Eurovision’s national finals season may be over, but the Junior Eurovision national finals season is just warming up. After two weeks of auditions, Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS has announced the 28 songs that will take part in the final audition on 22 March. That’s today. These lucky 28 have emerged from hundreds of applicants, so well done.
Among those songs are a few we actually heard last year, as Junior Songfestival allows children to resend their songs to the contest if they didn’t make the final. Sometimes things improve on second listen and with the passing of time.
Among them are “Don’t Bully Me” from Alexandra Klein.
https://youtu.be/tohxfkTJQl8
Then there’s “Come on” from Nieloefaar. Nieloefaar is no stranger to big stages as she competed in the third season of “The Voice Kids”, where she made it all the way to the final.
There are other familiar faces from The Voice Kids. Katrina, who also reached the final of the third season, has seen her audition clock up nearly 7 milion hits on YouTube.
Former contestants from The Voice Kids have a history of success at Junior Songfestival. Last year Chelsea (from the second season of The Voice Kids) ended up as runner-up with the song “Waarom”.
The songs are judged by Charly Luske (singer-songwriter), Brownie Dutch (singer, rapper and producer) and last, but certainly not least, Edsilia Rombley, who competed for the Netherlands in Eurovision in 1998 and 2007. She’ll also host Eurovision in Concert in April.
Today the songs will be reduced to 8 — this year’s finalists. However, they won’t know whether they’ve made it immediately. Host Jan Smit will surprise them during the summer.
The auditions will not be shown on telivision, but they will be uploaded to the Junior Songfestival YouTube channel. During the fall they’ll be released during the “live reports” on NPO3.
@Graph this year she isn’t competing, her name was not on the list. It’s quite unusual here for Junior Songfestival finalists to compete again in Junior Songfestival. 🙁
I hope Chelsea competes again because I loved her song last year and felt that it should have won, even though I also liked Julia’s song.
Again, so early. Hopefully it’s not the “six soloists and two duos” thing like the previous two years (2013-2014). I hope that one of the candidates is a group/band consisting of three or four members.