The Finnish Eurovision finals were organised on Saturday night in Tampere. Twelve entries were whittled down through voting by phone and SMS messaging, with a first stage in which two "second-chance" qualifying round losers from a total of six had a chance to progress. Then the eight remaining were again reduced to three, before a super-final round run-off.
Finland’s candidate for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow will be Waldo’s People with their song Lose Control.
Finland’s entry will take part in the first semi-final to be held in Moscow on May 12th.
The winners were chosen by a phone-in vote, and Waldo’s People collected 45.1 % of the votes in the national final in Tampere.
Deaf rap artist Signmark featuring Osmo Ikonen came in second with the song Speakerbox.
At the beginning of the final, some viewers’ television sets did not receive any sound as a consequence of some technical problems.
Initially Digita Oy, the leading Finnish developer of network infrastructure, had planned to test a new multichannel surround-sound system in cooperation with the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, reports Henri Viljasjärvi from Digita.
However, the test was cancelled just before the beginning of the broadcast, as it turned out that the multichannel arrangement would require a home theatre system.
