Yesterday's dress rehearsals of the qualifier round are not as busy as announced. Earlier, it was said that all tickets had been sold out, but now it appeared that there were only a few hundred seats occupied.

Earlier it was said that the dress rehearsals for the qualifier round were almost sold out, but then it appeared that only a few hundred people actually attended the show.

The extremely low attention is a commercial disaster for the merchandising company. Special selling points are installed on several points in the hall, but there are hardly any people to by the t-shirts, caps and other Eurovision Song Contest related merchandising. The catering inside the hall also expected more people.

For every accredited person there is a ticket available for every dress rehearsal, although it's likely that most of them will only attend one or two of the rehearsal shows. This means that approximately 50-75 percent of the tickets given away by TRT for the dress rehearsals won't be used and thus many seats are empty.

Both afternoon dress rehearsals – today's and yesterday's – started at 15:00 local time instead of 16:00. When we asked TRT how the ticket holders were informed about the changed schedule, they could only refer to the Billetix website which shows a popup with the changed schedule…