"Em Tiên" Wins The Sound of Vietnam — Tóc Tiên's Eurovision Asia Song Is Chosen

“Em Tiên” won The Sound of Vietnam on Saturday 3 October 2026, and Tóc Tiên will perform it for Vietnam at Eurovision Asia 2026.

Vietnam’s artist was never in question — VTV selected Tóc Tiên internally in September. The show, Thanh âm Việt Nam in Vietnamese, existed to pick which of five songs she takes to Bangkok on 14 November.

The result

“Em Tiên” was announced as the winner. VTV published the winning song and nothing else: no points, and no order for the other four.

The five songs, in the order she performed them:

1. “Love Always Wins”
2. “Follow Me”
3. “Em Tiên” — winner
4. “Khó Gì?”
5. “a to A”

The song

“Em Tiên” is sung in Vietnamese, which makes Vietnam one of the countries sending a song in its own language rather than English. The songwriting credit is Trần Thị Thu Hà; the contest’s own announcement credits it to the creative team S•HUBE, with DUONGK producing and HAROSE as songwriter.

It was one of five songs commissioned from five separate creative teams, all developed for the same singer under music director Huy Tuấn and released together on 20 September as the EP Thanh Âm Việt Nam. That means the winning song had been public for two weeks before the vote.

How the vote worked

The winner was chosen by:

• 40% professional jury
• 40% Vietnamese public
• 20% Rest of the World

Each of those three blocs awarded 12, 10, 8, 5 and 1 points to the five songs. The totals were not published.

A correction. Before the show, this page reported VTV’s description of the system as a 50/50 split between jury and audience, and we noted at the time that the weighting of the international vote hadn’t been spelled out. The published formula turned out to be the same 40/40/20 that every other national final has used.

The jury

Five judges made up the 40% jury share:

• Lưu Thiên Hương — musician, head of the jury
• Huy Tuấn — the project’s music director
• Dương Khắc Linh — musician
• John Hùng Trần — chief operating officer of DAO Music Entertainment
• Gavin Nguyễn — Southeast Asia content manager at TikTok

It is worth noticing who is on that list. The music director who oversaw all five songs, and an executive from the production company behind the project, were both judging which of those songs should win. That is not unusual for an internal-artist format — the people who built the entry are the people best placed to assess it — but it is a different kind of jury from an independent panel of working musicians.

The show

The Sound of Vietnam was staged at Zoom Media’s studios in Ho Chi Minh City and hosted by Đức Bảo. It aired on VTV3 and the VTVGo streaming platform, with the international stream on the official Eurovision YouTube channel.

Guest performers were S.T Sơn Thạch, Minh Hằng, Châu Anh and Mylina.

Why this format keeps spreading

Vietnam was the second country to separate the artist decision from the song decision, after Laos did the same with Thinla. Mongolia has since become the third, announcing Beck internally and turning its 10 October show into a song vote.

The logic is easy to see when a broadcaster already has a star: there is no risk in a public vote on who goes, but there is still a broadcast event, a streaming release and a fortnight of engagement to be had from the what. We set out the trade-offs in Three ways to pick a Eurovision Asia entry.

What it means

Vietnam now has a complete entry six weeks before the Grand Final: a two-decade star, a Vietnamese-language song, and one of the bigger domestic audiences in the contest. We moved it up a point to 12% in our Eurovision Asia odds, fourth of eleven.

What the result can’t tell us is how strong “Em Tiên” is relative to anything — the song beat four alternatives written for the same singer, by a margin nobody outside VTV knows.

More on the artist is in our profile of Tóc Tiên, and Vietnam’s contest profile is on the Vietnam country page.

Last updated 7 October 2026. This page previewed the five songs before the show and now carries the result.