How Sanremo Became a Digital Ecosystem

The Festival turns 75 and keeps reinventing itself. From the radio of 1951 to the 4K of 2026, here is how it innovates while keeping its identity — and what companies can learn about digital transformation.

There is something extraordinary about an event that turns 75 and can still get millions of people to sit in front of a screen at the very same moment. In an age when everything is on demand, fragmented, personalised, the Sanremo Festival is an anomaly. A collective ritual that resists the breaking-up of attention.

But the real anomaly is not that Sanremo still exists. It is that Sanremo has managed to completely reinvent itself in technology, distribution and language, without ever losing its identity.

The Ariston Theatre is still there. The orchestra is still there. The competition is still there. And yet the way the Festival reaches its audience, the way the audience interacts with the Festival, the way content is produced, distributed and consumed has nothing to do with how it was twenty years ago. Let alone in 1951.

Understanding how Sanremo built this digital ecosystem without losing itself is a valuable lesson. Not only for those who work in television, but for any company that wants to evolve while remaining itself.

The history of the Sanremo Festival: 75 years of technological innovation

The first edition of the Sanremo Festival aired on 29 January 1951. Not on television (TV did not yet exist in Italy) but on the radio, on Rete Rossa, the forerunner of Rai Radio 1. The audience sat at the tables of the Ballroom of the Sanremo Casino, over dinner, while three singers took turns on twenty songs. Nilla Pizzi won with "Grazie dei fiori".

The television debut came only in 1955, a year after the official birth of Italian TV. It was a revolution: suddenly the Festival was no longer just a sound, but also an image. Italy could see the singers, the outfits, the stage. The visual dimension changed everything.

In 1973 the Festival was filmed in colour for the first time, but Italians still watched it in black and white; colour would arrive only in 1977, together with the move from the Casino to the Ariston Theatre. The very theatre that still hosts the event today.

Then came stereophony in the 1980s, then high definition via satellite in the 2000s, then digital terrestrial television. Every technological milestone of Italian television has had Sanremo as its testing ground. The Festival did not merely adopt new technologies: it often launched them for the general public.

Sanremo 2026: the debut of 4K on digital terrestrial television

In 2026, the Festival debuts in native 4K on digital terrestrial television, with Dolby Atmos audio. A resolution four times higher than traditional HD, broadcast over the air for the first time in Rai's history. To do so, the technicians had to reorganise the entire broadcasting infrastructure, sacrificing bandwidth on other channels.

But the real revolution of recent years is not in the pixels. It is in the fact that today Sanremo is no longer a television programme. It is a multichannel platform.

Sanremo's digital ecosystem: figures and data of the transformation

According to data reported by Inside Marketing, the Festival's evolution is closely tied to the transformation of the music market and the growth of streaming. In 2024 streaming accounted for 67% of the revenues of the Italian music market, and in the first half of 2025 it exceeded 166 million euros, growing by 10%.

But the most impressive figures concern the multi-platform consumption of the Festival itself.

RaiPlay and streaming: the Festival's data

RaiPlay recorded 13.5 million views and 12 million hours of content consumed during the 2025 edition. The most telling figure: 40% of users were under 35 — a demographic that linear television is finding it increasingly hard to reach.

As reported by Agenda Digitale, the live stream of the first night of the 2023 Festival was the most-watched non-sporting event in streaming since Auditel Online measurement began, with 292,000 devices connected in the average minute. A figure up 40% on the previous year.

Social media and TikTok: Sanremo wins over Gen Z

On the social media front, the numbers are even more impressive. The hashtag #Sanremo2025 generated around 70,000 posts with over 399 million views — up 40% on the previous edition.

On TikTok, views exceeded 1.2 billion, more than double the previous year. Over one billion audio clips were saved and reused by users to create their own content.

FantaSanremo: the gamification of the Festival

And then there is the FantaSanremo phenomenon, the game that turned the Festival into a participatory and gamified experience: 5 million teams signed up, hundreds of thousands of leagues created. Millions of people who do not just watch, but play, comment, create content, share. The Festival becomes a social event in which the viewer is an active protagonist.

Sotto Sanremo and Spotify: native content for every platform

In 2026 came "Sotto Sanremo" too, an original format produced for RaiPlay that tells the story of the Festival from backstage in the language of social media, hosted by creators and explicitly designed for Gen Z. Content that would not exist without the digital platform, but that feeds on the main event and amplifies it.

And Spotify launched an advertising campaign with five different spots, one for each night, building a serial narrative synchronised with the Festival. Plus an in-app experience that lets users support their favourite artist and create personalised content.

The Festival is no longer an event you watch. It is an ecosystem you step into.

What still makes Sanremo Sanremo: the core identity that never changes

And yet, amid all this transformation, Sanremo has remained Sanremo.

The Ariston is still there, with its red velvets and its imperfect acoustics. The orchestra is still there, with its forty members playing live. No backing tracks, no playback. The live broadcast is still there, with its mishaps, its slip-ups, its moments of genuine television that no editing can replicate.

The competition is still there, with its voting mechanism that keeps people glued to the screen until one in the morning. And above all, the ritual is still there. Sanremo week remains the Italians' "secular holy week", the one moment of the year when the whole country watches the same thing at the same time and talks about it the next day at the bar, in the office, on social media.

This is the crucial point. Sanremo has understood that innovation does not mean throwing everything away and starting from scratch. It means understanding what should be preserved and what should be transformed.

The core, the identity, the ritual, the collective experience, the live music, the Ariston stage, has remained intact. Everything else — the distribution, the interaction, the formats, the languages, the platforms — has been rethought from scratch, several times, over the course of 75 years.

It is this combination that makes Sanremo unique. It is not a TV programme that has added a few social channels. It is an integrated ecosystem in which the live broadcast, the streaming, the social media, the gamification, the native content for different platforms and the brand activations feed one another, amplifying the overall experience.

Digital transformation for companies: the lesson of Sanremo

There is a lesson in all this, and it is not only about television. It concerns any organisation that has to evolve without losing itself.

The temptation, when it comes to digital transformation, is to think that everything must change. New identity, new language, new channels, new everything. Or, conversely, to change nothing because "we've always done it this way" and it has always worked.

Sanremo shows that there is a third way.

You can build a complex digital ecosystem, made up of a website, e-commerce, social media, an app, a CRM, automations, content for different platforms, while keeping a recognisable and coherent core identity. Indeed, you must. Because it is precisely that core that gives meaning to everything else.

Without the Ariston, without the orchestra, without the live broadcast, without the collective ritual, Sanremo would be just another talent show. It is the combination of tradition and innovation that makes it unique. It is the ecosystem built around a solid centre that allows it to reach different audiences, on different platforms, in different languages and without ever losing its recognisability.

This is what it really means to build a digital ecosystem. It is not adding channels at random. It is not being everywhere for the sake of it. It is rethinking the entire experience of the customer, the user, the audience while keeping clear what makes you yourself.

How A126 builds digital ecosystems for companies

This is exactly the approach we take at A126 when we work with our clients.

We never start from the technology. We start from identity. Who are you? What makes you recognisable? What is your "Ariston" — that is, the core that must remain intact while everything else evolves?

Only after defining this centre do we build the digital ecosystem around it:

A website that is not just a showcase, but a tool that works for you, optimised for search engines, designed to convert visitors into customers, fast and usable on every device.

A social media presence that is not just "being there", but that speaks the right language to the right audience, with a coherent and measurable content strategy.

A bespoke management system that does not force you to adapt to it, but adapts to your processes, from invoicing to inventory, from client management to accounting.

An e-commerce platform that is not an online catalogue, but a shopping experience consistent with your brand, capable of opening markets that a physical store would never reach.

And above all, a system in which all these elements talk to one another. In which the website feeds the CRM, the CRM feeds the automations, the automations feed the social media, and the social media drive traffic back to the website. An ecosystem, precisely. Not a collection of disconnected tools.

It took Sanremo 75 years to build its ecosystem. Companies do not have all that time. But they do have the chance to learn from those who did it first and to be supported by those who know how to do it.

Conclusion: innovating without losing your identity

The 2026 Sanremo Festival is broadcast in 4K with immersive audio, has a parallel format on RaiPlay designed for people in their twenties, generates billions of interactions on social media, powers a game with millions of participants and inspires serialised advertising campaigns.

But it remains, in its essence, what it was in 1951: an event that brings Italians together around music, at the same time, in the same symbolic place.

Seventy-five years of continuous innovation. Zero loss of identity.

If you think about it, this is exactly what every company would like to achieve. And with the right partner, it is possible.

Do you want to build a digital ecosystem for your company? Get in touch for a consultation — we start from your identity and build together the system you need.