• The Eurovision Song Contest 2016  took place on May 10-14 in Stockholm, Sweden.
  • The Swedish organisation went for a humoristic approach (the hosts sang a song about how to win the song contest), decided to scale-up (world famous star Justin Timberlake performed as the interval act) and to promote 'awareness' (with a dance performance representing the fate of refugees, for instance ).
  • A new voting system was introduced: at first the professional jury's points for each country were announced, and finally - in order from lowest to highest - the combined points given by all televoters were revealed, making it impossible to discern the winner until the very last minute. Which is exactly what happened: in a thrilling finale it became clear that the winner would not be Russia (winner of the televoting votes) nor Australia (winner of the professional juries' votes), but Ukraine.
  • Russia gave the festival a temporary highlight when it comes to an act driven by technology, when singer Sergey Lazarev 'climbed' a virtual wall of wooden blocks during his song.
  • Romania was supposed to participate and had already chosen a song (Moment of silence by Ovidiu Anton) but was excluded from the contest by the EBU in April, due to a growing debt.