This was the third time the contest had taken place in Stockholm, after 19.
The contest was held at the Ericsson Globe and consisted of two semi-finals on 10 and 12 May and the final on , with all three live shows hosted by Zelmerlöw and Petra Mede.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2016 was the 61st edition of the annual Eurovision Song Contest.
It took place in Stockholm, Sweden, following Måns Zelmerlöw's win at the 2015 contest in Vienna, Austria with the song "Heroes".
Portugal withdrew, largely due to their national broadcaster's insufficient promotion of their music-based media, while Romania had originally planned to participate, but was forced to withdraw due to repeated non-payment of debts by their national broadcaster to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
The contest was also the first to implement a voting system change since 1975: each country's professional jury points were announced largely as before, while the results of each national televote were combined and announced in reverse order.
Friends Arena is the biggest football stadium and indoor venue in Sweden and the Nordic countries.
The new voting system is also used to determine the qualifiers from each semi-final, but as before the qualifiers are announced in a random order.The Ericsson Globe has a capacity of approximately 16,000 attendees, and this was the second time the contest has been staged at the venue, after the Eurovision Song Contest 2000.Host broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT) announced on 24 May, the day after winning the 2015 contest, that the Tele2 Arena in Stockholm was their first choice venue.SVT proposed a change of start time of the contest from CEST to CEST on 9 September, arguing that such a change would help to promote family viewing of the contest, especially in eastern Europe when it would run late into the night.The EBU announced on 23 September that rather than using clips from their respective music videos, extended clips from the dress rehearsals of the six acts who qualified directly to the final (the "Big Five" and Sweden) would be shown as previews during the semi-final in which they were allocated to vote.