Melodifestivalen - Hosting

Hosting

The venues for each year's Melodifestival are announced in September of the preceding year. The semifinals are held in towns and cities throughout Sweden. The 16,300-capacity Ericsson Globe in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, has hosted every final since semifinals were introduced, until 2012. In 2013, the final will move to the newly built Friends Arena in Solna Municipality, Stockholm County. The Scandinavium in Gothenburg was offered the 2005 final, but turned it down as it clashed with a Frölunda ice hockey match.

The event spent its early years at one venue: Cirkus in Stockholm, which hosted the first ten competitions. It has hosted the final of Melodifestivalen seventeen times in total. The Stockholm Globe Arena has hosted seven finals, and SVT's headquarters in Stockholm has staged five. The competition first took place outside Stockholm in 1975 as part of a decentralisation policy at SR. Stockholm has hosted thirty-seven finals in total, including the first fourteen. Gothenburg has hosted eight, and Malmö seven. The competition’s final has never been held outside these cities. Before the expansion, the host of the previous year's Melodifestival would host the Eurovision Song Contest in the event of a Swedish victory. Hence, the 1985 Eurovision was held in Gothenburg, and the 1992 contest in Malmö. Since 2002, the only venue that has hosted more than three semifinals is Gothenburg's Scandinavium, which has hosted one every year since 2003. In 2008, a heat was held in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle.