Life after Helsinki 2007 Eurovision

Jūrmala in Latvia is the place to be if you are singer in ex-USSR countries and not only as the New Wave - the international contest of new pop voices is taking place again. Sixteen singers or groups have made it to the contest this year coming from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Germany, Armenia, Latvia, Cuba, Georgia and Vietnam. No Finnish or Italian singers made the cut this year. In the coming days the performers will do world-wide hits and local hits, while guest stars will perform as well. There will be also gala concerts, tennis, soccer.... a lot goijg on indeed. If the contestants are new and fresh the guest stars include a lot of familiar names: Valeria, Sergey Lazarev, Intars Busulis , Dima Bilan , Emin , Garou, Julio Iglesias , Il Divo, Natalia Podolskaya , Ani Lorak , Serebro , Lara Fabian , Timati, Verka Serduchka , Alsou , Alessandro Safina, Emma Shaplin.... and if that wasn't enough Toto Cutugno is one of the judges! You ...

esctoday.com has made a list of best selling Eurovision artists. No surprise ABBA tops the list but there are some surprises, who would have thought Nana Mouskouri at the top? But she has been extremely popular at her day. Some names are not in the top-10 like Lara Fabian who might be the 11th. Bucks Fizz might be 12th and Lulu have also sold a lot, including the single To Sir with love , that was the most sold single in the US in 1967. Then we have the outsiders Ajda Pekkan , Samira Bensaid and Albano . Ajda Pekkan is said to have sold some 50 million records but there's no official proof of that. Samira Bensaid is one of the best sellers in the Arabic world and her record sales are said to be anything between 20 to 200 million. But there's no proof either. Albano claims to have sold something like 160 million records but that most likely includes his solo mefferts and the records sold with Romina Power, so... excluded. But then we have also Ricchi e Poveri with record sal...

Daniel Diges, the Spanish entrant in Oslo 2010 has a lot of experience as a stage artists but now thanks to winning the Spanish selection with Algo pequeñito he finally got to record his first album to be released shortly. The producer and arranger for it is five time Grammy winning Oscar Gómez (collaborations with Chayenne, Julio Iglesias, Ana Belen, Roberto Carlos and Miguel Bosé just to name a few) and Daniel has written most of the songs himself with some covers from Michael Bublé, Billy Joel and Robbie Williams. I think Daniel's lovely waltz will the dark horse....