As esctoday.com has previously explained, we fully support the Eurovision Song Contest, the participants and the companies that contribute to the event that gives life to the countless websites, forums, communities and events that are given life by the event. We would like to refer to previous articles regarding legal downloads and purchases of copyright materials.

Artists thatenter the Eurovision Song Contest have a right to earn money from their endeavours in the same way that readers, viewers and anyone else can expect a financial reward from their day jobs. We are aware that illegal copies of the songs enter circulation via various forums, message boards and sites such as rapidshare, limewire and many others. We have a simple policy on this. We remove any links to illegal downloads and help the artists to sell their songs and albums legally!

Whilst we all know that many fans of the contest do not want to wait until the legal versions are available in order to review the entries in the Eurovision Song Contest, we do ask them to purchase the songs legally when they become available. esctoday.com has for some time publicised albums and singles for sale by those competiting or previously competing in the Eurovision Song Contest and publish links for readers to purchase copies through the proper channels.

We hope that readers will purchase the songs and allow the artists and record companies involved to reap the rewards that they deserve. Remember that they put a lot of time and effort into participating in national finals and the Euroision Song Contest and deserve to be rewarded. Without them, we would not have a competition to watch and many readers and people working on the hundreds of fan sites would lose one of their highlights of the year.

esctoday.com remains a neutral website run by fans for fans. We have a policy of never charging readers for our services and do not require people to register in order to access our news. We do not accept payments or donations from any participating party in the Eurovision Song Contest, including broadcasters, participants, record companies, management companies or anyone else. Any free materials offered to esctoday.com are passed on to our readers through competitions. We do not currently have a site sponsor and the site is funded by reader donations, financial donationsfrom team members, advertising through google and a small number of affiliate schemes.

Affiliate schemes (including itunes, cdon.com and cdwow) allow readers to make purchases from links on our website at the same cost that they would find by going to theaffiliate sites directly. By making a purchase through an esctoday.com link, the website earns a small amount of commission which goes towards the running costs of the site and will help us meet development and investment costs to improve the site for all readers. Without the introduction of these schemes, we could not remain online.

As more of this year's entries become available through affiliated sites for legal purchase or download, we will of course add links to them in relevant articles. This means that readers can make legal purchases and at the same time support both the artists concerned and esctoday.com. If you find a link to a legal purchase site, you can inform the editorial team by sending us the link via the 'share news' option on the homepage.

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Whether you choose to make purchases directly, or help esctoday.com by going to the sites via a link on our website is up to you. But please remember that we are desperately trying to raise enough money to purchase additional servers to prevent the site crashing due to high demand, as has happened several times in recent weeks.

Remember, you can also support esctoday.com by clicking on the 'donate button' on the homepage. We would like to once again thank everyone that has donated funds to us so far and assure all readers that all money raised will be invested in the website.

Thank you once again for your time, support and for making us the post popular and visted Eurovision Song Contest website.