Nunzio Gallo's Corde della mia chitarra ("strings of my guitar") was performed at the Großer Sendesaal of Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt am Main on 3 March 1957 — the second Eurovision Song Contest ever held. The Neapolitan tenor's traditional Italian ballad ran 5 minutes and 9 seconds end to end, and finished sixth of ten entries with 7 votes.
The rule that immediately followed. The EBU Reference Group, meeting in Hilversum in September 1957, introduced a 3-minute maximum length for all songs. The rule took effect from Eurovision 1958 in Hilversum and has remained unchanged for 68 contests since. The rule is one of the longest-standing competitive constraints in any major music event: every Eurovision entry from 1958 to 2026 has been 3:00 or shorter.
How tight the modern field hugs the cap. Of the 25 Grand Finalists at Vienna 2026, twenty-three came in between 2:55 and 3:00. Composers have learned that the structural payoff of using every available second outweighs the artistic cost. The shortest GF entries (between 2:35 and 2:50) are typically uptempo dance-pop where the chorus is long enough that a fourth repeat would dilute it. The 3:00-flat hits are most often power ballads (Sobral's Amar pelos dois at 3:00, Conchita's Rise Like a Phoenix at 2:59).
Has the rule ever been bent? Effectively no. The cap is enforced at the EBU's reference recording stage; any submission longer than 3:00 must be edited down before the artist's national selection. The closest contests have ever come to a violation: Edyta Górniak (Poland 1994) submitted at 3:01, which the EBU asked be re-recorded at 3:00 flat (it finished 2nd, the highest Polish placement to date). The 50/50-era record for shortest is the post-2014 inverse — see /stats/shortest-song for Finland 2015's 1:27 record.
The longest-ever interval performance. The 3-minute cap applies to competitive entries only. Interval acts, which are non-competitive, regularly run 4–7 minutes (Riverdance, 1994, was 4:30 and went on to become a global cultural phenomenon). The 2026 Vienna interval medley honouring Eurovision's 70th anniversary ran 9 minutes and 12 seconds and featured eight prior winners.