Our new SongHunt feature has enjoyed a positive response so far, with lots of users voting and giving their preferences on this season’s most popular national final entries. And while it’s never ideal to change things “just like that” during a running project, it’s precisely the constructive feedback from our users that has prompted us to make a little tweak to the rules.

We originally intended to have 12 heats evenly spread across the 12 weeks up until the HoD meeting, i.e. the last possible date for a national final. This decision was made back when we had no idea how the national final calendar for 2015 would look, and was intended to provide a basis we could use for all future years, too.

Now we know a bit more about the 2015 NF schedule – and ever since Festivali i Këngës (and hence Heat 1 of SongHunt), there has been a serious lack of new material due to a gap between preselection events that we didn’t anticipate. We’ve stuck to our rules until this week, selecting and adding favourite songs from the first qualification period that hadn’t made it into a SongHunt heat yet. But we’ve now reached a point where all of the songs from the top 30 of the overall list (except the NF winners) have been included, right down to songs with an average chat score of less than 6.00 out of 10.

If we would stick to that rule, the Heat 4 participants would have been all five Georgian songs plus three mid-table entries from the first qualification period that most people will have forgotten. On the other hand, the nature of the NF calendar means that there will be weeks in the future when – for example – seven shows will be held within a week, leading to extremely tough qualification criteria for the respective heat and many big chat favourites potentially missing out.

In the end, we decided not to take things to a ridiculous extreme by including all five Georgian songs in favour of giving later shows a second chance. So this is how the SongHunt rules are changing:

We’re skipping this week and moving everything else backwards by a week (i.e. Heat 4 will be launched next Sunday). This means that Heat 12 will be launched on the Sunday after the HoD meeting.

The participants in Heat 12 will be the top 8 songs from the entire national final season that didn’t make it through to their respective heats at the time – in other words, Heat 12 can be seen as a kind of “Second Chance” round. All dates of the further stages of SongHunt, including the final, will likewise be delayed by a week.

This system, with the final heat taking place after the end of the season as a kind of “Second Chance” round, may also be applied in future years, but we will make a final decision on that later this year – things may change depending on the respective schedule, after all.

We want the SongHunt rules to be easy to understand, and we appreciate that this change might make things seem more complicated – but (and with every respect to Georgia!) we believe it’s worth taking that risk in order to have a stronger line-up in the later stages of our SongHunt.

Stay tuned and read the updated rules here!