The Eurovision Song Contest 1996 was the 41st Eurovision Song Contest and was held on May 18, 1996 in Oslo Spektrum in Oslo, Norway. The presenters were Ingvild Bryn and Morten Harket. Eimear Quinn of Ireland was the winner of this Eurovision with the song, The Voice. The European Broadcasting Union continued to experiment in their efforts to find a broadly acceptable method of whittling down the large number of potential participating countries to a more realistic figure. This year, they reverted to the pre-qualifying round that had been used for the 1993 contest, but this time with just one country exempt from the process - the hosts Norway. The pre-qualifier was an oddity in that it was not broadcast in any form, and did not even entail any live performance of the entries. Instead, the traditional set of national juries simply listened to the studio recordings of each song, and awarded points accordingly. All that was subsequently revealed of their deliberations was which countries had qualified, with the precise scores and placings remaining under wraps (although they were leaked some time later). It rapidly became evident that this system was no more sustainable than any other the EBU had tried, as it meant that several countries had gone through their traditional full-blown national selection procedure to come up with an entry, only to suffer the anti-climax of having their challenge quietly extinguished without even having had the opportunity of presenting the song to an international audience. As a leading financial contributor to the contest, Germany were particularly aggrieved that their entry, Planet of Blue performed by Leon, was one of the seven cast aside.  Source: Wikipedia