How Eurovision became the “Olympics for singing”

The Eurovision Song Contest is an international annual music competition held by the European Broadcasting Union. Often known simply as Eurovision, the annual singing contest is held in May and has featured contestants from over 50 countries. The participating countries are each represented by an artist and song chosen by the country’s public broadcasting service. The first Eurovision was held on May 24, 1956, in Lugano, Switzerland. It was heralded as one of the first attempts to televise a live event to a large international audience. Over the course of the next seven decades, the number of participants in the annual competition grew from just seven countries to more than 40. Similar to the Olympics, Eurovision has become an international spectacle, with some political aspects becoming almost as prominent as the music itself. For example, host countries such as Azerbaijan in 2012 have had their human rights records scrutinized and protested, and in 2022 Russia was removed from the contest following its invasion of Ukraine. In the Eurovision finals, the winner is decided by a point system, where each participating country awards their favorite performances a pair of points on a scale of 1 to 12. In addition to a cash prize, the victor wins their country the right to host the next year’s contest. While winning the competition is not guaranteed to bring a musician future success, many Eurovision winners have had their careers launched by the victory. Eurovision winners have included ABBA, Sweden’s representative in 1974, as well as Celine Dion, Switzerland’s representative in 1988.