Portugal will select its entry for the Eurovision Song Contest 2010 through the Festival da Canção competition, organised by Portuguese national broadcaster Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP). A number of changes will be made to the format of the contest from the past number of years, with two semi-finals and a final being held over one week in March 2010 to select the winner to represent Portugal in Oslo, Norway in May 2010.

Festival da Canção 2010 will be held over one week in early March 2010, with semi-finals on 2 and 4 March and the final set to be held on 6 March. The contest will be held at the Campo Pequeno, an old bullring, in Lisbon, which has the ability to hold up to 10,000 people, enabling the biggest Festival da Canção ever.

Until mid January, authors, singers and groups can submit entries for the competition through the RTP website. An expert jury will select between 30 and 35 entries to progress to an online vote, as was introduced in 2009 Contest. Voters from across the world can vote for their favourite songs over the internet, with the top 24 songs progressing to the semi-final stage. RTP will now allow foreign composers to compete in Festival da Canção, after regulating the contest to Portuguese composers only in 2009. However the competing performers must be Portuguese, and the song must also be performed in the Portuguese language.

Two semi-finals will be held, each containing 12 songs. Televoting will solely select the top six songs from each semi-final which will progress to the final. In the final the winner will be selected through 50/50 jury and televoting.

420 songs were submitted to RTP, a slight increase from last year's total. 30 songs were selected by a professional jury of José Poiares, the Portuguese Head of Delegation, and music producers Fernando Martins, Ramón Galarza and To Zé Brito. The 30 songs were announced on 20 January, and 90 second clips of each song were placed on its website on 21 January for the voting.

Shortly after voting began it was reported by the Eurovision fan community in Portugal that Homens da Luta, current leaders in the voting with the song "Luta assim não dá", had been uploaded on the Internet in May 2009, and performed live in Lisbon in May, breaking Eurovision contest rules. The following day RTP disqualified the song, leaving 29 songs in the contest.

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Wikipedia