Everything's ready to select the Spanish entry

Destino Eurovisión

A total of 627 artists applied for participation in the castings. The first two shows will be used to shortlist the 24 selected artists to ten. In this preliminar stage, they will have to perform songs of the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, just like they did in the castings where they were chosen. Twelve singers will take part in each of the first two shows; from the twelve, the jury will eliminate four of them, and in a second round, the televote will choose three and the jury will pick two. This means that, in the third show, there will be ten singers to be reduced to the three finalists, chosen by both the jury and the audience.

The song selection

The selection of songs follows its own path. TVE already announced the twenty songs that made the cut from the 1142 submitted ones. An internal comitee will reduce this number to nine as the artists are being eliminated; these nine will be made public through TVE's website. The songs will be fully in Spanish, meaning that the ones that got through and were written in other languages will have to be translated soon. In the fourth and final show, scheduled for the 18th of February, each of the three artists will have to perform excerpts of three songs from the nine selected ones. In the end we'll have three songs: one for each singer. They will perform the three songs completely and the winner (chosen by jury and televote) wll wave the Spanish Flag in Düsseldorf.

The jokers

In the original rules of this year's national selection, TVE offered the possibility to join the final stage to any joker, an established artist that would skip the castings and the semifinals but, as the confirmed today at the press conference, no joker had approach them so far, although they have time to do so until next Thursday. If there are jokers joining the selection they won't be able to introduce a new song, but they will have to perform one of the selected ones.  

The expert jury

There will be a five-member expert jury that will have a say in both selections, singer and song. It will be formed by singer-songwriter Albert Hammond, Eurovision Song Contest expert Reyes del Amor, popular TV personality Boris Izaguirre and the successful singer-songwriter Merche, who, under the name Luna, tried to represent Spain in 2001 with No Pidas Más Amor. The 5th jury member is still in negotiations. 

The shows, to take place at the TVE studios in Barcelona, will be presented by last year's host, Anne Igartiburu, with the assistance of the winner of last year's national selection, Daniel Diges. Daniel took Algo Pequeñito to a 15th place in the Final of Europe's favourite TV-show in Oslo.