Sanremo Giovani Changes Format: One Winner Advances Directly to Main Festival

Sanremo Giovani, the talent search for emerging Italian music artists, is undergoing a significant format change for its 2026 edition. The most notable shift is that only one winner will be selected to directly join the "Campioni" (main contestants) category at the Festival di Sanremo in 2027. This move aims to make the competition more competitive and prestigious.

The selection process will begin with a musical commission reviewing all submitted songs. Sixty artists will be chosen for live auditions. From these, 15 will be selected for Sanremo Giovani, joining 15 artists from the Area Sanremo program, creating a pool of 30 young talents.

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The Sanremo Giovani project confirms itself as a privileged laboratory for the discovery and valorization of emerging talents, but with a novelty destined to make the path even more competitive and prestigious: at the end of the selection, a single winner will be proclaimed who will enter directly into the category of the Champions of the Sanremo Festival 2027.

These 30 artists will then face further live selections in Sanremo. From this stage, six finalists will emerge, three from Sanremo Giovani and three from Area Sanremo. Before the final showdown, these six will gain significant exposure through a special promotional activity. They will perform on a prime-time Rai 1 program, showcasing their music on the flagship channel.

The culmination of the event will be the live final of Sanremo Giovani 2026 on December 18, broadcast from the Sanremo Casino on Rai 1. The six finalists will perform for the musical commission, with the ultimate goal of impressing the judges to become the sole winner. This victory grants direct entry into the prestigious main festival in 2027, positioning them as key participants in Italy's premier music event. Rai emphasized that this new formula reinforces Sanremo Giovani's role as a bridge for emerging talent to reach the main festival stage, offering a more structured, visible, and meritocratic path.

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With this new formula, Sanremo Giovani further strengthens its role as a bridge between emerging talents and the big stage of the Festival, offering young artists an even more structured, visible, and meritocratic path.