TikTok signs on as Eurovision partner

TikTok has signed on as the official entertainment partner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 and will livestream the semi-finals and grand final, which takes place next month in Turin, Italy.

The video app will also give its growing user base access to daily highlights and behind the scenes content through the official @Eurovision account, offering “specially created programming” and music playlists featuring the entrants on its sound pages.

The company said Eurovision was already “incredibly popular” on the app, with a “staggering” 3.7 billion views for videos tagged #Eurovision. The hashtag #Eurovision2021 attracted 1.4 billion views.

This is the first time that TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has partnered with Eurovision, which is staged by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the representative group of public service media organisations.

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The semi-finals on May 10th and May 12th, and the grand final on May 14th, will be livestreamed “in a unique content format specifically created for TikTok”.

Martin Osterdahl, executive supervisor of Eurovision for the EBU, said the organisation was looking forward to "inspiring a whole generation of fans", while Rich Waterworth, TikTok's EU general manager, said he expected its creators and users across Europe and beyond to "embrace this much-loved celebration of music and culture".

Surging usage

While Eurovision dates back to 1956, the TikTok app was first released 60 years later in 2016. It reached the threshold of 1 billion monthly active users last year.

The latest social media tracker survey by research firm Ipsos suggests 21 per cent of Irish people had a TikTok account as of January, with the app – which is especially popular with younger people – one of the few social platforms to have grown over the previous 18 months.

Among this group, 58 per cent use it daily, up 15 percentage points, reflecting how it has become an embedded part of its users’ social habits.

RTÉ, as a member of the EBU, will broadcast the semi-finals and grand final on its television channels next month.

Ireland will be represented by Derry’s Brooke Scullion, the singer and co-writer of up-tempo pop number That’s Rich. Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra are the bookies’ favourites.