Australia: Song lyrics do not breach contest rules

The lyric “face time” in Australia’s Eurovision entry, Dami Im’s ‘Sound of Silence’ has been cleared by the Eurovision Broadcasting Union (EBU) of breaching contest rules that require no commercial mentions in songs, SBS announces.

The decision was handed down overnight by the Eurovision Song Contest Reference Group, which the EBU refers to as the “executive Expert Committee for all Members”. “The lyrics of the Australian song are presented as two separate words, ‘face time’ and not FaceTime which is an Apple trademark,” the group said in a statement. “The Merriam-Webster dictionary refers to ‘face time’ as ‘time spent meeting with someone’… so in this case the song lyrics have been cleared.”

SBS also confirmed in a statement today that, “In the official lyrics for Sound of Silence submitted to Eurovision, this lyric line is written as lower case ‘face time’ not referring to a brand.”

In recent years, San Marino had to change their song ‘The Facebook Song’ to ‘The Social Network Song’ because of commercial lyrics and Belarus was required to change the lyric “I look over Google Maps trying to escape” back in 2014.