The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), often known simply as Eurovision, is an international music competition organised annually by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and originally based on the Sanremo Music Festival of Italy. The competition occurs in the form of annual contests which mainly revolve around various countries competing for victory by submitting an original song to be performed live in the contest’s host country. Citizens of the competing countries then cast votes for the other countries' entries to determine a winner.

The significantly long history of this annual event traces its roots back to 1956 where a multinational contest was hosted at Teatro Kussal (now Casinò Lugano) in Lugano, Switzerland. This contest limited each country to submit a maximum of 2 songs, both no longer than three and three-and-a-half minutes. Switzerland won the contest with Lys Assia’s French-language “Refrain” as their entry, becoming the first country to win the ESC and first country to win an edition of ESC they hosted. Ever since then, each year except 2020 was met with their own Eurovision song contests.

The word “Eurovision” in “Eurovision Song Contest” derives from the name of EBU’s telecomunnications network which itself was first a word used by British journalist George Campey in a 1951 Evening Standard article in which he defined it as:

A system of collaboration among the West European countries, including Britain, by which television programmes will become interchangable.

EBU has created several other programmes under the Eurovision brand, those being the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, Eurovision Young Musicians, Eurovision Dance Contest, Eurovision Young Dancers and Eurovision Choir. An American version of ESC was made for all 50 states of the U.S. to participate and compete.

Read about the history of each participating country in the ESC here!