Aysel & Arash

Azerbaijani broadcaster İçtimai TV has announced that the Azerbaijani representative will be chosen by only jury voting. According to the channel, this statement is showing how much importance Azerbaijan attaches to the Eurovision Song Contest.

The polish broadcaster has today released the full televoting & jury results from the 2009 semifinal and final. Results shows that Azerbaijan scored a huge win in the semifinal over Norway and that Denmark benefited a lot from the jury.

The official album with all 42 participating songs is selling well in Denmark and Norway while the Swedish single chart practically is flooded by this year’s entries. Alexander Rybak is, to no surprise, popular in all three Scandinavian countries.

Ukraine complains about EBU forcing them to announce 8 points to Russia when they insist that it wasn’t their points and Armenia is saying that Azerbaijani TV wasn’t showing the voting number for Armenia properly.

The results of both semifinals have now been released by the EBU. They make interesting reading. The jury overturned the telephone vote to save countries in each of the semifinals. Quite annoying if your country finished 10th in the phone vote.

In a contest which nobody could call close, Norway won the 54th Eurovision Song Contest in the Olympiyskiy Arena in Moscow. He scored a record 387 points, leaving him a long way in front of Iceland and Azerbaijan in second and third places respectively.

After Tuesday’s semifinal, this evening, we discovered who would fill the remaining places in the final on Saturday. Nineteen countries, including favourites Norway, competed for the ten available places. The hosts were Andrey Malakhov and Natalia Vodianova, who also hosted the first semifinal.

A week into rehearsals and finally the five countries already in the final took to the stage. Before that, it was the turn of some of the remaining countries in Thursday’s second semifinal to rehearse for the second time.

Day 4 saw the remaining participants from the second semifinal rehearse for the first time, followed by the obligatory press conference. Slovenia were the early risers this morning, Dutch group, De Toppers brought the day to a close.