Melodifestivalen is an annual song competition in Sweden. It determines the country’s representative for the Eurovision Song Contest. Since 2000, the competition has been the most popular television programme. The festival has produced six Eurovision winners and twenty-four top-five placings for Sweden at the contest.
About Melodifestivalen in brief
Melodifestivalen is an annual song competition in Sweden. It determines the country’s representative for the Eurovision Song Contest. It has been staged almost every year since 1959. Since 2000, the competition has been the most popular television programme. In 2012, the semi-finals averaged 3. 3 million viewers, and over four million people in Sweden watched the final, almost half of the Swedish population. The festival has produced six Eurovision winners and twenty-four top-five placings for Sweden at the contest. The winner has been chosen by panels of jurors since its inception. Since 1999, the juries have been joined by a public telephone vote which has an equal influence over the final outcome. Hundreds of songs and performers have entered Melodif Festivalen since its debut. The number of contestants has increased from twelve to thirty-two since 2002. The 2012 contest marked the first foreign songwriters that they collaborated with a Swedish songwriter. To be eligible, songwriters must be at least 16 years of age on the day of the first Eurovision semi-final. Until 2001, participation in the festival was limited to a single night of contestants. In 1964 the competition was cancelled due to an artist’s strike; Sweden did not send a song to Eurovision that year. Elisabeth Andreassen failed to qualify in 1984, when she ended her career when she failed to reach the second round of voting. The competition became a stand-alone television programme in 1960, known as the Eurovisionschlagern, svensk final.
In the event’s early years, it was broadcast to Norway and Denmark through the Nordvision network. In 1967 the competition adopted its current name, Melod ifestivalen, in 1967. It is also broadcast on radio and the Internet, and a children’s version of the competition, Lilla MelodIfestivalen began that year, also began that same year. The first contest was the third, in 1958. Sweden’s first song selected was Alice Babs, which finished fourth at Eurovision in Hilversum, Netherlands. In 1970, Sweden was absent from Eurovision for a second time in 1970 because of a Nordic boycott of the voting system, which had led to a four-way tie for first place at the 1969 contest. After the 1975 contest in Stockholm, left-wing groups argued that Sweden should not spend money to win and host Eurovision again. This led to mass demonstrations against commercial music and the organisation of an anti-commercial Alternativfestivalen. In 1977, Sweden decided not to send asong to Euro Contest 1976 but returned in 1977. The event has attracted substantial tourism to the city of Stockholm since the introduction of a grand final in Stockholm in 2000. It was first broadcast in 1959, when Sveriges Radio decided that the winning song—regardless of its original performer—would be performed by Brita Borg. In 1960, the contest was incorporated into the Säg det med musik radio series; eight songs participated.
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This page is based on the article Melodifestivalen published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
