After the thrilling finish in Vienna, Austria, with Måns Zelmerlöw taking the crown with his song, “Heroes”, the 61st edition of the Eurovision Son Contest will be hosted this year in Stockholm, Sweden. The contest, which has been held annually since 1956 will be making the stop in Sweden for the sixth time. Member nations of the European Broadcasting Union(EBU) are given the chance to send a participant from their country to the musical contest, which has become more and more popular throughout the world. After the performances, a winning song will be lauded as the best song according to viewers and will join an elite group of winners that includes Loreen of Sweden, the bearded lady of Austria, Conchita Wurst, two-time winner and Mr. Eurovision himself, Johnny Logan, worldwide success ABBA, and even Celine Dion.

Swedish public broadcaster, SVT, will be the local organization in charge of the contest with major telecommunications company Tele2 as a lead sponsor. The three main shows will take place at the Ericsson Globe Arena and be broadcast to nearly 200 million people across the world. Three shows, occurring on the 10th, 12th, and 14th of May will make up this year’s contest — Two Semi Finals, where 36 competing countries will be narrowed down to 20, moving on to the Grand Final where they will be joined by the host country and the Big 5.

The slogan for the 61st edition of the contest is ‘Come Together’, promoting the ideals of unity and extolling the virtues of musical being communicative across borders and languages. Indeed the countries will come together in the logo this year, a dandelion bloom in which each seed represents the participant countries. As the contest ends, the dandelion seeds will scatter in the winds back to their homes to plant and share the love and fellowship they experienced in Sweden.

The impressive set design for the contest also comes from a veteran team of designers. Frida Arvidsson and Viktor Brattström return after creating the staging from the contest’s last visit to Sweden in Malmö 2013. No less than 26 cameras will film the artistic displays of songs and visuals to the backdrop of a 15,5 x 50 x 32-metre super-stage with a record-breaking nearly 2.000 square metre of LED-screens on the walls combined with just 250 square metre on the stage floor. Nearly two thousand lighting units along with almost a hundred different environmental effect units, including pyrotechnics, fog, and CO2, and the worlds largest video projector can be utilized by each country to make an impressive visual presentation alongside their songs.

One major change for this year occurs in the voting system. Under the guidance of Christer Björkman, Sweden’s contest producer, the jury and public vote 50/50 split will remain, but will be presented drastically different. For the first time in history, the points given by each group will be announced separately, as opposed to being combined and aggregated into the traditional douze pointe allotment. Meaning that each country will get a set of points from the juries which will take the form of the 1-8, 10 and 12 points, which will be announced via remote call-ins from each country as usual, then the hosts will present the public votes for each country. The tallied public votes will start with the lowest scoring country and work their way to the most voted — causing a heightened sense of drama and tension as the winner will only be known at the very end nearly all situations. With the new system, a record point-scoring win will be all but assured, with the dreaded nul point finish being statistically unlikely.

In a number of earlier contests, runaway wins will usually obviously spotted before the voting had finished, which was the main cause for the changes to the voting system this year.

What started out with a record-matching number of participants with 43, saw Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Ukraine return, while Portugal chose not to participate. Australia returned after the special 60th invitation, but will now compete through the Semi Finals opposed to starting in the Final with the host country and the Big 5. In dramatic fashion, the Romanian entrant was disqualified just three weeks prior to the contest. Ovidiu Anton was set to perform with “Moment of Silence”, and had taken part in many pre-parties and press events, but the European Broadcasting Union(EBU) chose to expel the Romanian broadcaster, Televiziunea Romana (TVR), on grounds of non-payment of a debt in the excess of 16 million Swiss francs. The now 42 contestants matches the high of a number of years, the latest of which being the 2012 Azerbaijani edition.