He told us so ... so what's next?

Toni Sant is basking in his own unexpected fortune-teller fortune. He correctly predicted Lordi will win the Eurovision and so they did.

I did smell the coffee, the one brewed by www.votelordi.org that contributed to Lordi's success. Indeed it seems the band's use of technology proved their success and the lack of it part of Malta's downfall.

This is the full interview I conducted this week with a spokesman of the votelordi.org project team. Excerpts were reported in an article in i-Tech, The Times' IT Supplement.

1) Before Votelordi.org went live were you convinced that it would contribute to Lordi's extremely good result?

Not before it went live, but shortly after. In a few days we started receiving growing amounts of traffic, and translations started arriving faster than we could have anticipated. As we saw people from all around Europe start to pay attention, we knew that we had accomplished something. So far, we've had close to 200 000 visitors, and we're still going. Currently we're the number two search result for Lordi after their official site in Google.

2) Do you think that Internet can play an important role in promoting good music, not just rock?

Absolutely. There are numerous examples of small bands that do their own online promoting, virally and through word-of-mouth. Creative Commons licensing (which votelordi.org also uses) is an excellent step in the right direction, for starters. There's no real reason why this wouldn't work for enormously famous bands as well - if only they would release themselves from the clutches of the record companies.

I find the current hardline anti-piracy stance of the record companies destructive for everyone, artists and themselves included. They're dinosaurs, destined to either evolve or be destroyed. Instead of worrying needlessly about Internet piracy, they should make their products more attractive. That is, promote and release music that is WORTH BUYING, not this usual calculated and productized MTV / pop radio crap that no one will remember in 5 years time. And as far as promotion goes, the Internet is an invaluable tool they still don't understand one bit.

We can say from personal experience that we download a lot of music online, but only to assess whether it's worth buying the album. MP3 downloads have caused us to buy a lot more albums than we ever would have without them.

3) My country, Malta, came last. There was no VoteFabrizio.org online. Do you think this lack of internet presence was one of the factors that brought the bad result for Malta?

Well, I don't know of any online campaigns besides votelordi.org, and most other countries still did just fine. I think Malta has to face facts, much like Finland had to for most of the last 40 years.

Fabrizio's song and performance were uninspiring and unremarkable (that is, usual Eurovision crap), and Malta as a country didn't seem to gather any political points either. This is the precisely the situation Finland had to endure before Lordi - we had boring or downright stupid songs and not enough "friends" who'd give us guaranteed points.