The industry chaos behind We Will Rave

0:00Work moves fast, every email, report, and proposal counts. That's where Grammarly comes in. It's your one place to think, write, and finish. Grammarly's AI agents help you find natural phrasing, fine-tuned tone, and confidently write wherever you work. It's the premier writing tool that 93% of users trust to get more work done. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. When you watch a massive televised music competition, there is this carefully constructed illusion of effortlessness. Oh, absolutely. You see this three-minute pop song performance, and the lights flash, the bass drops, the artist hits their exact mark, and it all just feels like magic. It looks so clean. Exactly. Clean, polished, and presented for your immediate judgment. But behind that three-minute magic trick, there is usually an absolute mountain of chaos.

1:01A literal mountain. Yeah. So we are going to pull back the curtain on that chaos today. We're looking specifically at the 2024 Eurovision entry from Austria. Right. It's a song called We Will Rave by the artist Colleen, and we're using its Wikipedia article as our single source guide for this. It's a great example to use, honestly. It really is. Our mission for this deep dive is to deconstruct the life cycle of a modern Eurovision pop track. Because, you know, this isn't just about a single performance on a Saturday night. No, not at all. This is fascinating look at the really messy intersection of, like, artistic intent, high-stakes production drama, and just brutal public judgment. Yeah, and Eurovision entries act as these fascinating microcosms of the entire music industry. Yeah, sure. I mean, in just a few minutes of stage time, you have fashion, politics, staging, and sound, and they are all just colliding at once. All at 200 beats per minute. Right. And by analyzing the life cycle of this one specific track from its initial conception in a studio to its final placement on a global scoreboard,

2:04we can uncover the hidden mechanics of how global pop culture is actually manufactured, tested, and well-consumed. Okay, let's unpack this. Because the journey of We Will Rave starts with a pretty start contradiction. It really does. On paper, if you just look at the production credits, this is a major label debut single. It was released on March 1st, 2024 by Warner Music Central Europe. Heavy hitters. Yeah. And it was written by what is basically a veritable committee of industry professionals. You've got Andrews Rettoff, Jimmy Tharnfeldt, Julie Augardt, and Thomas Stingardt. Right, a huge team. And it is self-described as a techno-inspired pop track. So, you know, you see that line up of writers, and you immediately think of a highly engineered, totally calculated club anthem designed purely for commercial radio. Exactly. You expect a product, essentially, a track built by a team of Scandinavian hitmakers who just, they know exactly how to engineer a hook that gets stuck in your head. But then you look at Kaleen's specific vision for the song,

3:04and it completely subverts that expectation of just some shallow manufactured product. Right, she had a very different take. She did. She didn't just want this track to be about jumping up and down in a dark room. She described the image of a rave party in this song as a sanctuary. A sanctuary, yeah. She explicitly stated it's a place where outsiders and wounded souls go to heal and dissolve their problems through music. Which is such a strong image. I find that contrast so fascinating. It's like the song is this sonic band-aid hidden inside a relentless bass line. But I have to push back a little on this premise with you. Okay, go for it. When a major label puts together a team of pop writers to create this high BPM Euro dance track, does the sheer volume and that heavy pounding beat actually distract from that deeper message of healing? That's a valid question. Like, can you genuinely deliver a message about finding sanctuary for wounded souls when the tempo is designed to make the floorboards shake? Well, what's fascinating here is that the high BPM isn't a distraction from the healing process at all.

4:05Actually, historically and psychologically, it is the actual mechanism for the healing. Wait, really? The speed is the point. Exactly. If you look at the roots of rave culture, these high energy underground dance parties were explicitly created as safe havens for marginalized communities. Well, that makes sense. Right, so the relentless pounding rhythm is not meant to drown out emotion. It is engineered to create this collective almost hypnotic state where people can physically exhaust their anxieties. Wow. So pairing a techno-inspired pop track with a message for outsiders is actually a highly authentic nod to the origins of the genre. The beat itself is the therapy. I love that. Yeah, it demands physical exertion as a form of emotional release. That reframes the genre entirely for me. The physical exhaustion is the point. Yes. But, you know, having this beautiful, authentic concept about a healing sanctuary is one thing. Getting that concept from a pristine recording studio under the world's biggest stage in front of hundreds of millions of people is where the friction really starts.

5:09Oh, definitely. Because the timeline of this release completely shatters that illusion of a seamless, effortless music drop. The reality behind the polished facade of a music release is almost always a logistical nightmare. Totally. And the timeline for We Will Rave is a perfect example of this friction. So the Austrian broadcaster, ORF, decided to use an internal selection process to choose their representative, right? Right. They had a short list of 14 artists and those artists were judged by a jury and fan clubs. Now, the public announcement of the winner was originally expected in December of 2023. But it didn't happen then. No, that announcement got delayed for an entire month. It finally happened on January 16th, 2024. And that initial delay was really just the start of the gauntlet. Because weeks before the official release in March, a demo of the song leaked online. The dreaded leak. Yeah, and this wasn't just some low quality acoustic recording. It was an early version of the track that revealed something very telling about the industry. What did it reveal?

6:09Well, Keleen actually claimed that the final version of the song was altered from that leak demo to conform better with Eurovision. Ah, yeah. I want to pause on that phrase, conform better with Eurovision. To me, it's less like tailoring a suit to fit a specific event, and more like aggressively optimizing a website for Google's algorithm. That is a great comparison. You have to insert mandatory three-second dopamine hits, a predictable bridge, a specific climax, or the voting machinery simply won't process it. This raises an important question, though, about the fundamental tension between pure artistic expression and the highly rigid formula required for a televised spectacle. It's a huge tension. Eurovision has a very specific set of parameters. I mean, the song cannot exceed three minutes, period. Right. To translate instantly to an audience spanning over 40 different countries and cultures. That is a wild demographic to try and please. Exactly. It requires structural beats that keep a massive television audience engaged.

7:10So an artist has to weigh their original creative vision, like that sanctuary for wounded souls, against the pragmatic mathematical need to score points across diverse demographics. It's a tough balancing act. It really is. Altering a demo to conform means sanding down the edges that might alienate a casual viewer while trying to preserve the core identity of the track. Which has to be incredibly frustrating for an artist. I mean, you have this vision. You optimize it for the algorithm, and the universe just keeps throwing hurdles at you. The hurdles didn't stop there. No. The music video was supposed to drop on March 1, right alongside the song's official release. But it had to be pushed to March 4. Why was that? Because the production company couldn't finish it on time. Oh, wow. Yeah. And meanwhile, Colleen is out there grinding through this extensive pre-party promoter. Right. The promo circuit is intense. She's performing in Madrid in March, then London Amsterdam and Stockholm in April. Plus, she's doing a televised performance on an Austrian show called Die Gross Chance.

8:13That is exhausting just to hear. Seriously. We should look at how these continuous delays and leaks act as unintended psychological pressure tests. For an artist's resilience. That's a good point. Long before Colleen even stepped on to the stage in Malmo for the semi-finals, she had navigated internal broadcaster delays, a leaked demo, enforced musical alterations, and a botched music video timeline. Yeah. And she had to manage all of that stress while maintaining the high physical energy required for a multi-city European promotional tour. It really tests whether an artist can compartmentalize industry chaos and still deliver the product. It is a brutal endurance test. And the result of that endurance test was that the track was officially out, the music video is up, and the song finally reached the critics. Oh, the critics. And the reaction was spectacularly divided. We often think of pop music as aiming for universal appeal, but the critical whiplash here is extreme. It perfectly illustrates the subjectivity of art, especially in an environment as hyper scrutinized as this one. Right.

9:14I mean, a single piece of music is going to be interpreted in vastly different ways, depending entirely on what the critic believes the function of a pop song should be. Exactly. So listen to this contrast, and if you are listening right now, ask yourself which side of this divide you would fall on. Yeah, think about it. On one side, you have John O'Brien, a writer for Vulture. He ranked We Will Rave, number one out of all 37 competing songs that year. Number one. Number one overall. He praised the fusion of musical styles and called it a relentless club banger. I praise. But then you flip over to the eye paper where Emily Baker reviewed it. She completely categorized the song among the bad ones. Oh. She claimed it's something we've seen a million times on the Eurovision stage. He said it wasn't boring, but it's not exactly good either. Bouch. And then you have the middle ground perspectives, trying to weigh the production value against the live execution. Right. The site we blogs gave it a solid 7.7 out of 10 points placing its sixth overall.

10:14Which is pretty respectable. It is. Meanwhile, Doron Lahav from ESC Bied ranked it 15th out of 37. He praised the polished production, but he expressed a very specific anxiety over how difficult a high energy techno track like that would be to sing live while dancing. Which is a very valid concern. But wait, here's where it gets really interesting. If the ultimate goal is to win a contest that relies heavily on consensus voting from across an entire continent, doesn't alienating half the audience with a polarizing track, mathematically guarantee you won't get the votes needed to take the trophy. You would think so, yes. Right. How is this gap between number one relentless club banger and we've seen this a million times? Anything but a strategic failure for a competition. Because there is a massive difference between winning a specific contest and winning the broader market. Okay. See more about that. Well, in the attention economy of pop culture, a song's value isn't just about technical musicality is a quality or universal likability. It is about how effectively it triggers an immediate emotional response.

11:16Oh, I see. You want to evoke either absolute euphoria or complete fatigue because both reactions mean you are memorable. Being forgotten is the real enemy. Exactly. A song that is universally considered just okay is a song that people forget to vote for, and more importantly, they forget to stream it the next day. That makes total sense. Polarizing art demands attention. If you're going to lose the consensus vote anyway, it is a strategic advantage to cultivate a fierce, dedicated minority who will champion the track. That makes the stakes for the live show even higher than because Eurovision is above all a visual medium. Highly visual. Having a song that demands attention means your live performance has to deliver on that visual promise in front of millions of people. Which, of course, brought a whole new wave behind the scenes drama when they finally got to the Malmo Arena. We know the music video had a specific, sexy aesthetic. But Colleen mentioned before the contest that they were going to implement a tone down version of that for the live stage.

12:18Right. And translating a high tempo conceptual audio track into a massive visual arena spectacle is an enormous undertaking. Dan Shipton was appointed as the creative director for the performance, and the visual vocabulary they chose for this wave was very distinct. Very distinct. On stage, Colleen was accompanied by four backing dancers in black cargo pants. And there was this massive inverted pyramid prop shooting multi-colored lasers everywhere. It sounds incredibly visually intense, very industrial. Yeah, very industrial. But the primary focus of the performance and where the real tension emerged was in the high stakes politics of the fashion. Oh, the fashion. The visual aesthetic of a pop star is never just about looking good. It is a highly negotiated corporate arrangement. Oh, let's talk about the costume drama because this is wild. Originally, the performance was intended to feature Colleen wearing a black mesh bodysuit designed by Marina Horman's cedar. Right. And this wasn't just like a standard piece of clothing. It was adorned with around 150,000 Swarovski crystals.

13:20That is an unbelievable amount of detail. It's nuts. But then, literally right before the contest during the critical dress rehearsals, the costume was suddenly changed to a piece by a completely different designer. Though it was still paired with a coat by Horman cedar, right? It was, yes. But Horman cedar was reportedly furious, publicly criticizing the decision after the contest was over. And I just keep thinking, how do these micro dramas, like a designer feud, impact the performer's mindset right before stepping in front of hundreds of millions of viewers? Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture, it forces us to look at the economics of Eurovision fashion. A designer doesn't just hand over a custom garment covered in 150,000 Swarovski crystals for the fun of it. No, definitely not. That is a massive capital investment. It functions as a loss leader. The designer fronts the extraordinary cost of the materials and the labor strictly for the return on investment of having their work seen by an audience of nearly 200 million global viewers.

14:21Right, it's advertising. Exactly. So when that exposure is pulled at the last possible second, it isn't just a bruise ego. It is a catastrophic financial and marketing blow to the brand. So the artist is suddenly caught right in the middle of a corporate standoff? Exactly. The costume drama proves that at this level of the industry, fashion is a high stakes battleground of branding, aesthetic control and ego. For the artist, it requires an immense level of psychological compartmentalization. I mean, you have to leave the fury of a sperm designer, the financial implications, and the last minute wardrobe panic in the dressing room, walk out under the lights and still deliver a flawless vocal and physical performance as if nothing happened. And to her credit, she did deliver the performance. She got through the semifinal, placing ninth with 46 points, which secured Austria a spot in the grand final. A huge achievement. For sure. But all of this, the deep meaning of the rave sanctuary, the algorithmic tailoring of the demo, the polarizing reviews, the lasers, the cargo pants, and the crystal drama.

15:25Ultimately, in the context of the competition, it comes down to a final mathematical verdict. The numbers. And we have to look at the mechanism of how those points are actually awarded. The grand final reality was starkly different from the semifinal success, honestly. And the breakdown of the scoring reveals a lot about how different factions evaluate music. Right. So performing 26th, which was the final act of the night, Kaelene finished 24th out of the competing acts with only 24 total points. That's tough. It is. That broke down to 19 points from the professional juries, placing her 20th in that metric, and a mere five points from the public televote, placing her 23rd there. Wow. And to break down those points impartially based on the data, no country awarded Austria the maximum 12 points. The highest score from the juries was seven points, which came from Israel. The high score from the public televote was three points, also from Israel. Interesting. Why is such a harsh penalty from the juries and widened the public rally behind a high energy club track? Well, we have to look at the specific criteria juries are instructed to evaluate professional juries historically penalize high BPM dance tracks because they are looking for vocal technicality, complex, instrumental composition and dynamic range.

16:38A techno track like we will rave purposefully sacrifices, traditional vocal acrobatics in favor of relentless club energy and heavy production. The juries are grating a rubric that the song wasn't designed to pass. That makes a lot of sense. What about the televote? As for the televote, this is where the strategy of being polarizing meets its limit in a consensus format. The track was highly memorable for a specific demographic, but it failed to capture the broad cross-cultural base required to amass public points across Europe. So what does this all mean? I mean, I want you listening right now to imagine the psychological weight of this. It's heavy. Imagine working on a project for months. You pour your heart into a concept about healing wounded souls. You survive your work leaking early. You survive management making you alter it for the algorithm. All the delays. The delays, your music video being late, grueling promo tours, critics telling you it's both the best and the worst thing they've heard, and a last minute corporate fight over your wardrobe.

17:38You give it your all in the biggest music show on earth and you finish near the bottom of the scoreboard. It sounds crushing. It sounds completely crushing. But if you look at the actual music charts, a completely different story emerges. Yes. This is where we have to fundamentally redefine what winning actually means in the modern music industry. Because despite the low placement on the scoreboard, we will rave hit number three on the sweeten heat-seeker chart. Number three. It hit number 18 in Austria. It charted in the UK reaching number 23 on both the singles downloads and single sales charts. That's real commercial traction. And Colleen's reaction to the Eurovision results is so telling. She stated she was not disappointed at all and was simply grateful for the opportunity to perform at the contest in the first place. She gets it. Yeah. There's a massive, fascinating dissonance between her low placement on that specific Saturday night and her very real commercial success across European charts. And that dissonance is the reality of the business today.

18:39Yeah. The scoreboard is not the territory. I love that phrase. It's true. Well, Colleen's reaction shows is a very mature, contemporary understanding of how this machinery works. Eurovision is no longer just a finish line where you collect a trophy. It is a launch pad. Absolutely. The global stage visibility, the streaming numbers and the international chart placements, often matter far more for an artist's long-term career and financial success. Then the specific number of points awarded by Juries, who are, frankly grating on an outdated rubric. Right. By getting the song onto those charts, she reached her audience of outsiders and wounded souls, regardless of the final ranking. It really is an incredible journey when you step back and look at the whole life cycle at once. I mean, from a conceptual healing rave to an algorithmic adjustment to a polarized crystal-studded laser-filled spectacle that ended up conquering international download charts, despite finishing near the bottom of the scoreboard. It is the perfect anatomy of a modern pop song release. It really is. You see the collision of art, commerce, and pure endurance.

19:42It is a remarkable case study, but as we wrap up this deconstruction, there is one final aspect of this life cycle worth considering. Okay. Lay it on us. Well, we discussed how the song was altered to conform to the contest parameters, right? And how the staging and costuming were changed at the last minute to manage optics and corporate relationships. Yeah. It leaves us with this thought. If a song is fundamentally altered to fit a format and its visual identity has changed to manage brand politics, at what point does the original piece of art cease to be the artists and instead become a product entirely owned by the machinery of the event itself? Oh, wow. That is a heavy, fascinating question to leave on. Where does the artist end and the algorithm begin? Exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive into the hidden mechanics of global pop culture. We hope you enjoyed unpacking the chaos behind the magic as much as we did, and we warmly invite you to bring your curiosity back for the next one. Until then, keep digging. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog.

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