Today the Austrian newsforum news.at launched the names of five prominent Austrian popacts who are believed to participate in song.null.fünf, the Austrian preselection for the Eurovision Song Contest: DJ Ötzi, Alf Poier, Starmaniacs, Die Seer and Global.Kryner. However, it is not clear if this is the official participants list.

All five – commercially successful – acts declared their interest to participate in the national final. While DJ Ötzi's management says that the very popular artist of such sing-along-friendly tunes as The Burger Dance was invited by national broadcaster ORF, news.at reports some reservations towards the casting-show popband Starmaniacs: “We will have to see if they can convince us with their application songs”, ORF's head of entertainment Edgar Böhm said.

Comedian and singer Alf Poier represented Austria in 2003 and came sixth. He seems to be confident about his performance: “Udo Jürgens needed three attempts to win. I will only need two”, he said in an interview.

Die Seer and the Global.Kryner are bands known for more typical Austrian folk. While Die Seer consist of ten musicians and would have to scale down to the allowed six persons, the Global.Kryner since today were successful with coverversions of international pop hits, which they present in the typical Oberkrainer brass sound (some nice examples can be found on their web page). But coverversions are not allowed for the Eurovision Song Contest. So, it seems that there are some question marks behind news.at's story. ORF so far has not confirmed it.

One thing is for sure: song.null.fünf will take place on 25th February and will consist of five artists, performing two songs each.