linguistic:paraphrasing
Special events and related competitions

Several anniversary events, and related contests under the "Eurovision Live Events" brand, have been organised by the EBU with its member broadcasters. In addition, participating broadcasters have occasionally commissioned special Eurovision programmes for their home audiences, and a number of other imitator contests have been developed outside of the EBU framework, on both a national and international level.

The EBU has held several events to mark selected anniversaries in the contest's history: Songs of Europe, held in 1981 to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, had live performances and video recordings of all Eurovision Song Contest winners up to 1981; Congratulations: 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest was organised in 2005 to celebrate the event's fiftieth anniversary, and featured a contest to determine the most popular song from among 14 selected entries from the contest's first 50 years; and in 2015 the event's sixtieth anniversary was marked by Eurovision Song Contest's Greatest Hits, a concert of performances by past Eurovision artists and video montages of performances and footage from previous contests. Following the cancellation of the 2020 contest, the EBU organised a special non-competitive broadcast, Eurovision: Europe Shine a Light, which provided a showcase for the songs that would have taken part in the competition.

Other contests organised by the EBU include Eurovision Young Musicians, a classical music competition for European musicians between the ages of 12 and 21; Eurovision Young Dancers, a dance competition for non-professional performers between the ages of 16 and 21; Eurovision Choir, a choral competition for non-professional European choirs produced in partnership with the Interkultur and modelled after the World Choir Games; and the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, a similar song contest for singers aged between 9 and 14 representing primarily European countries. The Eurovision Dance Contest was an event featuring pairs of dancers performing ballroom and Latin dancing, which took place for two editions, in 2007 and 2008.

Similar international music competitions have been organised externally to the EBU. The Sopot International Song Festival has been held annually since 1961; between 1977 and 1980, under the patronage of the International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT), an Eastern European broadcasting union similar to the EBU, it was rebranded as the Intervision Song Contest. An Ibero-American contest, the OTI Festival, was held by the Organización de Televisión Iberoamericana (OTI) between 1972 and 2000 among hispanophone and lusophone broadcasters in Europe and the Americas; and a contest for countries and autonomous regions with Turkic links, the Turkvision Song Contest, has been organised since 2013. Similarly, an adaption of the contest for artists in the United States, the American Song Contest, was held in 2022 and featured songs representing U.S. states and territories. Adaptions of the contest for artists in Canada and Latin America are in development, though development on the former has been halted.