1,795 songs
Each dot represents one song that was performed at Eurovision in its 70 years, coloured by theme. More on this shortly, but let's understand the chart first.
Each column is a year
To the left the first edition of 1956, to the right Eurovision 2025. The dots on a column are the songs performed in that year.
Songs are stacked by finishing position
The winner is at the top. Entries that didn't get a final position are scattered at the end in no particular order.
Semi-finals were only introduced in 2004, so the number of songs increased from then.
The winners!
There was a 4-way tie in 1969, and no Eurovision in 2020 (due to the pandemic) although the songs had been selected.
Let's look at the themes and languages of some of these winners.
Waterloo
ABBA! Widely considered the most influential song ever staged at Eurovision, despite the Napoleonic metaphor it's ultimately a love song.
Sweden was famously the first non-English speaking country to sing in English in 1965, and Waterloo was also in English.
Insieme: 1992
Italy wins in Zagreb with an anthem about continental unity, referencing the Maastricht Treaty entering into force two years later. With the Berlin Wall just fallen, many songs that year had more political topics.
The song is in Italian 🤌, but the chorus “Unite, unite Europe” switches into English to make sure the message is heard.
Rise Like a Phoenix
Bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst wins with a Bond-style power ballad. A statement on empowerment, sung in English.
1944
Jamala sings one of Eurovision's most political winners, smuggled in as a family memoir. The lyrics describe Stalin's 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars, with Jamala's own great-grandmother among them. The contest reads it as a response to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Mostly in English, but the chorus is in Crimean Tatar.
Amar pelos dois
Salvador Sobral's love song is a jazz ballad that sounds like the antithesis of Eurovision mainstream.
The first Portugal success at Eurovision is also the first non-English song to win in 9 years.Toy
Netta's hymn to personal freedom in the #MeToo-era: “I'm not your toy”. The English chorus is sprinkled with Hebrew and Japanese.
Stefania
Kalush Orchestra's win comes three months after Russia's invasion and it's a nostalgic lullaby to the singer's mother. The language is Ukrainian.
Let's look at the themes
I classified every song into one of ten themes: Love, Joy, Empowerment, Freedom, Peace, Identity, Nostalgia, Rebellion, Fantasy, and Music itself.
The songs by theme
Let's look at the themes one by one. ⬇️
Love
Love dominates throughough the competition, with love songs making up more than half of the total.
- Winner Refrain — Lys Assia, Switzerland 1956
- Winner Nous les amoureux — Jean-Claude Pascal, Luxembourg 1961
- Voilà — Barbara Pravi, France 2021 (2nd)
Empowerment & resilience
The "rise up" theme: self-belief, survival, declaring your own worth.
- Winner Heroes — Måns Zelmerlöw, Sweden 2015
- Winner The Code — Nemo, Switzerland 2024
- Rock Bottom — Lynsey de Paul & Mike Moran, UK 1977 (2nd)
Peace & unity
Togetherness, harmony, a better world. Eurovision's idealist and sometimes hippie streak.
- Winner Ein bißchen Frieden — Nicole, Germany 1982
- Winner Hallelujah — Milk and Honey, Israel 1979
- A Million Voices — Polina Gagarina, Russia 2015 (2nd)
Joy & celebration
The pure-pop core: dancing, partying, the sheer pleasure of being out on a Saturday night.
- Winner J'aime la vie — Sandra Kim, Belgium 1986
- Winner Wild Dances — Ruslana, Ukraine 2004
- Wunder gibt es immer wieder — Katja Ebstein, Germany 1970 (3rd)
Freedom
Personal liberation, breaking constraints, walking away.
- Winner Ne partez pas sans moi — Céline Dion, Switzerland 1988
- Winner Toy — Netta, Israel 2018
- Runaway — Sahlene, Estonia 2002 (3rd)
Music & meta-song
Songs about songs, about singing, about Eurovision itself. Not many, but it punches well above its weight when it comes to winners.
- Winner La, la, la — Massiel, Spain 1968
- Winner Diva — Dana International, Israel 1998
- Power to All Our Friends — Cliff Richard, UK 1973 (3rd)
Nostalgia & memory
Looking at the way things used to be: childhood, lost streets, family memories. Strong in the chanson era of the 1960s and 70s.
- Winner Un banc, un arbre, une rue — Séverine, Monaco 1971
- Winner Rock 'n' Roll Kids — Paul Harrington & Charlie McGettigan, Ireland 1994
- Petit bonhomme — Camillo Felgen, Luxembourg 1962 (3rd)
Identity & homeland
National identity, language, place, planting a flag (sometimes literally).
- Winner The Voice — Eimear Quinn, Ireland 1996
- Winner Stefania — Kalush Orchestra, Ukraine 2022
- Mama Corsica — Patrick Fiori, France 1993 (4th)
Fantasy & dream
Imaginary worlds, fairy-tale figures, lyrical nonsense words. A small theme, weighted toward the early decades.
- Winner Tom Pillibi — Jacqueline Boyer, France 1960
- Winner Diggi-loo diggi-ley — Herreys, Sweden 1984
- My Star — Brainstorm, Latvia 2000 (3rd)
Rebellion & war
The smallest theme, but one that tracks the headlines. It spikes around conflicts. A response, not a genre.
- Winner 1944 — Jamala, Ukraine 2016
- Humanahum — Jean Gabilou, France 1981 (3rd)
- The War Is Not Over — Walters & Kazha, Latvia 2005 (5th)
The topic mix is changing
Eurovision's themes are adapting to changing times. Love (red) still dominates but is no longer the majority. Empowerment (blue) becomes prominent in the the 2010s, and Peace crests in the early 1980s. Let's take a look at some changes. ⬇️
Love vs Empowerment
The headline shift: Love (red), historically more than half of every year, has been narrowing its lead, while Empowerment & resilience (blue), almost invisible before the 2000s, has risen
sharply since the 2010s.
The gap between them tightens year on year.
Will
Empowerment overtake Love as Eurovision's dominant theme?
Peace & unity
The line crests in the early 1980s, the Cold-War-thaw Ein bißchen Frieden era, and again around 1990, as the Berlin Wall falls and Europe unites. After that the theme quietly recedes.
Freedom
A small theme, but a telling one. Almost absent until the 1980s, then it climbs as Eurovision becomes a stage for personal-liberation pop — Céline Dion in 1988, Netta in 2018. Eurovision turns from chanson-of-romance to chant-of-self.
Identity & homeland
The "where I'm from" theme is small. The peaks in 2022, the year of with Ukraine's wartime Stefania, and again in 2025, suggests political songs get louder as the world enters conflicts.
Music & meta-song
Music was big in the late-1970s and 1980s, with the schlager-and-disco heyday. As many as one in five entries was a song about singing.
Rebellion & war
The smallest theme is another headline-tracking set of songs. Spikes appear in lockstep with European conflict: around 1990 (Yugoslavia), 2005 (Iraq), 2016 (Crimea), and 2022 onwards (Ukraine). Not a Eurovision genre: a Eurovision response.
Some words slip through the topic net
The 10-theme classification captures what each song is about, but lyrics also carry vocabulary the topic analysis doesn't see: place names, time-of-day clichés, single-song shockwaves. Let's take a look at some words. ⬇️
Europe
"Europe" peaks around the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the contest was trying to understand who counted as European.
Waterloo
An ABBA-shaped loud bang in 1974 that never repeats.
London
The British capital appears just often enough to register.
Gay
Gay shows up only a handful of times. Despite Eurovision's famously queer audience, it doesn't surface much. Where it does, it's a slow shift from coded subtext to explicit text.
Man vs woman
Man (blue) is the more frequent of the two for most of the contest's history, but the gap narrows as Eurovision's lyrics shift from songs sung at someone to songs sung about oneself.
War vs peace
The contest's two political opposites. Peace (green) is the louder and more constant word. War (red) is sadly becoming more prominent.
The languages of Eurovision
I've recoloured every dot by language to look at a different angle. Eurovision once welcomed dozens of national tongues; over seven decades English has risen, retreated, and risen again, sometimes by rule, sometimes by choice.
- English
- French
- Italian
- German
- Spanish
- Dutch
- Portuguese
- Greek
- Other
1956–1965 · No language rule
For the first decade, there was no language rule. Most songs were in their own national language anyway. French, German, Italian, and Dutch dominate the early years; English is barely a presence. The exception is Sweden in 1965, whose entry Absent Friend, performed in English, prompted the EBU to introduce a formal language rule.
1966–1972 · National-language rule
The first version of the language rule: every entry must be performed in one of the country's official languages. There's a large set of national tongues, with English confined to Ireland, Malta, and the UK.
1973–1976 · The language rule is relaxed
For four years, countries could enter songs in any language they liked. Many took the opportunity to sing in English, a first taste of what would become the norm decades later.
1977–1998 · National-language rule, again
The rule comes back. Only Ireland, Malta, and the UK get to sing in English by default. Everyone else returns to their national languages, and the blue cools off considerably for two decades.
1999 onwards · Free choice, English wins
The rule is permanently dropped. Within a decade English has become the default — Eurovision joins the global pop economy, and the chart turns blue.
2016 onwards · A small reversal
The trend partially reverses. Portugal wins in 2017 with Salvador Sobral's Amar pelos dois, sung entirely in Portuguese. The share of English songs has been quietly slipping ever since.
Words that belong to a single song
Across 1,795 Eurovision songs I found over 5,000 hapax legomena: words that appear in exactly one song and never again.
Some are the defining word of their entry: a chant, a name, a hook that shows up dozens of times within one song and nowhere else. Here are some of them.
Sauna
Sweden 2025 · KAJ, Bara Bada Bastu.
The word sauna is
chanted 61 times in this one song, and never once anywhere else
in seventy years of Eurovision.
Jennie
Sweden 1975 · Lars Berghagen, Jennie, Jennie.
The name
Jennie appears 56 times. No other Eurovision song has ever named-checked a Jennie.
Rimi
Turkey 2005 · Gülseren, Rimi rimi ley.
Pure onomatopoeia:
rimi repeats 56 times.
Hule & Hupa
Israel 1987 · Lazy Bums, Shir habatlanim.
Hule (53 times) and hupa (49 times),
are nonsense syllables that drive the whole track.
Moni
Cyprus 1981 · Island, Monika.
Diminutive of the title;
moni shows up 48 times, an affectionate refrain
addressed to a single fictional Monika who never appears in any other Eurovision
lyric.
Kong
Netherlands 1966 · Milly Scott, Fernando en Filippo.
Kong appears 47 times through this
playful early entry.
Tweet
Finland 1962 · Marion Rung, Tipi-tii.
Tweet
(45 times). Just a birdsong, not that tweet.
Languages and themes
Seventy years, 1,795 songs, two bubbles. Every song performed in English vs. everything else.
And now, scroll below: the chart is yours to explore. ⬇️