Today, 6th January, the opening of the envelopes with the songs submitted to the Romanian broadcaster for the country's preselection for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Bucharest. On Thursday, a special jury appointed by TVR will shortlist 24 songs to compete in the two semifinals and the next day all songs will be posted on TVR's official site.

This is the first time that many of the submitted songs have been revealed by the artists themselves and a lot of them are already online on youtube. Esctoday.com has spoken with many Romanian participants and they revealed to us that they wanted the public to listen to their songs before the internal presection because first of all it's not against the rules and that it is good for the promotion of the submitted songs.

There are many artists who have submitted songs for the Romanian selection for the first time and we also see some past Eurovision stars. Nico (Romania 2008) this time wants to represent her country with a duet with Moni-k with the song Disco maniacs, Imba (NF2008) with the song Round and round, Zero(NF2008) with the song Sunny days and Jasmine (NF2007) with the pop song Fly. Among the participants, we have many artists that are famous in Romania but either they never made it to the semifinals or they never tried before, such as Romero Zaharia, Blaxy girls, Alexa, Cats love dogs, Dalma Kovacs, Noni Razvan Ene known from the Junior Eurovision, Marko, Crazy win and many more.

There are only 3 days left to find out the semifinalists and it is certain there will be many surprises as a lot of artists wanted to keep their participation a secret, so stay tuned for more…

Many of the submitted songs are available on youtube here .