Festival da Canção is about to start as this weekend we’ll get the first semi-final of the Portuguese national selection.
Broadcaster RTP have just released which jury members will determine for 50% who will qualify from said semi-finals!

It’s in the hands of these seven:

Let’s get to know them a little better:

• Anabela: She has won Festival da Canção in 1993 with ‘A cidade (até ser dia)’ and reached 10th place! Later she became a famous musical star.
• Capicua: Is a celebrated Portuguese rapper. She was behind Tamin’s song, ‘Sobre nós’ in Festival da Canção 2018.
• Conan Osiris: Has famously won last year’s edition of Festival da Canção with ‘Telemoveís’ and went on to represent Portugal in Tel Aviv. After that, his schedule has been full with people reaching out to him to perform all over the country!
• Héber Marques: A singer songwriter, also with previous national final experience, as he has had a song in both the 2015 (Filipe Gonçalves – Dança Joana) and the 2017 (Rui Drumond – O teu melhor) edition.
• Isilda Sanches: A radio broadcaster and currently on the Antenna 3 team. Has several publications on the topic of music to her name.
• Miguel Ângelo: As a singer he has been a member of the band Delfins, with which he participated in Festival da Canção 1985. In 2018 he came back as a composer behind ‘Arco-íris’, performed by Dora Fidalgo.
• Rui Miguel Abreu: Has experience in music through the Arkham Hi-Fi project. Next to that, he created the digital magazine Rimas e Batidas in 2015 and often writes as a music journalist in Blitz magazine.

Now for the voting part: that will mainly stay as we’re used to from Festival da Canção.
These 7 jury members will make up 50% of the votes and the televoters the other half. In the final invited jury members will each present the jury votes of 7 regions of Portugal, again amounting to 50% of the votes and the televoters will have the other half once again.
There’s a difference in that in the semi-finals, in case of a tie, the jury vote prevails and in the final it will be the televoters having the final say.

A change however is that, to keep the suspense, from now on: the individual scores of the songs in the semi-finals will not be revealed anymore! They will be announced in a random order, exactly like at Eurovision which entries (in this case 4 from each semi-final) have made it but not their ranking!

The detailed scores will appear on the Festival da Canção website after the grand final of the festival!

If you’ve heard the songs in this edition already (if not, you can hear them right here), you can vote for your favourite in our polls!