Eurovision's Asia Spinoff May Bring Much More Than Music
By J. J. Ghosh | 04 May, 2026

Eurovision Song Contest s coming to Asia for the first time — and if history is any guide, it could do a lot more than crown a winner.

If you grew up in the United States, there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of Eurovision. 

Or maybe you think of it like soccer: you know it exists and that Europeans are obsessed with it, but you aren’t exactly sure why.  It's possible that, like me, you know only what you learned from the 2020 musical comedy feature “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams.

The 2020 musical comedy feature about Eurovision

Eurovision is, in the simplest terms. the longest-running international music competition on television and one of the world’s longest-running television programs.  It's existed since 1965 and the rules are fairly simple:  Each country sends one act, one song, three minutes on the stage. The other countries vote. Someone wins. The winning country hosts the following year. Repeat for seven decades.

But beyond the structure, here's what actually happens:

Eurovision is one of the most gloriously, unapologetically maximalist spectacles in the history of live television.  Elaborate lighting displays, pyrotechnics, and extravagant on-stage theatrics and costumes have become a common sight.

Countries have sent wind machines, live wolves, and a man in a hamster wheel.  Finland once sent a heavy metal band in full monster costumes — Lordi, with “Hard Rock Hallelujah” — and won.  Austria sent a bearded drag queen named Conchita Wurst and she won too, becoming one of the most iconic moments in the contest’s history.

The contest launched the careers of ABBA, Céline Dion and Julio Iglesias.  Riverdance debuted as a Eurovision interval act.

Iconic Swedish band ABBA was discovered on Eurovision.

In 2024 roughly 163 million global viewers tuned in.  For context, that’s more than the Super Bowl.

It is in short, absolutely unhinged and completely wonderful.

And now it’s coming to Asia.

Bangkok 2026

The European Broadcasting Union and Voxovation together with S2O Productions announced that Eurovision Song Contest Asia will debut in 2026, with Bangkok selected as the Host City for its inaugural edition.

The grand final will take place on November 14, 2026, at IdeaLive in Bangkok, Thailand, and will consist of a single show.  Results will be decided by a 50/50 split of professional jury voting and public voting.  Each competing entry must be under three minutes and performed by no more than six people.

A Eurovision contestant once appeared in a life size hamster wheel

South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam are confirmed alongside Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan, with more countries expected to be announced.

We’re talking about a stage where a Bhutanese folk-pop act could go head-to-head with a Korean idol group, a Cambodian ballad, and if we're lucky, a Bollywood dance. 

In other words, it’s going to be big.

Eighteen Years in the Making

This announcement didn't come out of nowhere.  Plans for an Asian counterpart to Eurovision began in earnest in 2008, when the EBU announced that an Asian version would be held as early as 2009.  The project was taken up again in 2016 by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, which developed an iteration of the format with the EBU for a planned debut in 2019. SBS shelved the project in 2021.

It’s been a long road.

Bhutan apparently got so impatient waiting for the official version that its broadcaster aired a competition to select its entry before Voxovation asked them to pump the brakes... which is genuinely one of the more charming things to happen in music television.

The timing now, though, is meaningful.  Eurovision Song Contest Asia launches in the same year as the main contest’s 70th anniversary.  And the ambitions being floated are not small. 

Organizers have suggested the Asia edition could draw more than 600 million viewers. 

More Than Music

While people may tune in for the music — and sequins and dancing and pyrotechnics — Eurovision has been about much more than that.

For one, it's about national identity.  It’s about countries deciding what story they want to tell about themselves — in three minutes, in front of everyone — and then watching how those stories land across borders.  It’s political and personal and campy and earnest, sometimes all in the same performance.

But it’s also about diplomacy.

Eurovision was created to foster unity in post-World War II Europe.  It was designed to connect countries that had spent the previous decade trying to destroy each other.

The European Broadcasting Union was itself founded in that same spirit — a shared infrastructure for countries that had decided, however tentatively, to build something together.

Eurovision was that idea expressed in the most human terms possible: we’ll send you our best song, you send us yours, and we’ll all vote on it together.

Europe had some structural advantages in making this work.  The European Union — with its shared currency, open borders, and decades of economic and political integration — gave Eurovision a foundation of institutional goodwill to build on.

Asia is admittedly a different story.

There’s no Asian Union.  ASEAN, the region’s closest equivalent, is a loose economic and diplomatic forum whose members include countries with active territorial disputes, unresolved wartime grievances, and sharply divergent political systems.

China and South Korea have a complicated relationship with Japan.  India and Bangladesh have their own tensions.  The region is vast, diverse, and not always particularly aligned.

Which is exactly why Eurovision Asia could matter in a way that goes beyond the scoreboard. 

Soft power has always moved faster than diplomacy: K-pop has done more for South Korea’s regional relationships than most government initiatives.  Thai cuisine has charmed its way into the hearts of people who couldn’t place Thailand on a map.

When countries compete on a shared cultural stage — not militarily, not economically, but creatively — something shifts.  You stop seeing the other country as an abstraction and start seeing its people, its music, its particular way of making something beautiful.

Eurovision didn’t create the European Union.  But it spent decades rehearsing the idea that Europeans had more in common than not — and that rehearsal mattered.  Asia, right now, could use the same kind of practice.

Eurovision Song Contest Asia’s stated ambition is to create “a show that truly reflects Asia’s identity and creative energy” — one where “artists and fans connect across borders in new ways, through participation, community and deeper engagement beyond the stage.”

That’s a lot to ask of a song competition.  Then again, Eurovision has spent 70 years proving that a song competition can hold quite a lot.

The question now is which country goes full hamster wheel first.  My money is on the Philippines, though we should probably start by deciding what Asian currency we're placing our bets in.