Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV has revealed that it has received 297 songs for its national selection for the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest.
The broadcaster said that this figure is up 25 percent on last year, showing that the annual song contest is growing in popularity in Iceland.
A special jury is now charged with going through all the entries and deciding the acts that will advance to the Icelandic national selection stage. Acts eager to learn if they have been chosen for the national selection stage will only have to wait a few weeks, with an announcement expected by the middle of next month.
Meanwhile, the Icelandic national selection is likely to begin after Christmas, although RÚV has yet to reveal the exact dates.
Iceland first entered the Eurovision Song Contest in 1986. Although it has not won the event to date, it came close in 1999 and 2009 when Selma’s All out of Luck and Is it True by Jóhanna Guðrún both finished in second place. Last year in Malmö, the Atlantic island was represented by Eyþór Ingi, whose track, Ég á líf, came 17th.
The 2014 Eurovision Song Contest will be held in Copenhagen on 6, 8 and 10 May seeing as Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest was victorious in Malmö.