As it was announced at the end of July, Spain is going to select their entrant for Eurovision Song Contest 2022 through the Benidorm International Song Festival. Today the submissions for the Festival are officially open and all the interested authors can send their proposals until the 29th of October when the submissions are going to be closed. The submission forms are available on the following links: HERE (scroll til the end of the article) or HERE
The total of 12 acts will be selected to participate in the Benidorm Festival, which will be held in the end of January 2022. Two semifinal and one final night are going to be organised. The decision is going to be made by the audience votes and national and international expert jury. And as a new thing they announced that half of the audience vote will be formed by a demoscopic jury made of people from different demographic and age groups of Spanish population similar method was used for Sanremo and Melodifestivalen 2021.
Four phases in the process of selection are:
First the interested authors and singers need to submit the form. All participants should be Spanish nationals or have a permanent residence in Spain (in case of a band 50% of the members should meet this condition);
Singers can only send a single submission on the other hand composers can submit one song as the main author and additional two as co-authors. The songs shouldn’t be released before the 1st of September 2021, they should be between 2 minutes 30 seconds and 3 minutes and should feature lyrics in Spanish and/or any other official languages of Spain. In case of a song in a foreign language maximum 35% of the lyrics in that foreign language is allowed. The authors can suggest the artist or band they consider ideal to perform their song.
Second phase includes a jury of music professionals created by RTVE who will rate the proposals and select 12 acts which will be taking part at the Benidorm Festival and also they will be selecting 6 backup acts. Minimum of two submissions registered through the website will take part at the festival. RTVE will also invite the authors and singers which they think are ideal for the competition. The names of the chosen artists and songs will be announced in November or December.
Third and Fourth phase include the festival itself which will be held at the end of January 2022 with a live broadcast at RTVE and RTVE Play .Two semi-finals will be held featuring six contestants. The audience ( 25% televoting and 25% demoscopic jury ) and the jury ( 60% national and 40% international ) will choose the finalists (the three acts advance from each semi-final). The final will feature 6 acts out of which one will become the Spanish representative at Eurovision Song Contest 2022.
The full set of rules is available HERE. The promotional video of the festival is available at the link HERE.
At Eurovision 2021, Spain was represented by Blas who ended on 24th place with just 6 points from the juries (4 from Bulgaria and 2 from the UK) in addition to that Spain became one of the four countries who got zero points from the televote. You can check his performance of “Voy a quedarme” below
Don’t forget to check our interview with Blas too.
What are your expectations of the Benidorm Festival? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and at our social media links!
