We proudly announce the return of SongHunt, our now-traditional method of finding the best national final song of the year!

Once again, the 96 most popular national final songs from around Europe according to our chatters will take part in eight heats, followed by four quarter-finals, two semi-finals, the grand final and – for the second time – an exciting superfinal. All these stages will be hosted in the form of online polls in which you can vote for your favourite songs. If you are new to all this, why not read all about how SongHunt worked last year?

The first heat of SongHunt 2018 will be launched on Sunday 28 January. 

What the SongHunt launch has to do with Festivali i Këngës 

You might be thinking we’re a little bit early with our SongHunt announcement, considering we only launch the polls at the end of January. Well, then you need a quick reminder of how things work before the heats!

• 12 songs participate in each heat. 9 of them are the chatters’ favourites from the national finals (and we do mean finals), with the remaining 3 songs being carefully selected by our editors.
• The 9 chatters’ favourites come from the top 9 of a rolling chart containing all the entries from all national finals, sorted by the average scores that the songs achieved in the votings in our #esc chatroom during the respective live shows. (Here’s how the list ended up looking last year if you want an example of how it works.)
• The 3 editors’ choices can come from any stage of a national preselection. In other words, they might be songs that got knocked out in a country’s preliminary rounds, or they could be finalists that weren’t popular with all our chatters so they got a lower average mark. The only restriction is that no winners of national finals get to compete in SongHunt. The aim is to find the best national final song that didn’t make it to ESC!

And since these rules apply as soon as the first national preselection show hits our webstream windows, it’s Festivali i Këngës (and to be more specific, the first Albanian semi-final, which will be held on Thursday evening – join us for it in the chat) that kicks off SongHunt 2018!

So here’s what you need to keep in mind for the upcoming shows:

• Join the chat and take part in the live voting! Even if your scores for semi-final performances don’t get counted for the rolling SongHunt chart, they might have an influence our editors’ choices – we’ll be keeping a close eye on those chat favourites that were “robbed”. And, of course, your votes in each country’s final will be included in the calculation for SongHunt.
• If your favourite in a country’s semi-final doesn’t reach the national final or gets ignored by the other chatters, don’t despair! You can still help it to reach the SongHunt polls by submitting your suggestion here or by sending a PM in the chat to MartinF or FelixK. There are no guarantees, but if you draw our attention to a song, we might well take it into consideration for our editors’ choice.

That’s all for now! Join us in the chat on Thursday, Friday and Saturday for Festivali i Këngës – and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for future updates.