Former winners of Melfest (Mello, in Swedish) who went on to Eurovision include ABBA, which failed to win Melfest with Ring, Ring in 1973 but won both Melfest and Eurovision the following year with Waterloo. Melfest, in turn, is the gateway to the Eurovision Song Contest, arguably the world’s most watched nonsporting event, with a global audience of nearly 200 million people.

In Sweden that year, Melfest winner Carola Häggkvist’s debut album outsold it. In 1983, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the world’s bestselling album. The show has immense sway over the Swedish charts. The producers have a captive audience-in February, Sweden’s coldest month, the temperature can plunge to -8 degrees F. It regularly claims an 80 percent share of TV-viewing homes, and nearly half of all Swedes hunker down in front of it. The show airs in prime time on Saturday evenings in February and March and has been Sweden’s most-watched program since 2000. None can claim as much domestic influence as Melfest. In recent years, reality singing franchises, including The Voice, X Factor, and Pop Idol, have cropped up from Australia to Britain to Ukraine. Measured by its popularity, star power, and production values, it makes American Idol look like a couple of people humming a tune in your living room. Melfest, as it is known, is a six-week televised competition that SVT, Sweden’s state-run broadcaster, has staged in various forms since 1959.

Singles swing dance moves list