San Marino — population 34,000 — faces an uphill climb to find just one singer for Eurovision. That partly explains their tendency to call on the same singers — Valentina Monetta, Serhat, Senhit — repeatedly.
While we are all fans of their returning artists, it’s great the microstate is doing its best to field some fresh talent with its very international national selection Una Voce per San Marino.
The broadcaster is so enthusiastic about it that they’ve released an update three days after launch, explaining that there have already been 45 registrations.
About 40% of the applications were filed from abroad, “and for the most part from Sweden.” That make sense. Sweden regularly receives around 2,500 submissions for its national final Melodifestivalen (and for just 28 spots in the contest). That makes the mountain very high to climb for folks without a record label or established name.
The contest is open to both emerging artists and established artists, with a 50/50 split between the two groups. These contestants can come from any country — San Marino or abroad.
San Marino celebrates Una Voce per San Marino applications
Emerging artists will enter via the open application process. The broadcaster will hold two casting periods in December and January, where the emerging artist applicants will be assessed at live auditions.
From there, around 40 shortlisted emerging artists will compete in four semi-finals, a second chance round and a final, held at the Teatro Titano. The acts will perform a cover of a well known song and present their choice of unreleased song. The nine highest placed acts will qualify for the overall grand final. These shows will all be broadcast on SMRTV.
The acts in established artists category will not have to audition. Rather, nine artists will be invited by contest organisers to compete directly in the grand final (sort of like the pre-qualified artists portion of Norway’s national final in recent years).
Eighteen artists — nine emerging and nine established — will compete in the grand final. Acts will perform their intended song for a potential Eurovision entry. Songs can be performed in any language.
Initial applications are free, but acts who pass to the audition stage will need to pay an entry fee of 30 euros (before 30 November) or 50 euros (after that date).
Which artists would you like to see competing in San Marino’s national final? Are there any Swedish acts you’d like to see represent the microstate? Tell us your thoughts below!
They should get artists from Italy instead of Sweden.
Implying they haven’t got several from Italy
I know this site doesn’t really cover Junior Eurovision in depth, but if anyone is interested, we have three songs out out of 19 country so far.
Germany—Pauline—“Imagine Us”
The Netherlands—Ayana—“ Mata Sugu A? Ne”
Poland—Sara James—“Somebody”
Robyn, I always like your articles and comments. But I disagree on this clarification. Each country participating at Eurovision wants to promote its own tourism. It is not just San Marino. And I highly doubt that with the national final they can make 300K (the amount of money asked to singer Arisa a few years ago). The priority is to send a song which represents the ‘country’. Also let’s remember that San Marino (practically a town with 33 thousand people) has, in the voting process, the same leverage of countries with millions of people.
It has no leverage in the televote because San Marino does not have a televote.
San Marino has leverage in the voting system (through the jury vote). For the televote of San Marino, it is used a composite score using average televoting results from a pre-selected group of countries.
Yes. San Marino has only half the power of every other country.
team IROL here, let the boi shine
Wow… I’m kind of impressed, 60% of 45, is 27… so we have 27 Sanmarinense artists, that’s an impressive 0,08% of their population (the equivalent in Sweden would be 8274 artists, in UK would be 54198 artists)… it’s obvious that we will see a lot of foreign artists in such a little country (Luxembourg was very appealing in Eurovision, and many, almost all of their artists were from other countries), having right now 18 (40% of 45), is quite interesting. Will we see a lot of Swedish songs in the preselection? Is kind of obvious, taking into account that just… Read more »
I got hyped up there with Valentina! Imagine her participating again for a 5th time… After a pretty bad place in the SF, an 11th place in the SF, a bad result in the final and a last place with 1 point in the SF again, a good result is all she’s missing! Plus a 5th appearance would be a new record…
Too early to start with the negativity since we don’t even know the songs in the entries. Don’t knock ’em till you’ve heard ’em.
Why is everyone upset that 40% of the submissions are from abroad? Why no one is talking about the 60% that is from San Marino? I find it quite surprising to have that many local acts (bc it’s San Marino) just from the first days of the submission.
That is indeed remarkable.
I actually expected more applicants from abroad, so I’m surprised that 60% are local.
It’s remarkable, given that most of us live in cities way larger and more populated than San Marino.
Let’s be real. This year’s song was from San Marino was “written” by 10 people and 7 of them were from Sweden already and those 7 people had written a 85% similar song for Melfest 2020 called Moves with the only differences being the lyrics changed, the rap was thrown in and the instrumentation had a more ethnic beat. So…Sweden representing San Marino is not that far off from this year.
here come the xenophobes, people only want something to whine about.
You’re clearly missing the point. Also, I highly doubt someone thoroughly xenophobe would stick around here – pretty much like you don’t visit a sauna if you can’t stand heat.
This is wrong on so many levels. That’s why I never liked the hype behind San Marino entries and also the hype in the comment section of this blog, cheering for the ‘splendid’ San Marino entries. Clearly the Eurovision participation of San Marino is a highly ‘profitable’ spot for someone. Nothing to do about real music, but just the crave to have a slot to perform a short-lived pop song. Isn’t San Marino culturally and linguistically Italian? And why not then choose a singer from Italy, for example this year Sanremo Festival non-winners like Irama and Annalisa would have been… Read more »
Wtf
That would be a good idea for next year to choose a Sanremo song or an Italian artist. I think it’s good that San Marino choose artist all over Europe, it is sort of a bonus song, but then the bonus song must be something the fan base really want sending in!
EH? ESC 2021 has been over for a long time. Why rant over Adrenalina and songwriters?
Agree! I don’t think that the fact that Sweden wants to sell songs is disgraceful, what I personally find disgraceful is when countries don’t even try… Adrenalina was clearly a very lazy product in my eyes, Malta 2019, 2020, 2021 were entries that I consider were good “bought” products.
So it depends but I do think that San Marino would be way better off if they just tried to send something “Italian”.
They’ve tried to approach Italian singers like Arisa before but it hasn’t worked, most likely due to lack of funding and sponsorship
I agree with you.
Guys … weren’t Serhat (especially with his first entry) and most of the Ralph Siegel years proof enough that San Marino would take just about anyone who has got the money to take them to the stage? They don’t want to win it. Their primary goal isn’t even to send songs decent enough to avoid ridicule. They only want to remember you of their existence, because there’s basically no other way for them to get noticed. Don’t forget that, after all, this republic basically just equates to a single, random small town anywhere in Europe. The people over at SMRTV… Read more »
Hey, the more the merrier.
Sweden? oh no, another country that will receive rejections from Melodi or Swedish-penned (Swedish teams) entries like Cyprus and Malta. No originality at all.. i was hoping that they would receive more Italian entries/artists since Eurovision is now big in Italy and not everyone can take part in San Remo..
The article says: “many from Sweden”. It doesn’t say how many, could be 8, 9, 10 or more. Will probably be enough room for at least 5 Italian entries or something.
yeah i am not saying that it says how many but it highlights Sweden, not Italy which makes me think that an extremely high number of the entries are Swedish-penned. Even senhit’s song was Swedish-penned…
And why is that a problem? Many of the songs you hear on the radio today also have Swedish song writers.
I can see the logic with that. To even be considered for Melodifestivalen you have to be established or have a major record label backing you. If you are a small independent artist you probably wont even be listened to by SVT. That leaves sending to other countries or just releasing the song independently. Whether it is a wise choice remains to be seen..