Swedish public broadcaster SVT says a record 4,077 songs have been submitted for next year's Melodifestivalen, the national contest that picks Sweden's Eurovision act, and that it believes a considerable share of them were made with AI. Only 30 songs will reach the contest itself, so the vast majority of entries never make it to a stage, whoever or whatever wrote them.
“Det är inte en dator som kommer att stå och sjunga på scenen på lördagar i Melodifestivalen.”
Anders Wistbacka, Melodifestivalen project leader, to TT · tv4.se ↗
SVT cannot put a number on it. It runs no technical tools to detect AI-made music, so the suspicion rests on patterns: one unknown submitter sending very many songs in a wide spread of genres is the telltale sign. Without detection software, the broadcaster is effectively left judging by volume and variety rather than by anything it can verify in the audio. Every entry is still listened to by people, which takes time and money, and the broadcaster notes that a jump to 10,000 entries would require a larger budget.
There is no ban on AI in the competition. SVT says it will follow whatever line the music industry settles on. The project leader, Anders Wistbacka, considers a song produced entirely by AI possible in theory but doubts one would get through, since the performance has to be sung live on stage.
The broadcaster places the flood in a wider run of moments that made AI music a talking point: the 2023 track Heart on My Sleeve, the Velvet Sundown in 2025, and Jacub reaching the top of Sweden's Spotify chart in January 2026. Radio Sweden had already reported that same month that SVT was open to AI-involved songs as long as they were performed live. What follows for SVT is practical: planning and budgeting for a possibly much bigger inbox next year.
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