Vietnam Picks Em Tiên for Eurovision Asia 2026

Vietnam will be represented at the first Eurovision Song Contest Asia by Tóc Tiên with the song “Em Tiên”. The public and a five-member jury picked it from five candidates at The Sound of Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday 3 October 2026, under the contest’s 40% jury / 40% domestic public / 20% rest-of-world split. It is Vietnam’s first entry in any Eurovision contest, and it completes the seventh of eleven entries six weeks before the Grand Final at the One Bangkok Forum on Saturday 14 November.

Photo: Eurovision Song Contest Asia — Tóc Tiên at The Sound of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, 3 October 2026.

Key takeaways

• Winner: “Em Tiên”, produced by DUONGK and written by HAROSE for the S•HUBE team, beating “a to A” (VIZA), “Follow Me” (M1 Music), “Khó Gì?” (HIGHLUA) and “Love Always Wins” (TINLE).
• The split was 40/40/20 — stated by the organisers themselves, in line with clause 8.1 of the official Voting Terms. That is the fourth national final running reported with the correct weighting.
• No scoreboard at all. Not a top three, not a running order of placings, no points. Vietnam is the first selection this season to publish only a winner.
• One artist, five writing rooms. Tóc Tiên sang all five candidates herself, so the Vietnamese public voted on songs, not singers — the model Laos used in September and Mongolia will use on 10 October.
• The field is now seven complete entries of eleven. Nepal (7 October), Mongolia (10 October) and Cambodia (17 October) are left, plus Malaysia’s undated song, which TV3 has teased for 9 October.
• The market did not move. Vietnam last traded at 10¢ on Kalshi, unchanged through the result, on a contract with no bid and a board that has recorded zero volume since 28 September.

What’s on this page

What happened at The Sound of Vietnam · The song, and who wrote it · The 40/40/20 split and the missing scoreboard · What it means for 14 November · The betting position on Vietnam · What is left to decide

What happened at The Sound of Vietnam

The Sound of Vietnam was broadcast by VTV3 from Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday 3 October, hosted by Đức Bảo. It was not a conventional national final. VTV had already named Tóc Tiên internally — the broadcaster confirmed her on 4 September — so the show existed to choose a song, and she performed all five candidates herself across the night.

The professional jury had five members, chaired by the musician Lưu Thiên Hương, with music director Huy Tuấn, the songwriter and producer Dương Khắc Linh, John Hùng Trần (COO of DAO Music Entertainment, which produces Vietnam’s Eurovision Asia project) and Gavin Nguyễn of TikTok Entertainment Southeast Asia. Guest performers were S.T Sơn Thạch, Minh Hằng, Châu Anh and MYLINA.

Unlike most of the selections this season, nothing about the result was a surprise in the sense of a new name emerging. The five songs had been public since 20 September, released in full as the EP Thanh Âm Việt Nam on the show’s own YouTube channel, so anyone who wanted to form a view had a fortnight to do it. We covered the songs released so far and where to hear them when that happened.

The song, and who wrote it

“Em Tiên” was produced by DUONGK and written by HAROSE, both working as part of the S•HUBE creative team — one of the five production houses VTV commissioned to write for Tóc Tiên. The organisers published those credits themselves, which is worth noting because songwriter credits have been the single hardest fact to pin down across this season’s selections.

The title plays on the singer’s own name. Tiên in Vietnamese means fairy or celestial being, and Tóc Tiên’s stage name translates roughly as “fairy hair”; em is the intimate first- or second-person pronoun used between close equals. “Em Tiên” is therefore both a phrase and a signature, which is a reasonable thing for a debut entry to be doing in a contest where most of the audience will not speak the language.

The full candidate list, with the team behind each:

Two of the five were English-titled and one was written by a Swedish producer, which tells you something about how VTV hedged. The public took the Vietnamese-language option, and the one most explicitly tied to the performer.

The 40/40/20 split and the missing scoreboard

The organisers stated the weighting directly on the result: 40% professional jury, 40% Vietnamese viewers, 20% rest of world. That is clause 8.1 of the official Voting Terms and Conditions, which governs every national song selection this season. The 50/50 public-jury split that circulates in fan coverage is clause 8.2, and it applies only to the Grand Final in Bangkok. Four selections running have now been reported correctly, so the conflation that dogged the September shows looks like it has been fixed rather than being structural.

What was not published is any scoreboard. Bhutan, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand and Bangladesh each gave at least a top three; South Korea gave a fuller result. Vietnam gave a winner and nothing else — no second place, no points, no breakdown of how the jury and the two publics differed. On a contest that asks the rest of the world to vote, and on a show where the same singer performed every entry, the margin would have been the most interesting number of the night. It does not exist publicly.

We flag that as a transparency gap rather than a scandal. Nothing in the Voting Terms obliges a broadcaster to publish a full result for a national selection. But it does mean nobody outside VTV knows whether “Em Tiên” won comfortably or by a point.

What it means for 14 November

Vietnam is the seventh of eleven countries with a complete entry — artist and song both settled. Bhutan, the Philippines, South Korea, Laos, Thailand and Bangladesh are the other six. That matters for the staging calendar more than for the music: entries with six weeks to rehearse are in a different position from Mongolia’s, which will have five, or Cambodia’s, which will have four.

Tóc Tiên is the most commercially established name in the field by some distance. She has been releasing records since 2007, broke through nationally on The Remix in 2015 with “Ngày mai (Vũ điệu cồng chiêng)”, won a Mnet Asian Music Award for Best Asian Artist in Vietnam in 2017, and has coached on The Voice of Vietnam. We set out the full case for and against her when VTV confirmed her in September. Nothing in the song choice changes it: the pre-selection worry was that VTV would default to a technical Sao Mai-style ballad, and it did not.

The open question for Bangkok is the one this result cannot answer. A song picked by a domestic public for a domestic star is optimised for the 40% that will not be voting in November. In the Grand Final the split is 50/50 jury and public across every participating country plus the rest of the world, and Vietnamese votes are one eleventh of the public half. Several entries this season carry the same structural problem; Vietnam’s is simply the clearest case, because the song was chosen by the people who already know the singer.

The betting position on Vietnam

There is still no fixed-odds bookmaker pricing Eurovision Asia, and Polymarket has never listed the contest. One venue prices it: Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated US exchange, which opened an eleven-country winner market (KXEUROVISIONASIA-26) on 14 September 2026. We explained how that market is built and how it settles when it opened.

Read on 4 October 2026, Vietnam last traded at 10¢, with no bid at all and an ask of 84¢. The contract did not move on the result because it did not trade: the whole board has recorded zero volume in the last 24 hours, and total lifetime volume across all eleven contracts stands at 3,279 — two contracts more than on 28 September, nearly a week ago. Laos alone is about three quarters of that.

This is the plainest test the board has had, and it failed it. A country completed its entry, with a published result and a released song, and the market attached to that country did not record a single trade. The eleven last-traded marks still sum to 143% of a field where exactly one country wins, nine of the eleven contracts have no bid at all, and every ask except Mongolia’s 15¢ sits between 80¢ and 95¢. A 10¢ mark on Vietnam is the memory of one trade from September, not a quote you could take.

If you want to know what you could actually transact at, read the bid and the ask rather than the last price — and on Vietnam there is no bid to read. For context on what a liquid market looks like, the Eurovision 2026 winner market closed at nearly $194M of volume on Polymarket. The bookmakers we track price the European contest and nothing in Asia.

What is left to decide

Nepal is the next country still to name an act, and the one with the most to resolve: eleven songs and no artist, after a postponement from 19 September caused by the August floods. The Eurovision Asia hub carries the running state of the field, and the Vietnam country page has the full profile of the entry.

Sources

• Eurovision Song Contest Asia — “Vietnam now has its song”, 3 October 2026 (result, 40/40/20 split, songwriter credits).
• Eurovoix, 3 October 2026 (venue, broadcaster, host, jury, guest performers).
• Eurovision Song Contest Asia — Voting Terms and Conditions, updated 28 August 2026 (clauses 8.1 and 8.2).

Market figures read from Kalshi’s public API on 4 October 2026. Prices move; check before you act on anything here.