12 PointsJoin
The curtain is about to go up

Cast your 12 points
Give science a hand

12 Points is a Eurovision Song Contest companion. Rate every entry, compare with your friends and the community, and opt-in to a citizen science project on musical taste and collective choice run by researchers at the University of Southern Denmark. Free to use, geeky and a little bit glittery.

Go to the web app
Free for allResearch opt-in12points.science
§ 00 / The App

One app, the whole contest — in your pocket

12 Points is designed to expand your Eurovision Song Contest experience. Browse every competing country on a map, rate each entry, build your personal scorecard, and find out whether your taste matches (or clashes) with your friends across the room or the continent. Everything stays in sync across devices. At the same time you participate in one of the largest citizen science projects on musical tastes and collective choice.

01 · The map

See every country in the contest at a glance — tap one to dive into its entry, rate it, compare your taste with the rest of Europe (and beyond).

02 · The entry

Listen to the entries, give your personal rating, and participate in the forum. You can change your mind as many times as you want.

03 · The scoreboard

The scores are in. Build your personal ranking and share it with your group chat, your followers, or anyone who needs to know your verdict!

Built for ease —designed to be used one-handed on the couch, with chunky tap targets, big type, and a dark theme that doesn't fight with the stage lighting on your TV.

§ 01 / Thesis

A fan app that is also a laboratory and a laboratory that is actually a lot of fun

On Stage

For the fans

  • 01Rate every entry, from semifinals to grand finalRate each song on what matters to you: vocals, staging, songwriting, or pure camp. Your ballot, your rules. You can keep on updating your ratings as songs grow on you.
  • 02Settle the group chatCompare your ranking with friends side-by-side. See who really has taste, and who just has loud opinions. Allow (or not) yourself to be influenced by what your friends say and/or from arguments in the comments section.
  • 03Get access to the contest statisticsOnce you rate all entries from a contest, you get access to rich statistics from the event. You can peek on how the different countries or demographics voted, and learn who is the 12 Points ‘winner’ for different voting systems.
In the Lab

For science

  • 01Participatory science, open researchYour scores can help researchers understand (i) how musical taste varies across cultures, countries, and generations, (ii) how to build better algorithms for discovering music, and (iii) how we can collectively make better decisions. Opt-in, rate, and help advance science.
  • 02Real people, real opinionsThe Eurovision Song Contest brings together an enthusiastic, cross-national audience of millions. That kind of rich, real-world window into collective opinions and cultural tastes doesn't come along very often.
  • 03Your data is yours, and it stays that wayParticipation in the research is entirely your choice. If you do not consent to being part of the citizen science project, your ratings and questionnaire responses remain stored on your device and are not sent to our servers or used for research. The data of people who opt in will help advance science. Nothing is sold. Nothing is tied to your identity.
§ 02 / Mechanics
Eurovision 2026 · Ballot01 / 35

Albania

“Nân”

Alis

—
Your rating
↳ Compare with Marta, Jonas, +4

Why ten stars?
It's one of the most broadly used rating scales in existence, and people have immediate intuitions about how to use it. You can break any ties among the entries to which you gave the same rating and create and share your final scorecard.

Step 01

Watch, rate, and comment

Whether you follow every national final or tune in just once a year, the ballot and the forum stay open. No registration pressure, you can just tap the stars for what you love.

Step 02

Compare with your circle

Find your friends, compare your music tastes with them, and explore their scorecards.

Step 03

Contribute to science

If you choose to, your ratings join an anonymised, growing dataset that helps researchers understand how musical taste varies across cultures and countries, and how we can collectively make better decisions. No extra steps. Just rate.

§ 03 / The Research

Dozens of countries, millions of opinions, and some very big questions about musical taste and how we make decisions together

12 Points is an independent research project run by Pantelis P. Analytis at the University of Southern Denmark in collaboration with Minsu Park at NYU Abu Dhabi. We study how taste, culture, and identity shape the way people evaluate music, and how we can make better collective choices. The Eurovision Song Contest happens to be one of the richest platforms on earth to address these research questions.

Every rating in the app is a small piece of a much larger puzzle. What does it look like when millions of people across dozens of cultures evaluate the same songs? Do patterns emerge? If so, do they follow the borders on a map, or something else entirely? And beneath all of it, there are fundamental questions about how we choose: is a score a good mirror of what we truly feel? Once we have made up our minds, how easily do we change them? How can we make better and fairer decisions together?

Ethics first, always

This project has been reviewed under SDU research ethics guidelines. Participation is voluntary. Consent is explicit and logged. If you do not contest, your data will only be recorded in your local device and it will not be used to address scientific questions.

Privacy by construction

Although we collect background demographic information, the data will be anonymized, and your identity as an individual remains protected. Research data is separated from account data and direct identifiers are not included in research datasets. Scientists will see that someone rated, but not who.

Open science

Our findings will be published openly, and we aim to share research outputs—such as aggregated results, code, and documentation—to support other researchers. The data of the people that opt-in in the citizen science project will be shared with safeguards to protect participant privacy. We believe science should be accessible to everyone, not just those with access to funding and resources.

Not affiliated with the EBU

12 Points is an independent, unofficial Eurovision Song Contest companion. We are not associated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Eurovision Song Contest or the European Broadcasting Union. That said, we hope that our app will provide additional value to the Eurovision Song Contest platform.

§ 04 / FAQ

Small print, plainly written

No — and we want to be very clear about that. 12 Points is an independent citizen science project led by Pantelis P. Analytis at the University of Southern Denmark in collaboration with Minsu Park at NYU Abu Dhabi. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the EBU or the Eurovision Song Contest.

If you consent to the research, your ratings join an anonymised dataset used to study how musical taste varies across cultures and countries, how people form their preferences, and what the best ways are to make collective decisions. If you do not consent, your questionnaire responses and your ratings will be only stored locally on your device. You will still be able to compare your ratings with those of the community, but your ratings will not contribute towards grand averages.

Yes, all the main features are free and will remain free as long as the project runs in its current form. There is no paid tier, and the only ads you will see are YouTube’s before the song videos, not ours. The project is supported through 2028 by a Digital Infrastructure grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, bestowed to Pantelis P. Analytis at the University of Southern Denmark.

Absolutely. Participation is based on opting-in. The app experience is yours regardless.

All of them. Eurovision may be a European contest, but curiosity about it is not, and neither is our research. Whether you are watching from Oslo, Sidney, or Abu Dhabi, your ratings are welcome. The more countries represented, the richer the picture.

The app was developed by Angelos Pipergias, a researcher and software developer working on the project under the guidance of Pantelis P. Analytis and Minsu Park. Angelos was assisted by Giannis Kagiorgis and Stefanos Kampouris. Giannis and Stefanos have also built a cool travel app together. You can check it out here.