Record interest in Norwegian selection

Winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009 has sparked a great interest amongst the songwriters for participating for the Host Country of the 2010 edition of Europe’s favorite TV-show. Namely, a record amount of songs have been submitted to the Norwegian broadcaster NRK.

Will Norway repeat its success on home soil in 2010? Photo: Indrek Galetin (EBU)

NRK has revealed they’ve received almost twice as much entries for their national selection this year than usual. This means they now have about a thousand songs to choose from. That’s more than ever before!

This week the broadcaster will start their first round of listening of the songs to find out exactly the quality of the entries. So far it’s known songs from all over the country have been received. Who exactly has done so, remains to be seen.

This year only local authors were allowed to send in their entries, even though they can be co-written by foreign authors – up to 50 percent of the team can be outside the Nordic country of Norway.

Does all of this mean another Alexander Rybak might be among them and might ensure Norway its second victory in a row? NRK believes this might very well be the case! That’s according to Leif-Åge Reme who’s the Project Manager of Melodi Grand Prix at NRK.

Norway won the Eurovision Song Contest this year with Alexander Rybak’s Fairytale. This gave Europe at least two things: a pan-European hit as Fairytale peaked at number three in the European charts, topping many of the countries’ charts and also – Norway’s capital Oslo as the next city to hold Europe’s favorite TV-show.

The 55th Eurovision Song Contest will be held on May 25th, 27th and 29th 2010.

For more information visit www.eurovision.tv.