Last year’s host country, Azerbaijan, started its "long term" national final called Milli Seçim Turu on the road to Malmö. As well as in previous years, the participants in the first heat showed their skills in different music styles during the past week on İçtimai TV with Vüqar Muradov winning the first ticket to the semi-final.
This year, more than 128 participants have submitted their applications to be one of the lucky names who will be participating at the Azeri national final, Milli Seçim Turu 2013. Therefore, the broadcaster İçtimai TV narrowed the number of participants down to 80 and decided to continue its very long national final procedure, which consists of 8 heats, a semifinal and a final. Each heat will include 8 or 9 participants, who will continue a week with the same schedule of music styles. At the last show of the week, only one name will qualify to the semifinal.
This week, Milli Seçim Turu started with its first heat with the first nine participants: Group New Skin, Cahangir Qasımzadə, Mədinə Muradxanova, Vüqar Muradov, Anna Zemçenko, Nigar Əlizadə, Elqiz Məmmədovii, Rinat Alimov and Tomris Naibli.
Each participant performed their bests to be one of the semifinalist including five shows in a week. The shows started at 18.00 CET (21.00 Local Time) and the televoting lines were open during the shows. The details of the song selection procedure was:
- Monday: Eurovision Hits
- Tuesday: Azeri Music
- Wednesday: World Hits
- Thursday: Stage Performance
- Friday: Free Style (Participants will re-perform some of their previous song selections)
At the last show, the televoting results of each day were added to the poll, which is also combined with the jury results at the end. Before the last show the televoting results from the previous four days here in heat 1 was looking like:
– Vüqar Muradov: 675 votes
– Mədinə Muradxanova: 486 votes
– Group New Skin: 347 votes
– Anna Zemçenko: 285 votes
– Tomris Naibli: 245 votes
– Nigar Əlizadə: 73 votes
– Cahangir Qasımzadə: 61 votes
– Elqiz Məmmədovii: 41 votes
– Rinat Alimov: 31 votes
As in previous years, the total votes combined with jury votes and we are directly informed with the results of heat 1. The final results as it follows:
2 points: Elqiz Məmmədovii
3 points: Cahangir Qasımzadə
4 points: Anna Zemçenko
5 points: Nigar Əlizadə
6 points: Rinat Alimov
7 points: Tomris Naibli
8 points: Mədinə Muradxanova
10 points: Group New Skin
12 points: Vüqar Muradov
The lucky name of the first week was Vüqar Muradov who is grabbing a place in the semifinal.
The second heat will take start on December, 24th at the usual time – 18.00 CET – and will be able to be watched via İçtimai TV, satellite on Turksat & Hotbird and its website, itv.az.
Azerbaijan is one of the newest face at the Eurovision Song Contest where they participated in 2008 for the very first time, have found themselves a spot in the final each year up to now, also finishing at top 10 each year. In 2011 they won the contest thus hosted last year’s big event in their capital in Baku in May this year.
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