opt-in and explicit.
• Anonymised data only. Your identity is separated from your ratings before any researcher ever sees them.
• Nothing is sold. Nothing is tied to advertising.
• Reviewed under University of Southern Denmark research ethics guidelines.

OPEN SCIENCE Findings, aggregated results, and documentation will be published openly so other researchers — and curious fans — can build on the work.

WHO'S BEHIND IT 12 Points is led by researchers at the University of Southern Denmark, in collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi. The project is supported through 2028 by a Digital Infrastructure grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.

NOT THE OFFICIAL APP 12 Points is an independent, unofficial, fan-made companion. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Eurovision Song Contest, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), or any participating broadcaster. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Learn more at 12points.science