My Crystal Bowersox Blog (was My American Idol Season 9 2010 Ramblings)

New Year, Last Post

2011-01-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2011 and my final post on my old blog! I realized last year that the only reason I followed American Idol was I had fallen for a incredible new talent on Season 9, that being Crystal Bowersox. I have never cared about American Idol before, but since I first heard her sing "Natural Woman" before they selected the Top 24 I was captivated by Crystal's performances. I tried to start this as a neutral and unbiased AI blog last year, but by the time Crystal released her album, "Farmer's Daughter", in December, I realized I could no longer pretend to be unbiased. It is not that I have anything against any of the other contestants, I just think Crystal is exceptional. On this blog I noticed almost all my posts in November and December were about Crystal, since I really was not that interested in what was happening to Lee at that point. He is a pretty talented fellow and may do quite well, but I just am not a big fan of his music now that the show is over. I am actually more curious about what may become of Casey James once his music is released in 2011. We will have to wait and see what happens to him!

So the "Farmer's Daughter" album has now been out for more than 3 weeks and the latest sales results have been released. In three weeks Crystal has sold 106,000 copies and has dropped to #62 on the BillBoard 200. She had debuted at #28, then fell to #47 so falling to #62 after 3 weeks is not too bad. She appears to be continuing to rank well on Amazon sales (currently #10 in all music sales) so she will hopefully stay in the top 100 for a few weeks and may even move up once "Farmer's Daughter" is released to radio. Her video is now playing on VH1 and people can even vote for it on the VH1 Top 20 Countdown. She is even playing tomorrow at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas representing Sony Music.

Splitting This Blog now that it is 2011!

2011-01-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

I now realize how foolish I was to give my American Idol blog a URL with a year in it. Now that it is 2011 who would read something called idolblogger2010? So now I am creating a new AI stats blog with the name aistats.blogspot.com and a separate crystal-bowersox-tracker.blogspot.com site which follows her career. I now realize Crystal was the only reason I watched Idol last year (the only year ever that I watched a whole season religiously) and the past couple months the only thing I cared about was her album and how her career was progressing. I am guessing that 2011 will prove to be the year where Crystal Bowersox will either make a huge name for herself in the general music scene, or if she will just continue to be a very talented singer/songwriter doing what she loves with enough financial success to keep her going. In either case I love her music and will continue following her. She is the only AI contestant who I ever cared about and her album is the only one we have ever purchased besides Carrie Underwood's "Some Hearts". In my AIStats blog I will continue tracking the numbers for Season 11, but if none of the contestants end up piquing my interest I may not continue with that one. At this point, I am much more interested in seeing what happens to Crystal in 2011 as her songs start hitting radio and she continues to perform and promote her music.

"Farmer's Daughter" two week sales approach 100,000 units

2010-12-29T07:23:00.000-08:00

Wow, who would have guessed that in two weeks that Crystal Bowersox's new album would have sold nearly 100K units without a radio single to support it? That is pretty good. After first week sales of 58,000 and second week sales of over 37,000 she should break 100K by the end of the year. And her real radio and video promotion does not begin in earnest until January which can only help matters out. She only had a 35% drop in sales which is pretty good, but she was helped by selling during the holiday sales weeks. She will also be appearing on Access Hollywood tonight after having a special appearance at the Village Idiot in Toledo on Monday night. Let's hope for even more success for Crystal in 2011!

"Farmer's Daughter" debuts for Crystal Bowersox with 58,000 first week sales

2010-12-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

If you factor in that Crystal Bowersox does not currently have any radio airplay of her songs at all and performs with a difficult to pinpoint musical style, the 58,000 first week sales for Crystal's "Farmer's Daughter" is pretty impressive for her. She did pick a good week to release it right before Christmas, but she did end up outselling Lee's first week numbers by almost 50%. I think her second and third week sales will be more telling as well as how the album sells once her song starts getting radio play in January 2011. Another good sign for her is the number of views her video is receiving on YouTube with over 140,000 views in six days. She also has a new main website now, but unfortunately there are no user discussion forums on it anymore. If you want to join in the conversation, the best blogs or forums are at MJ's Big Blog, Bowersoxfans.com or even the American Idol Forums. Crystal is also back on TV tonight (or is it technically tomorrow morning?) on Chelsea Handler's show. Due to the wonders of YouTube we can all enjoy it now without having to stay up late to watch it!

"Farmer's Daughter" video on VH1 and CMT.com and 2011 Country release

2010-12-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

It sounds like from recent tweets from her publicist, that Crystal Bowersox's debut single "Farmer's Daughter" (from her album with the same name) will be released to country and AAA radio stations in January 2011. A lot of fans had commented that she should go the country route, and it looks like it will happen. One proof of this is the release of her music video to CMT.com. You actually cannot search for her and find her on the site, but if you know the exact URL you can find her. It is similarly on VH1.com where you can find it if you know the URL but otherwise you could never find it unless you use the current American Idol link on the homepage (with Crystal's photo). Crystal will also be back on broadcast TV this week. After being on ExtraTV this weekend, she will be on Chelsea Handler's show this Wednesday, Dec 22.

By late tomorrow afternoon we should also find out the total first week sales tally for her album. HitsDailyDouble and Billboard are both predicting about 50,000 copies, but I wonder if that takes into accounts the sold out status at Amazon briefly and also order problems on crystalbowersox.com (her Sony Online site.) If those numbers were expecting to include those sales the tally may come in lower than expected, but if that is a sign of unexpected high demand, the numbers might come in higher. We will have to wait until tomorrow to know for sure.

Other new items for Crystal include a radio interview about Christmas songs at The Takeaway, and also a video interview where she flares her nostrils. You cannot say she takes herself too seriously!

More on Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter" music video and the "F-bomb"

2010-12-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

When the Crystal Bowersox "Farmer's Daughter" music video first appeared on VEVO.com early yesterday, I noticed the version of the song they used was the "explicit" version which simply meant it had the "F-bomb" in it. Frankly, I think the song and video are so moving that word is really not needed, but I guess Crystal likes it since it adds more impact to that line of the song. I personally prefer the "I'm so sick and tired" version she has been performing on TV lately (Leno, Regis and Kelly, Ellen.) I noticed the music video has now popped up on MTV.com and that version is the "clean" version from the CD which will obviously be the version that also plays on VH1. The VEVO video version on YouTube by CrystalBowersoxVevo is the one everyone is linking to (including the country music site, todayscountrymusicvideos.com) and that is the original "explicit" version most popular with the most hits. In about 24 hours it has had over 10,000 views. In fact if you check the single song tracks from Crystal being purchased on iTunes, the explicit version of "Farmer's Daughter" is far and away her most popular download. The clean version is way down at #12 right now with "For What It's Worth" still being #2, and "Speak Now" being #3 and her first single "Up the Mountain" is now #4. I guess there could be a lot of people who purchased the hard copy CD who wanted the full impact of the "explicit" version and were willing to pay $1.29 to hear her sing that one extra word! Personally, I still am amazed "For What It's Worth" is #2. I think she sings that song well, but I consider a number of the other songs on the album better songs than that one ("Speak Now", "Mine All Mine", "Holy Toledo", "Mason".)

Another topic this brings up about her album is the "explicit" labeling of the album. The only difference between the "explicit" and "clean" versions of the album is the one F-word ("f*ing sick and tired") in the title track. Personally, I am curious why she didn't just get rid of it and always just use the "I'm so sick and tired" line she has been performing live lately. The current clean version is just blanked out vocally until she sings "sick and tired", and I think the "I'm so sick and tired" version works a lot better. I wonder if the "explicit" label actually helps sales, by showing she is "edgier" or more "aggressive". She also uses the "s-word" a couple times on the album, once in "Ridin With the Radio" and repeatedly in the chorus in "Kiss Ya". After her interesting lyrical "change up" during her duet with Alanis Morrisette in the season finale, I don't see why she didn't just clean up all her songs to be more "radio ready". I will give my suggestions here. In "Ridin With the Radio", she could have sung "the hits that they play now" which flows just the same and flows a lot better than "the crap that they play now" or "the mess that they play now". The chorus in "Kiss Ya" is a bit tougher. How about "I don't care a bit who's around" or "I don't even care who's around". I am not sure what having those "bad" words in her songs matters, but I know it matters quite a bit to some people, especially older folks who have a thing against bad language.

Full "Farmer's Daughter" video online

2010-12-16T07:58:00.000-08:00

On a day when I thought the only new Crystal Bowersox video online would be her performance from Ellen, it appears that I was wrong. After FOX Toledo (WUPW) leaked a small preview of the "Farmer's Daughter" music video Tuesday evening, VEVO has posted the full video online and now, of course, it is also on YouTube. After her publicist, Gina Orr, had tweeted the video was not going onto rotation on VH1 until Jan 3, it seems odd that it would suddenly appear on VEVO. Is it a coincidence that this is happening a day after Hits Daily Double predicted Crystal's first day sales would beat Lee's and Amazon ran out of stock of the physical CD (as well as many retail stores in the Toledo area?) I am not sure if this is a predestined marketing tactic or if everyone in the industry could have underestimated her sales that much. I wonder if now that Jive realizes she actually does have a fan base they are going to try to do a holiday push to drum up more revenue. In any case the video is pretty powerful and reminds me of "Concrete Angel" by Martina McBride, but with a happier ending.

But she was on Ellen too, but after the music video, the live version almost seems anticlimactic. A great performance as usual, but the music video really shows her personality even more. I wonder if all those free copies of the album to Ellen's audience counted as album sales.

Oh well, my "American Idol" blog here has pretty much turned into a Crystal Bowersox blog. Oh well, I guess I cannot help jumping on the Mamasox bandwagon too...

"Farmer's Daughter" by Crystal Bowersox : CD Released, video coming!

2010-12-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

So the big day has passed and Crystal Bowersox's debut album Farmer's Daughter was released. I had pre-ordered a digital copy on iTunes so I downloaded it to listen to the full album including the free extra track, "Finally Got It Right" which sounds great. In fact, if it were me I would have included that track on the original 12 and left off "Hold On". I just checked iTunes and "Finally Got It Right" is no longer available so I am feeling extra special. One interesting fact I noticed on iTunes is that if you currently sort the tracks on the album by popularity, the #2 most popular song after the title track, "Farmer's Daughter", is "For What It's Worth". I suppose that is the only cover on the album, and it was a pretty popular song decades ago, but it has 6 bars in popularity, whereas #3 "Speak Now" has 3 bars, and #4 "Mine All Mine" has 2 bars along with #5 "Hold On". I was also a little disappointed that the included digital booklet did not include any lyrics, although it did have some interesting photos. I will have to wait for the physical CD I am receiving for Christmas (pre-ordered from Amazon where it is still selling for only $6.99.) The album has been consistently in the top 10 in album sales at Amazon since this past weekend, so I hope the sales from the album will be good. I am guessing overall first week sales will be on the same order of magnitude as Lee's initial number (39,000) but could go +/- 10,000 either way. HitsDailyDouble.com is currently predicting 45-50K for her. I guess we will have to wait until next week to find out for sure. I did my part by helping to sell two copies!

I enjoyed watching the video clips from WUPW in Toledo which gives the album a nice personal and local perspective. They had stories on her Monday evening, Tuesday at 6:30 and again Tuesday evening at 10. One neat thing in the 10pm clip is a small preview of the music video for "Farmer's Daughter". After viewing the clip from cambio connect it makes me quite curious about the final video. Her publicist, Gina Orr, tweets that the video will go to VH1 on Jan 3.

Crystal Bowersox Everywhere: Leno on Friday, Regis & Kelly today, CD release tomorrow

2010-12-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

With her new album, Farmer's Daughter, releasing tomorrow, Crystal Bowersox seems to be showing up everywhere. She performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Friday, will be with Regis & Kelly today, and then the album comes out tomorrow (with an appearance on Ellen on Thursday, and Chelsea Lately next week). Her full album is still streaming on AOL Music, and I must say the more I listen to it, the more I like it. I have been following most of the critics reviews, and they are surprisingly mixed. Although they are all impressed with Crystal's vocal abilities, many are not so impressed with her songwriting, song selection and the production on the album. In reality, I will have to admit that she does sound a lot better live than on the album stream, as in her Leno performance which she delivered quite powerfully. Nonetheless, her album is selling quite well on Amazon where you can purchase it at a great price of $6.99 (with free shipping for any total purchase of $25 or more.) So you could buy four copies for $27.96 to give out as gifts. Likewise, Best Buy is selling it for $7.99 with free shipping (plus a free month of Napster). I find it humorous that Best Buy automatically mentions that you can get 6, 12 or 18 month financing. I sure hope nobody really needs financing on an $8 CD! It also sounds like her music video was just finished up and should be available very soon. Cambio Connect has some footage from her making the video.

Full Stream of "Farmer's Daughter" available and YouTube clips

2010-12-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

This has been a busy weekend for Crystal Bowersox fans. Not only did she perform in the Block 37 mall in Chicago on Friday, but she then performed at a holiday concert with the Doobie Brothers in San Diego on Saturday, and at the same time snippets of all her tracks on her new album appeared first on the French version of Amazon.com (and now all of Crystal's previews finally appear on the US site too). Finally today the full album stream was made available at music.aol.com. Due to the wonders of YouTube, all of these events are being chronicled online including a nice compilation of the 12 album tracks placed in a single video for easier listening to all the tracks. Here is an incredible rendition of "Bobby McGee" from her San Diego concert too. What would be do without YouTube?

Here is a YouTube link I created that shows all Crystal Bowersox YouTube videos uploaded in the past 24 hours. I find it very handy to see what her latest uploads have been. Here is a similar YouTube link to find all of Lee's most recent videos.

I just finished listening to the full stream of Crystal's album and I am quite impressed. After hearing how Lee's sound had changed from his indie releases to "Live It Up" and then the initial samplings of "Hold On" I was worried what hers would sound like, but she stayed true to herself and released a very fitting debut.

Crystal's Upcoming Promotional Appearances and Lee's Two-Week Tally

2010-12-02T10:17:00.001-08:00

With less than two weeks until Crystal Bowersox's debut album, "Farmer's Daughter", set to release she is finally doing some promotion for the album besides live performances. She will be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno next Friday Dec 10 (almost exactly one month after Lee performed there) and then on Monday Dec 13 with Regis and Kelly and then on Ellen's show on the 16th. She is also featured on some weird VEVO.com Christmas video and also has her own little Christmas related video there. She is also opening for the Doobie Brothers this Saturday in San Diego and then again in San Francisco on Tuesday Dec 7. And she is doing all this promotion without officially releasing her single for download and with almost no radio support. I sure hope her marketing people know what they are doing.

I do worry about her sales after seeing how little promotional support RCA is giving Lee Dewyze on his debut album, "Live It Up". After his first week sales came in at a weak 39,000 (#19 on the sales charts), his second week fell to 15,000 ( #93) which was an expected drop, but still only puts his total sales at around 55,000 after two weeks. I had originally expected Lee to have higher initial album sales than Crystal, but with these numbers I sure hope I am wrong! Lee was also on the Tonight Show and Regis and Kelly last month, and he was also on the Today Show and had a few other live performances. One difference I have noticed is that all of Lee's performances since the tour ended tend to be him as the only billed artist, but many of Crystal's performances are at festivals or opening for other artists (Michael Franti, Melissa Etheridge, KT Tunstall, Sara Bareilles, Doobie Brothers). Hopefully being at concerts with bigger name artists might give her more exposure and help her album sales.

Lee DeWyze's First Week Sales Numbers

2010-11-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

Since I am a numbers person, I love to look at lists of numbers. Now that Lee DeWyze's debut album has been out for about a week, the preliminary sales numbers are in and they do not look very promising. The Hits Daily Double site currently has him at #24 with sales of 10,593 with 31.77% of the tally collected. If you divide that out 10,593/0.3177 = 33,342 which is not very encouraging. They estimate the final number will be more like 40,000 to 45,000 but that is still only about half what Kris Allen sold his first week almost exactly a year ago with 85,000 units, which was then the lowest total of any Idol winner. Consider that Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" has been out almost a full a month now and it is still selling 4x what "Live It Up" is selling, and even her "Holiday Collection" album is selling more than twice that of Lee's debut week sales. Lee is still heavily promoting his album and hopefully he can keep his sales numbers steady. With Crystal Bowersox's album officially releasing in just three weeks today, I am surprised she has not officially released her single and title track "Farmer's Daughter" more fervently to radio stations. It sounds like they filmed the video just the other day and hopefully that is ready to be premiered somewhere soon. She did perform live in Chicago this past weekend and she also has a four part interview being broadcast on the FOX TV station in Toledo this week. With Lee's sales numbers being so low, I can see Crystal may have problems selling too many albums either, but I am not sure how much she really cares.

Crystal's First Single "Hold On" or "Farmer's Daughter"?

2010-11-17T08:41:00.000-08:00

Early this month it was announced that the first single off Crystal Bowersox's debut album, "Farmer's Daughter", was going to be the Kara DioGuardi and Chad Kroeger penned song "Hold On", but now that may not be so true. Tonight Crystal is premiering the title track, "Farmer's Daughter" on The Mix (WTMX) in Chicago and she had tweeted earlier that she had been working on the music video for that song. A tweet from today hints that "Farmer's Daughter" may indeed be the new single from the album. There is also a remixed version of the title track on her MySpace page, and it sounds gorgeous, although I wonder how "radio friendly" it is. I assume the version they play on the radio will remove the "F-word" from the beginning like the version she sang on VH1. The VH1 version is still my favorite version of the song, since I like the added percussion, but I still think the version on MySpace has a little too much background vocals and instrumentation for my liking. Plus she seems to be singing it with more passion on the video than on the studio version. Her MySpace page shows the song has had over 2,700 plays since it was posted so hopefully it will be popular once it hits the radio as well.

Lee's Album Released and "Sweet Serendipity" Ford ad, I mean Music Video

2010-11-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Lee DeWyze's debut album was officially released, but unfortunately not initially on iTunes! There appears to have been some technical difficulties earlier in the day which was not allowing people to download his album. Coincidentally his album was released the same day Apple announced they finally had the rights to sell all of the Beatles old music, so Apple was probably more concerned in getting all the Fab Four's music ready for download than the music of the latest winner of American Idol. Lee has also premiered the video for "Sweet Serendipity" on his own website (or YouTube, of course) and that looks like your typical VH1 "ah, isn't that sweet" kind of video. A cute girl and a cute guy (Lee, of course) get together at the end and walk off together. It definitely has its appeal, and should do well for him. I do love how the song says "I ain't got no car" but he appears to drive a very nice late model Ford Mustang in the video, and the girl has a red Mustang convertible. You could buy quite a few pairs of jeans with what you pay in insurance on those cars and they must be "doing just fine" to be able to afford them. Luckily her Mustang did have Microsoft Sync technology, so that makes it all worthwhile! Heaven forbid you have to touch a knob or button to listen to some music. I have decided to change the words to his song to make them more appropriate for the video:

I just got one car
A gas guzzling machine
I saw my State Farm bill
And now I'm weak at the knees

Season 9 Top 2 continues for Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox

2010-11-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday American Idol Season 9 seemed to continue with the "Top 2" Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox performing live in separate venues. Lee DeWyze performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Crystal is now available to see live on VH1.com. Lee performed his new single "Sweet Serendipity" with his new band, and they looked pretty good together. The guitar and bass player sang background on the choruses and were actually capable of spitting out all those words together. Overall the performance was not too bad, especially since it was supposedly their first time performing live together (they perform again tomorrow in a set in New York City). I thought the song sounded better live than on the recording and hopefully his performance will increase interest in his single and his upcoming album. Someone posted it on YouTube but that may be taken down by the powers at NBC, so it is just as easy to go to the official Tonight Show site and view the 11/9 show and go to the last commercial break. Crystal's songs include Farmer's Daughter, Jolene and Riding With the Radio performed with just her bass player, Frankie May and a drummer. That stripped down sound suits her well and those tracks sound a lot better than the original demos for her album. The VH1 site seems really slow streaming the videos, but luckily one fan made copies on YouTube which will hopefully not be taken down either.

The Real Album Cover for Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter"

2010-11-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

Aha, they have officially released what the album cover of "Farmer's Daughter" will look like and it is quite interesting. Nobody knows what happened to the apostrophe in "Farmer's" and whether it will be there or not. The cover art gives her album a very old fashioned, folksy look which actually does not match the over produced radio sound on the initial music clips that have been released. The producer, David Bendeth, did say those were not the final mixes, so the songs are still in the works. There is also a third song sample available to listen to called "Lonely Won't Come Around", which you can hear to decide what you think. Along with "Hold On" and "Farmer's Daughter" that makes three tracks you can hear in their not so final format. You can hear all three on MJ's Big Blog. Also on the blog is a post with a link to a YouTube page that gives short sample's to all the tracks on Lee DeWyze's "Live It Up" album.

Clips of Crystal's Songs, Lee's upcoming Performances

2010-11-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

Well, just as Lee Dewyze's first single was too much overproduced pop for my liking, they have seemed to have done the same thing to Crystal Bowersox's songs too. Someone on her fan forums was able to record the music clips from HitPredictor.com to MP3 and post them on their forum (as well as on her main site's forum.) They took the title track from the album ,"Farmer's Daughter", and added two much production that seems to bury her voice with too many instruments. Crystal sings her first single, "Hold On", quite admirably, but it is also suffering from the same "too much" syndrome, too much backing vocals, too much instrumentation. I was hoping Jive would not do it as much to her as RCA did to Lee, but I was wrong. It seems like many of her fans agree (as do many of Lee's fans as well.) Good news for Lee, though, is that his track "Sweet Serendipity" is gaining in airplay and moving up the charts. He is currently #46 on the Hot AC chart and #44 on USA Today's "Idol Airplay Chart". He also has some media appearances scheduled in the upcoming week to promote his album "Live It Up" which will be released in just over a week. Starting with the Tonight Show tomorrow, he will be visiting the Today Show, Regis and Kelly, Ellen and then the VH1 Top 20 Countdown. He should be premiering his music video for his single soon as well.

Crystal's First Single "Hold On" - Not an Original

2010-11-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

The first single from Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter" album will be "Hold On" written by Chad Kroeger (of Nickelback) and Kara DioGuardi. It should be released a few weeks before the album comes out mid-December and I will be interested to hear what she does with it. The image here is her current twitter icon and some think it may be the album art for her cover. Lee's "Sweet Serendipity" is getting some airplay spins (117 its first week) and hopefully that will go up in the coming weeks before his release. He needs some media attention though. Where are his marketing people? It sounds like Crystal is doing a acoustic video shoot for VH1. Interestingly Crystal's "Up to the Mountain" is still on the top 100 Idol airplay list at number 98.

And now the real results begin...

2010-11-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

The finale is long over and even the summer tour ended months ago. Now is where the real fun begins. Season 9 winner Lee DeWyze has released his first single "Sweet Serendipity" and his album "Live It Up" will be released in two weeks on November 16. This will start the true "results finale" where we see how well the contestants will do in the real music industry. I have listened to Lee's first released single and it is much more "pop" and radio friendly than I expected. It sounds like a good upbeat single for pop radio, but I have no idea if it will become a hit or not. That is really not up to even Lee that much any more, as it is to his label and how they market and push his music. I don't know if his whole album will sound this "pop" as compared to his two previous indie albums, but the different sound may help him and it may hurt him -- it could go either way. Since I am somebody who actually does not like most typical "pop" music anyway, I am definitely not a good judge of how well he might do. Personally, I preferred the more folksy, old fashioned sound that Crystal Bowersox favored, so I am also quite eagerly awaiting the December 14 release of her debut album titled "Farmer's Daughter" (after one of her previously released songs which will obviously be on the album.) If she comes out with such a pop friendly single like "Sweet Serendipity" I would truly be shocked. I am also curious what Casey James' album will sound like when it is released next year. He has been quite silent in the press since the tour ended (compared to Lee and Crystal), but being signed with BNA Records in Nashville, I am guessing he is going to be aiming more country. Being a tall blond Texan who can sing and play a guitar with ease and who has the looks to attract many female fans, I could see him being a big instant country success story, and may be the top seller out of the top three from Season 9. Plus, I find it interesting that his artist name on the BNA site is not simply "Casey James", but "The Casey James Band". I wonder why he wants it named more like a band than a soloist? Another Season 9 who could easily be a big country music star in a few years is Aaron Kelly. I think he may have been too young to realistically win in 2010, but he has the potential to be big in a few years. Stick a cowboy hat on that boy and have him start working out with weights. He can be another country heartthrob in no time. Siobhan Magnus is also a big wild card. Under the right guidance she might become huge as well, but I am not sure if sticking with her current band, Lunar Valve, is the best direction for her. It should be interesting to see how all these contestants succeed in their musical careers.

American Idol Season 9 and "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

2010-07-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

I just finished recently reading the book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell and I was thinking how well it applies to American Idol this season. One thing that struck me was the 10,000 hours of success Gladwell discusses for the Beatles, and how that applied quite a bit for the contestants this year. Without a doubt, the contestant who had the most performing experience this year was Crystal Bowersox, and that was evident from early in the season. However, that does not mean the other contestants were not lacking in talent, they just had not come close to putting in their 10,000 hours to achieve success. Lee DeWyze was another contestant who had substantial experience (he had released two albums!), but he probably did not have as much live performance experience as Crystal due to working part-time in more typical jobs. But we were able to see him develop as he gained more confidence and experience throughout the season to be able to win the competition by the end. Frankly, I think Lee is still developing and may reach his 10,000 hours during the summer tour, where his performances there seem to be gathering some pretty good reviews (much better than his performances on the show), although not everybody agrees.

I also question the idea to allow 15 year old performers to participate next season. The younger performers this season seem to also be developing during the summer tour (Aaron Kelly, Katie Stevens), but in reality it may be better to let them develop their skills before a three month television season, and then a 50 city summer tour. I think all of the finalists have talent (well, maybe not Tim Urban so much), but they all need to develop closer to that 10,000 hour level that Gladwell describes so well in his book.

Crystal Bowersox on Tonight Show with Jay Leno

2010-06-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

I was watching the Tonight Show after the news last night and they announced Crystal would be on the show. I was curious what she would perform and it ended up being a song called "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. I had never heard of the song before, but I just listened to it, and I like Crystal's version a lot better than the original. I was hoping he would talk to her too, but it was just a musical performance. Someone, of course, posted a video clip of it so you can see it all for yourself:

crystal blond @ Yahoo! Video

Final "What Not To Sing" Web Ratings Graph

2010-06-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Since I love making graphs in SigmaPlot I thought I would generate the last graph of Season 9 of American Idol by plotting the final web ratings from WhatNotToSing.com for the performances of the top 6. With the spline option in SigmaPlot it ends up being quite pretty especially since you get to see the lines end as the contestants leave the show. As expected Crystal Bowersox's plot line ended up being on top, but Lee DeWyze was able to pull out the win due to.... well, due to some reason that is not very obvious.

I am still waiting for someone to vote on my lovely American Idol voting web page I set up to count random people on the Internet. Since I posted it yesterday nobody has voted (the two original votes posted there are mine!) I just wanted some rabid DeWyze and Bowersox fans to vote there and generate some data for me, but sadly nobody wants to vote any more

My American Idol Voting Experiment - Crystal Bowersox versus Lee DeWyzee

2010-05-31T07:25:00.000-07:00

Being the big number geek that I am, I would really like to see the actual American Idol voting data over the season, but of course that will not release that information. Instead you can help me by voting at my own online American Idol Season 9 voting page so I can compile some data of my own. Here you can vote for Crystal Bowersox or Lee DeWyze and you can vote as many darn times as you like! However, I am going to analyze the votes afterwards to see how much multiple voting I receive on my site and see if I can find any trends. I plan on analyzing it to see who wins depending on the maximum number of votes each visitor submits (i.e. having cutoffs for 5, 10, 50 votes per visits) to see if that changes the results. Of course to get any reasonable statistics, I need lots and lots of votes from different people from all over the internet. So vote, vote, vote!!

Final HCD Research Graph and Numbers for the Season

2010-05-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

I received the final HCD Research Mediacurves.com poll results, and in their Idol Democracy survey Crystal Bowersox won by nearly a 2 to 1 margin over Lee DeWyze (66.2% versus 33.8%). So since Lee won by 2% over Crystal, he must have received 51% of the total votes versus 49% for Crystal in the actual vote. If we assume the Mediacurves sampling is representative of the voting populace, we can divide the actual vote percentage by the HCD Research percentage for each one to see the voting ratios for each contestant. So for Lee we take 51/33.8 = 1.51 and for Crystal we find 49/66.2 = 0.740 which represents the percentage of the total Idol vote responsible by each percentage of the voting population for each contestant. So on average each Lee voter called in more than twice as many votes as every Crystal voter, which makes perfect sense if you consider the demographics of who prefer each contestant.

DialIdol Results - Score versus Raw Votes

2010-05-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Well, the results are in at DialIdol.com. and according to their Idol Score prediction, Lee DeWyze should be the 2010 American Idol winner. He ended up with a score of 12.008 versus Crystal Bowersox's score of 7.687. I noticed initially his score was higher than that and over the evening it decreased but stayed substantially above Crystal's DialIdol score. However, if you look at the actual raw score tallied up by DialIdol.com you see that Crystal is actually far ahead in terms of total votes. I tallied the counts for the three phone numbers again:

Crystal = 55,048+54,652+51,422 = 161,122 = 61.4% of 262,355
Lee = 37,610_33,828+29,795 = 101,233 = 38.5% of 262,355

So in terms of total votes on Dial Idol it was not even close. They must be predicting the voting patterns following busy signals of their users, and even though the vast majority of their users were voting for Crystal the vast percentage of the busy signals were for Lee (especially early on in the evening). It was interesting to note that this week there were more than twice as many total votes as last week (262,355 versus 115,960 completed votes, 13,311 busy signals versus 4,612 last week) but compared to last year's Kris versus Adam contest there were only small fraction (412,250 total votes in 2009.) The busy percentages are way down as well, when last year all 6 numbers had busy percentages between 40 and 50% and this year Lee's were between 5-8% and Crystal's were all in the 3-5% range. For fun I even went back to the 2008 Cook versus Archuleta finale and that season had even more voting than 2009 with about a million total calls (611,638 votes and 389,207 busy signals). David Cook's busy percentages were all in the mid 40's and David Archuleta's were all around 30% (29.1% to 32.4%).

One interesting thing to note is for the past two weeks, Lee's number with the highest busy percentage is always his first number, but Crystal's highest busy percentage has been line #3. Lee also had the highest busy percentage on all three numbers last week, and it always seems to peak early and then die down. In fact Lee's #1 line has consistently been the busiest phone line for weeks, even when his #2 line is sometimes hardly busy at all. I wonder if AT&T had upgraded the line volume this year after the 40-50% busy signals last year and realized the capacity this year was not needed nearly as much. I know I called in using "Redial" manually during all the commercials during "Glee" on Crystal's number #3 (1-866-IDOLS06) and only hit three busy signals all evening. I am guessing the 200 or so votes I called in for her were probably negated by one active 14 year old Dewyze fan and her iPhone in about 10 minutes.

Tonight's Performances - Not even close

2010-05-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

At first I thought it was just me, but after checking most blogs and comments tonight, it seems most other people agree. It seemed like we were back to inspirational night or Billboard Top 100 night again when it was Crystal Bowersox and everybody else again. All of Lee DeWyze's performances tonight were pleasant enough, but he never seemed to even be there to compete. And Crystal just nailed every one of her performances, with "Up To The Mountain" ending the evening with the best performance of the season. The amazing thing is that Lee could still win this thing tomorrow due to the power of power texting teen girls. I do not understand why so many people complain that Crystal is not contemporary enough. They say this when I hear current teens listening to hits from the 60's, 70's and 80's all the time. Plus who says that people over 30 do not buy any albums? We buy tons of albums and we actually have the cash to do it. I can see a lot of people in their 30's, 40's and older buying a Crystal Bowersox album and they (we) may even buy her second and third one. It will be a lot tougher for someone like Lee to sell his second or third album when the next new "cute, gravelly voiced guy" shows up next year. I do think Lee is pretty good and will sell some albums, but considering the whole season, I would find it really sad if he wins over Crystal just because of a bunch of over energetic girls and their AT&T cell phones.

Going back to tonight's performances I will give my opinion on ranking them all:

1) Crystal - "Up To The Mountain" 9.5/10 - Emotional, powerful and near perfect. Wow...
2) Crystal - "Me and Bobby McGee" 8.0/10 - Better than the first time she performed it which was already great.
3) Crystal - "Black Velvet" 7.0/10 - She had to push it a bit sometimes with the accompaniment being too strong, but she still delivered.
4) Lee - "Everybody Hurts" 6.5/10 - Not too bad, but he sure does not have much passion in his delivery tonight.
5) Lee - "The Boxer" 5.0/10 - Hey, it wasn't as good as the first time he did it. DeWyze is supposed to have more "confidence" now. Where did his confidence go?
6) Lee- "Beautiful Day" 4.0/10 - Ouch, that is a great U2 song and Bono delivers it with such power. Lee sang it like he was half asleep. The accompaniment was too much as usual. Someone has to learn to tone down all the background singers so the lead singers can sing!

The whole thing almost seemed staged with Lee being oversold last week and then this week they decided to be honest with him and go back to praising Crystal. Sometimes I do not understand the judges at all.

Finale Week Facebook Fan Numbers

2010-05-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

With just a few days left in the American Idol Season 9, it has predictably come down to Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze for the finale. I have my latest Facebook Fan numbers from this morning, and as expected Crystal and Lee are the only two seeing any real change. However, for the first week ever Lee has gained significantly more new fans than Crystal, even though his total number still lags hers substantially. Since my last snapshot on the 17th, Lee has gained almost 30,000 fans (from 59,101 to 88,394) while Crystal gained over 11,000 (from 104,050 to 115,444.) In typical post elimination fashion, Casey James gained the most fans that he has in a while also, gaining about 1,500 to go from 37,990 to 39,433. Not much has changed with anyone else, and I will probably not have another update until some time on Wednesday. The final performance episode tomorrow should be interesting since I believe the title could easily go to either contestant, all dependent on what happens tomorrow night. In either case, though, I believe both Crystal and Lee will do fine, releasing an album in the fall. After hearing them perform not only "Falling Slowly" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", I could see them working together in the future too, since their sounds blend together quite well, better than say a Kris Allen and Adam Lambert duet.

As a comparison I also checked Kris and Adam's Facebook fan numbers and Kris has 392,743 and Adam has 676,426. Since these numbers are actually incredibly similar to the unit sales of their debut albums, perhaps that means Crystal and Lee should both sell a minimum of 100,000 units of their debut albums. When the Idol tour progresses throughout the summer, I could see them both gaining substantially more Facebook fans too, so hopefully both will see a lot of success in their album sales.

Crystal still leading both Mediacurves and DialIdol Raw Voting

2010-05-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

I was expecting Casey James to be in the bottom of any American Idol poll you could find following last night's performance episode, but I was surprised to see Crystal Bowersox still has a strong lead in both the Mediacurves.com Idol Democracy poll and in the total raw votes on DialIdol.com. In the Mediacurves poll she just barely dropped from last weeks 55.3% percentage to this weeks 53.1%. Lee Dewyze had a huge spike but still trails Crystal substantially, increasing from 18.6% last week to 31.6% this week. Casey's percentage actually increased (since Mike accounted for 11.9% last week) and he increased from 14.2% to 15,3%. Nevertheless he is way behind the other two contestants. I would need to know the total count from this weeks poll to count actual vote increases and decreases, and hopefully they will e-mail me those results soon. I know the Idol Democracy project will be happy to announce tonight that they predicted the three last eliminations correctly!

It is also time to tally up the raw scores from DialIdol.com:
1) Crystal: 20,495 + 15,806 + 15,839 = 52,140 = 44.9% of all votes
2) Lee: 16,128 + 13,002 + 12,234 = 41,364 = 35.6% of all votes
3) Casey: 7,776 + 7,380 + 7,300= 22,456 = 19.3% of all votes
This week there were 115,960 total DialIdol votes (up about 10,000 from last week's 105,986) and with Mike's 10,000 included that means an additional 20,000 votes for the three remaining contestants. Crystal gained over 15,000 more votes this week, Lee gained over 13,000 and Casey actually lost about 9,000 votes.

All Midwest Finale Set!

2010-05-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Surprise, surprise, guess who will be in the American Idol finale? We barely even need tomorrow's show to relieve the suspense. It should definitely be a Crystal Bowersox versus Lee Dewyze finale, with both of them getting good record deals afterwards. The only certainty should be Casey James going home tomorrow. For the first time I even did my part and voted for Crystal for a solid hour with my Redial button. I figure Lee was so heavily over-hyped on the show that he did not need any help. Since I am still surprised Casey had more votes than Mike did last week, I know he must have a powerful voting base. So I was trying to do my part to make sure Crystal was in the finale where she belongs with Lee. Someone has to vote against the huge mass of power texting tween girls, Texans and older women who love Casey. Plus since both Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth are so huge, I think Crystal needs more "local" voting help (hey, I used to live in Northern Ohio!) I did think Lee's "Hallelujah" was the highlight of the show, but I did not think his "Simple Man" was all that great. I will go ahead and score and rank the six performances as I saw them:

1) Lee - "Hallelujah" 7.5/10 - Despite the judges' ridiculous over praising, Lee actually did a great job. He definitely is a much improved performer since two months ago.
2) Crystal - "Maybe I'm Amazed" 7.2/10 - I did not think Lee's performance was that much better than Crystal's, and she definitely took a much bigger risk in her performance and arrangement. Her vocals are fantastic as always.
3) Crystal - "Come To My Window" 6.0/10 - The instruments were overpowering her vocals which is a shame. She actually sang it very well although she started off a bit weak.
4) Lee - "Simple Man" 5.5/10 - More over the top compliments from the judges. I thought is was solid but nothing we haven't heard from Lee before.
5) Casey - "Daughters" 4.5/10 - Better than his first song, but still a snoozer. Isn't he supposed to be a rocker? He does play a great guitar but his vocal performances are "nice" but not memorable.
6) Casey - "It's Alright With Me" 4.0/10 - I cannot believe he picked this from all the songs he could pick. Casey can be a lot better than this, but he did not bring it tonight.

Sometimes I wonder if the contestants are told to under perform at times. I cannot believe Casey performed in such a lifeless manner when he is actually capable of being a lot better. I watched some of his videos from when he played in Texas this past weekend, and he is so much better playing upbeat, rocking songs than what he performed in front of the millions of TV viewers tonight. Was he paid off to be boring and be voted off tomorrow?

Post Homecoming Facebook Fan Changes

2010-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

Now that the Top3 have had their homecoming trips and are ready for the last two weeks, it is time once again to compile the changes in the number of Facebook Fans for everyone (I am just compiling the Top 9.) My last graph was from Tuesday, May 11, from before the show that evening, so this demonstrates the increase in almost a full week. As expected Crystal Bowersox and Lee Dewyze continue to lead the increases. Crystal increased from 93,699 to 104,050 in the six days, an increase of over 10,000 and Lee went from 49,412 to 59,101 so he almost increased 10,000 as well. Casey James, on the other hand, increased from 36,624 to 37,990, an increase of just slightly over 1,300, which does not bode well for his current "buzz" on Facebook. Unless Casey can have two phenomenal performances tomorrow I think he may have to be happy with placing number 3 for the season. Hey, that is still one lower than Chris Daughtry!

I am curious how much the population of their hometown metropolitan areas affect the voting. Since Lee is from the third most populous metropolitan area in the country and Casey is from the fourth, I wonder if it hurts Crystal to come from #79 (Toledo-Fremont, Ohio.) The Chicago area has over 9 million people and the Dallas-Fort Worth area has over 6 million. The Toledo area has a whopping 700,000 which is hard to compete with the giant populations of the other two cities. For example, Lee threw out the first pitch at a Cubs game that was only 95% sold out, but that was still over 39,000 people, whereas Crystal threw out her pitch at a sold out, record attendance game of the Toledo Mud Hens where there were only 13,200 there. And Lee's Friday evening concert at the Arlington Park Racetrack could draw over 40,000 people, whereas Crystal's packed concert at the Ottawa County Fairgrounds could only hold about 6,000. Those Northwestern Ohioans will have to vote ten times are hard to keep their Idol hopeful alive!

Idol Democracy Poll Nails it Two Weeks in a Row!

2010-05-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

After properly predicting Aaron Kelly would be eliminated last week, the HCD Research Mediacurves poll correctly selected Michael Lynche as the contestant to be voted off this week. Once again I have graphed the percentage numbers from their results, but I will again decipher the true vote count from the percentages. This week there were substantially more people surveyed in their poll, from 3,151 last week to 3,476 this week, an increase of 325 (over 10%). Let's break down the raw number of votes:

1) Crystal 55.3% of 3,476 = 1,922 votes, an increase of 456 from last week. Her three week raw vote counts are: 1109, 1466, 1922
2) Lee 18.6% 0f 3,476 = 646 votes, a decrease of 118 from last week. His series: 387, 764, 646
3) Casey 14.2% of 3,476 = 493, a slight increase of 14 from last week. His series: 548, 479, 493
4) Mike 11.9% of 3,476 = 414, a decrease of 82 from last week. His series: 327, 496, 414

So next week we will see what happens to Mike's 300-400 survey respondents. This week it appears all of Aaron's 261 votes from last week must have gone to Crystal, along with most the 325 of the people who had not responded last week. From the trend here, it would seem the voting is not even needed for the next two weeks, Casey will likely be eliminated next week and Lee during the finale week. The ascent of Crystal's voting numbers, both in percentages and in raw votes is pretty overwhelming.

I also compiled the raw voting numbers from DialIdol where the results for this week are similar but not identical. There Crystal's lead is not as insurmountable with 34.7% of the raw votes there, and Casey actually had a slight lead over Lee this week, 29.7% versus 26.1%. But there Big Mike only received 9.3% of the votes, even lower than his percentages on the HCD Research poll.

A Blah-nd Night at the Movies

2010-05-11T21:31:00.000-07:00

Well, tonight's performance episode shows that not all things improve with age. I was hoping now that we were down to the Top 4 the overall quality of performances would approve. The movie theme was even much more broad than the artist themes (Sinatra, Elvis, Shania, etc) so there should have been better material for the contestants. It is pretty sad when two of the best performances of the evening are the duets. At least I am guessing that Crystal and Lee will both be safe, just like the Idol producers wanted, but I sure wish they could all perform better. The bigger question is who will be going home tomorrow, and it will be either Mike or Casey, all depending on who can get their fans to call in more votes. The numbers on DialIdol show Casey far ahead of Mike, but from DialIdol and Facebook results in the past, Mike seems to have a lot of "non-Internet" fans which have been voting for him and keeping him alive.

So now I will give my opinions on the six performances of the evening, including the two duets:

1) Crystal 7.2/10 - Good song for her performed quite strongly, but not as strongly as we know she is able. I still liked it better than her duet with Lee, but just barely.
2) Crystal/Lee 7.0/10 - Their vocals sounded good together, but I think the other instrumentalists were too strong. I think two guitars and two vocalists should be enough with just light accompaniment. Crystal definitely sounds better than Lee, but having her sweet vocals together with his raspy sound actually complement each other pretty well.
3) Casey/Mike 6.0/10 - They sounded best when they were both singing together, although Mike definitely sounds better than Casey who is rather bland in comparison. Both of them were adding a bit more "schmaltz" than I would like.
4) Mike 5.5/10 - As usual his vocals sound clean, but he added too much of his overdone vigor. At least he was hitting all his notes and adding some excitement to his song.
5) Lee 5.2/10 - He was definitely missing a bunch of his high notes, and not adding much added personality to the song. It still sounded like a nice cover song, but nothing special.
6) Casey 4.0/10 - With Aaron gone he is again in trouble. Luckily he looked better with his hair down again to get the ladies to call in votes for him. His version of "Mrs. Robinson" showed he added some originality but made the song much more lackluster.

Even though I think Mike did better than Lee, I am still guessing Lee will be voted to safety and Mike and Casey will be in the bottom two. So I think the folks in Toledo and Mount Prospect can start preparing for their celebrations on Friday (and hope for good weather) but St. Pete and Fort Worth will have to wait until tomorrow night to see who is going home. It is too close to call, especially since it all depends on the voters.

Before Show Facebook Fan count and Hometown Visits

2010-05-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

Since the movie theme performance show is tonight, I thought I would take my latest snapshot of Facebook Fan counts. It had been 4 days since my last count, and the same trend continues with both Crystal Bowersox and Lee Dewyze gaining new fans and nobody else much moving at all. In the past 4 days Crystal has added 2,500 more fans (from 91,142 to 93,699) and Lee has gained over 2,000 as well (from 47,650 to 49,748). The person with the most new fans after them is the just eliminated Aaron Kelly, gaining over 450 to go from 32,179 to 32,639. Casey and Big Mike are stagnant with Siobhan and Tim both gaining more fans than either of them. Do you think the other two have already given up all hope?

One thing I noticed when searching Google News about their hometown visits, is you can read what is going to happen in Toledo, Ohio, for Crystal and in Mount Prospect and Arlington Park, Illinois, for Lee, but there is no mention anywhere about any celebrations for Casey in Texas or Big Mike in Florida anywhere. I tried Googling terms like "lynche idol visit" or "casey james hometown idol" and I find more articles about Crystal and Lee's upcoming hometown visits than for Casey and Mike. Their hometowns had better have something planned, since three of the four will need them, not just the top two! Part of Big Mike's problem is he grew up in Florida but is now living in the New York City area where his band is located, so I am not sure where his "hometown" would be. There must be some Forth Worth Idol fans pushing for Casey's parade and performance there too. Or are they still wishing Tim Urban was still in the running? I bet Sonestown, Pennsylvania would have been excited if Aaron Kelly had made it! Incidentally, with the elimination of the two Northeast residents in the past two weeks (Aaron and Siobhan, if you do not count Mike), it looks like it is down to two Midwesterners versus a Texan and a Floridian who has moved to NYC. Which region of the country will win out? It looks like most likely it will be the Midwest.

Does Elimination Help Idol Contestants?

2010-05-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

I just compiled my latest Facebook Fan statistics, and one interesting thing I notice, is that right after any contestant is eliminated they seem to get a boost in their number of fans. This may be due to going on the talk show circuit afterwards (Ellen, Letterman, etc.) as well as giving interviews on their local FOX affiliates. For example this week Aaron Kelly gained almost 900 new fans (from 31,310 to 32,179) in 4 days after gaining less than 700 new fans over the previous 6 days. Siobhan had gained over 1,300 new fans from Apr 27 to May 3 and still gained over 400 (from 25,776 to 26,211) over the past 4 days. I watched some of Siobhan's post elimination video footage and she interviews quite well. She definitely is an interesting character! I still think she should go into Broadway musicals where I think she would excel.

As for the final four, Lee and Crystal are definitely pulling away from Casey and Mike in terms of Facebook fans. Since my last report on May 3, Crystal gained over 4,500 new fans (from 86,575 to 91,142) and Lee gained over 3,700 (from 43,866 to 47,650). In the past 4 days Casey only gained 200 new fans (from 36,415 to 36,604) so Siobhan gained twice as many fans than Casey, and Aaron gained over three times as many! And Mike is still proving his fans do not care about Facebook as he still only has 6,771 fans. I also noticed that Andrew and Katie continue to lose just a few fans (Andrew down 200 and Katie down 140, but Tim Urban actually still gained 250 fans in the past 4 days. What has he done in the past 4 days that he would gain as many new fans as Casey?

I also received an e-mail from HCD Research who were happy their poll finally predicted Aaron Kelly's proper departure. Their polls have put Aaron at the bottom for several weeks and now they are finally rid of him! Even all the multiple votes from the tweens, county music fans and Pennsylvania residents could not save him this week. However, I'll have to say I do like the kid and think he will do just fine. He is actually younger than my daughter which really makes me feel old, and I would not be surprised to hear Aaron Kelly's voice on country radio when my family makes me listen to that stuff. I can see him doing a special duet someday with Kellie Pickler, so they can call it "Kellie and Kelly" the County Idol duo or something.

My other graph to post this week is my updated WhatNotToSing graph. The last two weeks have not been kind to Crystal's web ratings and now she is mixed in the middle of the pack. Interestingly, even though Lee is now thought to be the new "front runner" the past two weeks, his WhatNotToSing ratings do not demonstrate this very well. You would think Mike would be considered a frontrunner as well, but he was in the bottom two this week. And Casey's web ratings jump up and down every week like a jumping bean, yet he was not in the bottom two. Thus you can never tell what the voting public will do.

Interesting New HCD Research Numbers

2010-05-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

The latest HCD Research mediacurves.com results were just e-mailed to me and I found the results quite interesting. As expected Lee and Mike both had large increases in the percentage of votes after last night, but Crystal actually received a spike as well, even after her not so positive reviews last night. The only contestants whose percentages went down were Casey and Aaron. If we compare these results to last weeks poll results we can see the actual trends better. Siobhan received 16.5% of the vote last week from a sample of 3,151 respondents which means 520 votes. This week there were 3,475 respondents which means not only are there 324 more votes, but Siobhan's 500+ votes must go to someone else as well.

1) Crystal: 35.2% of 3151 = 1109 last week, 42.2% of 3475 = 1466 this week (357 more)
2) Lee: 12.3% of 3151 = 387 last week, 22.0% of 3475 = 764 this week (377 more)
3) Mike: 10.4% of 3151 = 327 last week, 14.3% of 3475 = 496 this week (169 more)
4) Casey: 17.4% of 3151 = 548 last week, 13.8% or 3475 = 479 this week (69 less)
5) Aaron: 8.3% of 3151 = 261 last week, 7.8% of 3475 = 271 this week (10 more)

So even though Aaron's percentage went down this week, since there are more voters and less contestants, his actual number of votes actually increased slightly. And even though Lee is considered the big gainer this week, according to the HCD Research poll he actually only gained slightly more votes than Crystal did. And Crystal continues to poll higher than any other two contestants combined. Once again her "poor" performance this week has not hurt either her numeric lead here, nor her lead in total DialIdol raw votes.

Pie chart of DialIdol.com Raw Voting Numbers

2010-05-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Now that each contestant has two phone numbers to call, it makes reviewing the DialIdol data a bit tougher to read. For example, using raw numbers of votes last night, Lee's phone numbers ended up in third and fifth place, but Casey's ended up in second and sixth place. So I decided to just add them up and find a percentage to get a better picture of how the total DialIdol votes added all together:

1) Crystal: 19,237 + 13,571 = 32,808 votes (32.8%)
2) Lee: 13,410 + 11,735 = 25,145 votes (25.1%)
3) Casey: 14,067 + 8,936 = 23,003 votes (23.0%)
4) Aaron: 6,715 + 5,341 = 12,056 votes (12.1%)
5) Mike: 4,433 + 2,538 = 6,971 votes (7.0%)

There were a total of 99,983 votes which made the percentages very easy to calculate! I noticed the total number of DialIdol votes has been going down the last few weeks having been over 110,000 last week and over 126,000 the week before. I wonder if some people are no longer voting now that their favorites are gone (i.e. Siobhan and Tim). We can also pull the raw numbers from last week as a comparison:

1) Lee: 14,088+13,001 = 27,089 (24.3%)
2) Siobhan: 13,296 + 10,166 = 23,462 (21.2%)
3) Crystal: 12,591 + 9,075 = 21,666 (19.6%)
4) Casey: 11,294 + 7,946 = 19,240 (17.4%)
5) Aaron: 7,264 + 4,756 = 12,020 (10.9%)
6) Mike: 3,874 + 3,185 = 7,059 (6.4%)

There are some interesting changes from last week to this week. Lee's total DialIdol count actually went down from 27,089 to 25,145, probably because his fans now think he is safe. Crystal's numbers, however, went way up from 21,666 to 32,808 for probably the exact opposite reason with her fans afraid she might fall to the bottom three. And Siobhan's good showing last week demonstrates how atypical the DialIdol using population must be since she was eliminated while placing in second place. Mike and Aaron show very consistent DialIdol numbers from week to week and they obviously have a lot more voters in real life than are represented in DialIdol. It will be interesting to see tonight's results to see who is in the bottom three. My guess is still Mike, Aaron and Casey in the bottom three with Casey going home.

Only Certainty - Casey James is in Trouble

2010-05-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight's episode of American Idol gave us the Top 5 performing the music of Frank Sinatra while being directed and mentored by Harry Connick Jr. The only person who seemed comfortable performing this type of music was Big Mike and he probably gave the best vocal performance of the evening. Unfortunately, he is still Big Mike so we had to watch him lovingly listen to the praise from the judges which always makes me feel ill. That makes me rank him number two for the evening to Lee Dewyze who is a much more likable person since he always looks like he does not believe any of the praise he receives. Lee made his Sinatra number seem more like a Lee Dewyze song unlike Mike who changes genres like a chameleon. Crystal tried again to switch her style again this week with her Sinatra song, and she performed well but not great with another laid back performance. I would rank her third for the evening with a solid performance but nothing amazing. She was still better than Aaron or Casey though. Aaron looked like he was dressed up for a "grown up" event and his performance was okay but not very believable. But he still performed better than Casey James who was the consensus bottom of the evening. He did not look comfortable, missed a lot of notes and made a lot of strange faces. Since he was in the bottom two last week with Siobhan after a much better performance last week, I think he is very serious trouble. Here are my numeric rankings for this evening:

1) Lee Dewyze - 7.0/10 Made the song his own and performed with some emotion. Plus he took the judging well without looking like smug Mike.
2) Big Mike Lynche - 6.5/10 Best vocals of the evening, but his attitude before and after his performance just do not impress me.
3) Crystal Bowersox - 5.5/10 Nice style change but not an exciting performance. Two weeks in a row of pleasant but not exciting have not been good for her.
4) Aaron Kelly - 4.5/10 Pretty solid vocal performance for him but not much stage presence.
5) Casey James - 3.0/10 Shaky vocals, and not much stage presence. Not very pleasant to listen to or watch.

My big question for tomorrow night is who will be in the bottom three. I am pretty definite that Casey will be there, but the other two depends a ton on their fan support. My guess is the only one who is safe this week is Lee. Crystal might be named in the bottom three, but I still doubt it since I believe her fan base is huge. I even think Aaron's fans may be powerful enough to put him in the bottom three but not the bottom two. Mike Lynche has proven not to have the strongest voting support so I could see him in the bottom three as well. The best pick for who is leaving tomorrow is Casey, based both on his performance tonight and his proven weaker fan support. However, I could still see Aaron or even Mike leaving tomorrow based more on voting preferences than their actual performance tonight.

Facebook Fan Count - May 3, 2010

2010-05-03T07:44:00.000-07:00

I was able to again collect Facebook fan counts for the top 9 contestants, and this time sees the first occurrence where two of the contestant fan counts actually dropped, for both Andrew and Katie. Lee has increased now so he is almost caught up to Andrew, and Tim, Siobhan and Katie are all about the same at around 24,000-25,000. Since all three of them are now eliminated it will be interesting to see how much their numbers change anymore. Aaron and Casey seem to have leveled off in their increases of fans, and the only two still gaining substantial numbers are Crystal and Lee. Since April 27 which is a 6 day span (my longest span on my chart), Lee has gained almost 4,000 fans (from 39,917 to 43,866) and Crystal has gained over 7,000 fans (from 79,464 to 86,575). That is not too shabby a number! I also noticed that Melissa Etheridge has 40,351 fans and Tracy Chapman has 31,558, so Crystal actually has substantially more Facebook fans than some of her "influences".

Siobhan Magnus gone in a surprise

2010-04-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, I definitely was not expecting Siobhan Magnus to leave tonight, even if I was not a big fan of her most recent performances. When Ryan announced the bottom three of Casey, Mike and Siobhan, I was guessing at that point it was bound to be Big Mike going home tonight. I found it hard to believe Aaron Kelly was not in the bottom three. How many people can there be to vote for him in Sonestown, PA? I suppose he probably does have the teen and tween fan base as well as the country fan base to help his cause. This had been Siobhan's first time ever in the bottom three and had I assumed she would be one of the two to survive. But, unfortunately, I was wrong and now only one lady is left remaining, Crystal, and the four guys, Lee, Casey, Mike and Aaron. Why have all the other ladies been voted off from the top 12? Only two guys have been eliminated and now Crystal Bowersox represents all the female vocals left in the competition. I guess Crystal also gets her own room in the Idol Mansion now for her duration on the show. You would think with only five contestants left they would each get their own room in the mansion by now. I wonder how that works.

In any case I will miss Siobhan even if I never enjoyed her screaming. She actually has a great voice and since she is only 20, I am guessing she definitely has a future ahead of her in music. On Friday I am going to see "Avenue Q" here in town, and I could definitely envision Siobhan in a Broadway musical type production. Plus she definitely had the best name of any of the contestants on the show. Come on, "Aaron Kelly" or "Casey James" are extremely generic names (much like "Kris Allen" or "David Cook"). Unique artists need unique names!

Latest HCD Mediacurves Survey Information

2010-04-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

The latest HCD Mediacurves survey shows that even after a disappointing performance last night, Crystal Bowersox continues to receive over a third of their votes (35.2%) more than combined totals of the next two contestants, Casey James (17.4%) and Siobhan Magnus (16.5%). That helps to show the voting is more based on fan popularity as opposed to the performance of the specific night. Crystal's percentage of the votes did drop off substantially but is still considerably in the lead. Aaron Kelly again is in the bottom of the pack, and we will see if tonight is finally the night he is sent home.

Shania Twain night throws Idol Wacky!

2010-04-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

Now that we are down to only six contestants, they decided to pull a "Shania Twain" night and the results were not pretty. The bottom line was nobody was awful and nobody was really fantastic with everybody ending up extremely mediocre. That turns the voting into a pure popularity contest so it will be very interesting to see who goes home tomorrow night. This is actually good news for Aaron Kelley who was probably next to go for sure if the front runners had performed well, but since they did not he may survive the week. Aaron actually performed better than usual although I still would not say his performance was great. The closest one to being great this week was someone else who needed it, Casey James. After his stale performance last week where he was in the bottom two, he is probably the safest contestant this week. Lee was his same old self which probably means he is safe, but the usually top-notch Crystal Bowersox was definitely not at her usual level. She needs to tone down the supporting band which did not help out her performance at all. Big Mike again pulled out a ballad which as usual sounded great vocally but made me cringe watching him grimace and emote. The most polarizing performance, however, was definitely Siobhan Magnus who poured out a performance you either loved or hated. Unfortunately for me I was in the latter category. She has a great voice and does not need to screech and yell at the end of every upbeat song. I simply would never vote for her. She is definitely the person most in need of a talented producer to channel her very capable talents into something wonderful.

So how would I rank the performances?
1) Casey James 6.4/10 - not really that great but the best of the pack tonight -- too much like "Jealous Man" part II
2) Lee Dewyze 6.0/10 - he had pitch problems and was not as strong as last week. He is still probably safe though
3) Crystal Bowersox 5.4/10 - awful arrangement of the song. She could have done this so much better.
4) Big Mike Lynch 5.0/10 - nice vocals on yet another ballad. I still cannot enjoy watching him sing though.
5) Aaron Kelly 4.8/10 - more emotive than usual but still not that exciting
6) Siobhan Magnus 4.5/10 - started nice but never built until the end which was way overdone. She has more vocal talent than most of the guys here but needs real guidance (and not from the Idol judges for sure).

Having put Siobhan in last place, I really do not think she will go home. I am guessing Aaron and Mike will be in the bottom three based solely on their previous votes in the bottom three before and one of those two will be leaving. I think this week's voting will be very indicative of overall long term popularity of the contestants and not so much about the performances of this evening. It will be very interesting to see who the bottom three are besides Aaron and Mike. It could be anybody else as the third person in the bottom. I would be shocked if Crystal were in the bottom three, but if she were that may actually put her large fan base into a frenzy that would guarantee she win the whole thing. Frankly, since I believe either Aaron or Mike is going home tomorrow, being the third "bottom dweller" might help any other contestant by firing up their fans. I do not think Aaron nor Mike have the fan base of the other four contestants and they are bound to be voted off in the next couple weeks.

I figured out my Facebook Fan Page Problem

2010-04-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

Most of the Facebook fan pages are actually still there, it is just not very easy to find them anymore. For some reason, now I have to type their name into the search field, and then click the "See More Results for ..." selection to find their fan pages. But when I do that, then the old Fan pages show up with the proper counts except for Tim Urban's which does seem to be gone. There are actually a ton of Tim Urban Facebook pages out there, but none that had the ~20,000 fans he had last week. Oh well, he has been eliminated so I can stop tracking him. However, since I can still find Andrew and Katie fan pages, I can still track them just to keep their lines going. In reality, it now appears that just about all the contestants have "flatlined" on my graph except for Crystal Bowersox and Lee Dewyze. My latest data point is actually 5 days since my last sampling (April 22) and those two are the only ones to have significantly increased. In the five day period Crystal has added about 6,300 new fans (from 73,174 to 79,464) and Lee added about 2,800 (from 37,116 to 39,917) so he is definitely distancing himself from Casey James now. No other contestant added more than 1,000 new fans over the past five days.

So tonight is Shania Twain night with the six contestants performing her songs and being mentored by her. I am guessing she will be fine with Crystal, Lee, Casey and Aaron, and I am curious to see how it goes with Siobhan and Mike. At this point I think Aaron is pretty much a goner in the next week or two, and it is up to Casey, Siobhan and Big Mike to do something wonderful to get into the top three with Crystal and Lee.

Another interesting question is how Tim Urban's departure might help the others in terms of voting. Since he lived in Texas near Casey, I could see his Texan vote adding to Casey's tally. But since Tim was also popular with the teen crowd, I could see his under 20 crowd voting more for Aaron and his cute teen smile. Then there is the VoteForTheWorst crowd who is now supposed to vote for Siobhan, even though many on the board actually wanted to vote for Aaron instead. It will be interesting to see who will be in the bottom three tomorrow, but a lot depends on what transpires tonight.

I am also curious who the west coast crowd are voting for now that all the contestants live in the central and eastern time zones. We now have one from Texas, one from Illinois, one from Ohio, one from Florida, one from Pennsylvania and one from Massachusetts. I have even added a US map with the hometowns of the six remaining contestants in red and all the previous Idol winners in green. It is interesting that Mount Prospect IL, Elliston, OH, Sonestown, PA and Barnstable, MA almost all would fit on a straight lattitude line as you travel east. Four of the six remaining contestants including both of the front runners, Crystal and Lee, are from north of the Mason Dixon line. None of the previous winners have been northerners before with the winner living furthest north being David Cook from Blue Springs, MO. And if it ends up being Crystal and Lee in the finals that would make for a midwestern final, where both contestants had been in the Chicago music scene.

Facebook turned off the Fan Based Pages!

2010-04-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Alas, it appears that Facebook must have taken all the fan created pages for the contestants except for Crystal's, Michael's and Tim's. So that means I cannot keep updating my lovely Facebook Fan graphs! How sad. I did note that Crystal's fan count is up to over 78,000 now, so maybe the other fan pages took themselves down so they would not be compared.

I thought another interesting graph would be layering the line graphs for the WhatNotToSing web ratings for the remaining contestants. Now that we are down to six, it is now much easier to see them all together over the nine weeks they have been performing. Just showing the overall average of the contestants at the current time does not demonstrate their change over time as well, but my lovely line graph does demonstrate the ebbs and flows of each contestant over the past two months. Some contestants like Crystal and Aaron have been very consistent (consistently good for Crystal, consistently bad for Aaron), but the remaining four contestants have varied quite a bit. I even added a spline to the curves here since I thought the pointed lines were too much. I definitely believe Aaron, Casey and Mike are the ones to worry this week and who really have to deliver a great performance or risk going home Wednesday. Since it is Shania Twain week this should make for some interesting performances.

Down to Six Contestants and my Latest Facebbok Fan Graph

2010-04-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

Now that "Idols Gives Back" is over I thought it was time for my next graph! I am still tracking Andrew and Katie (along with the recently departed Tim) just because I can . When Ryan said the show was going to run late, I did not imagine it would be THAT late, but it seemed mean to not let Tim sing a final farewell song. He kept on smiling though, since that is what he does best. Looking at the numbers from early Tuesday to today, Tim actually was still gaining fans well, adding almost 2,000 in that time (from 19,424 to 21,351). He was still gaining the third highest number of new fans, behind only Lee (gaining about 3,000 going from 34,052 to 37,118) and Crystal Bowersox, of course, who tacked on nearly 7,000 new Facebook fans in two days (from 66,252 to 73,174). Crystal gained more new fans in the past two days than Big Mike Lynch has in total. I noticed some of the other contestants have pretty much stopped gaining many new fans which does not look good for them if Lee keeps increasing steadily and Crystal adds new fans by leaps and bounds. For example, the now departed Andrew and Katie added 300-400 new fans, and Aaron and Casey each only gained about 500. Siobhan did gain almost 900 (from 22,435 to 23,315) but Mike only added 150 (from 6275 to 6425). Since Big Mike was not in the bottom three, however, I am just guessing his fan base is not populated by a lot of Facebook users! I was a bit surprised by Casey being in the bottom three since I thought he had a ton of fans, but then again so did Andrew.

Since I love numbers I also investigated the final web rankings on WhatNotToSing, where the rankings this week actually perfectly selected the bottom three and Tim's elimination as well. Crystal scored another very high ranking of 90 this week, which means after only 9 performances Bowersox has scored 8 "five star" ratings. In terms of five star performances, Mamasox is already in third place on WhatNotToSing's list of top contestants of all time which is pretty staggering. Her average web ranking of 84.1 puts her number 1 of all contestants and she has never scored below four stars (her lowest score is a 78). I will be curious to see if she can continue this impressive streak for her remaining time on Idol, which hopefully will be until the finale, but with the voting patterns of America, you never know for sure.

New HCD Mediacurves poll results released

2010-04-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

I just received the results via e-mail of the HCD Research Mediacurves poll after last night's episode of American Idol. Last week I was curious where Katie and Andrew's 15% of the vote would end up, and it looks like most of it ended up with Crystal! Crystal's number was up to a staggering 44.5% of the vote this week with Siobhan surprisingly number two, but at a distant 12.4%. Lee and Casey are pretty much tied at 10.8/10.7% with Mike right behind them at 9.6%. Finally Tim has 7.3% and Aaron again is at the bottom with 4.8%. Last night only 3,081 people responded so their level of response keeps getting lower. So for this week Crystal Bowersox received more votes than Siobhan, Lee, Casey and Mike combined. So much for the backlash from her "quitting" rumor...

My Predictions after 'Inspirational' Night

2010-04-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Being a big fan of Christian music, I was curious how close to true inspiration any of the contestants would come during 'Inspirational' night on Idol. Luckily for me, one contestant actually proved to be inspirational, even if at the expense of making all the others seem flat. After the first six performances, I was thinking Lee Dewyze had done the best job, and it was pretty impressive and held my attention, even if I did not feel it was as inspirational as Simon did (or was he just comparing it to Casey's solid but unexciting performance?) So, I was waiting, as much of America may have been, for Crystal Bowersox to hopefully show a little inspiration herself. In her own words, my reaction would be "Holy Toledo!" She started out singing acapella and was able to not only sing it pitch perfect, but with a ton of soul and emotion. Then when the instruments started she amped it up even more and pretty much knocked it out of the park. She made Lee's impressive performance look like a warm up band performance for the main act. I am wondering what performances like that will do for the Idol ratings, though, if people feel there is no competition left in the show. It seems like from week to week, there might be one other contestant who might be able to match or outshine Crystal, but otherwise she becomes the gold standard each week. It is a bit like the Cardinals having Albert Pujols in the lineup. I am curious what the other six contestants think of her performances.

But the big question for today is not who performed the best last night, but who is going home this evening. That is best done by trying to decide who is safe. The obvious safe ones are Crystal and Lee, but looking at the other five, I am not so sure. I think Siobhan is pretty safe from being eliminated tonight, but if she landed in the bottom three it would not surprise me. Her vocals continue to be fantastic, but she fails to connect with the audience any more and her defensiveness is getting on my nerves. Big Mike is in a similar position with consistently solid vocals, but with an attitude that makes him not so likable. You can tell he is trying to tone himself down, but that is just the way he is, "over the top", physical and a big ham. He is the kind of person who makes a great first impression, but after a while you get tired of his antics. With his seemingly smaller dedicated fan base, I think he may possibly land in the bottom three again but not get eliminated. Casey James is a much more likable and personable presence than Siobhan or Mike, but his performances are getting old and boring. Nevertheless, compared to the bottom two guys I believe he is still pretty safe. So that takes us to Tim and Aaron. When it comes down to it, they should be the bottom two for the evening, but they both seem to have plenty of hard voting fans. On DialIdol, Tim actually has the third highest number of raw votes behind Crystal and Siobhan. However, on the show last night Aaron was able to perform after Tim, which made it easy to compare the two. Tim's performance was quite lackluster and he missed plenty of notes. Although Aaron started off somewhat lackluster himself, he picked it up and by the end was actually starting to show some emotion. I think he did a better job than Tim this week, but that still may not translate into votes. My guess, though, that one of the two of them will be going home.

My overall performance rankings for last night:

1) Crystal - 9.5/10 - Fantastic and moving. Her best performance to date.
2) Lee - 8.0/10 - Good and still less wooden than in the past. Better than anyone not named Crystal.
3) Siobhan - 5.5/10 - Great vocals but I cannot connect with her performance. She seems aloof and not there.
4) Mike - 4.8/10 - More good vocals, but he seems more angry than inspirational.
5) Casey - 4.6/10 - Happy, smiling guitar slinging singer. "Good but not great" could be his motto.
6) Aaron - 3.4/10 - He has potential but not any time soon. At least he has more personality than Tim.
7) Tim - 2.0/10 - His vocals were not good and he is not even interesting this time. What is he doing on this show?

Preparing for 'Inspirational' Night!

2010-04-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Tonight the seven remaining American Idol contestants get to perform an "inspirational" song, and looking at the list, it might be good and it might be awful. If Big Mike picks an upbeat song and hams it up it could be his last week, but how many ballads should be perform? We all know Casey James can be good at performing a ballad, but we really have not seen what Lee or Crystal can do with a slower song. I will be curious to see what Alicia Keys will add to the show as well. I thought Adam Lambert was quite good as a mentor for Elvis week, and Alicia should be able to give some good constructive criticism as well. I wonder if Tim Urban might even listen to her!

It is also time for my latest graph since I like graphs. It has been four days since my graph on Friday, so I was curious how the Facebook fan numbers had changed over the weekend. I even left Andrew and Katie in there just since they were actually getting press time over the weekend since they are both getting some press time on their departure. And sure enough, Andrew actually has the fourth highest increase in fans over the weekend, about 1,200 to put him at 46,760 still a very solid second place count. The only contestants with more new fans over the weekend are Tim Urban with about 1,700 more (19,424 total), Lee Dewyze with 2,400 more (to 34,856) and Crystal Bowersox leading the group with about 4,400 more for a total of 66,252. I guess Crystal's news that she had thought of quitting the show has not decreased her growth of popularity. Lee and Casey are just about tied now in total number of fans, but in reality their combined total is about the same as Crystal's total by herself. Siobhan still has not caught up with Katie, and in fact Katie gained about 900 fans (24,488 total) and Siobhan gained 1,100 (22,435) so I do not know if Siobhan will be catching up. On the other hand, Tim is catching up with Siobhan whereas Big Mike still trails at the bottom of the pack.

Crystal Almost Quit the Show!

2010-04-17T06:43:00.000-07:00

The latest American Idol news that surfaced yesterday was a TMZ report that Crystal Bowersox almost quit the show. The article reports that it occurred two weeks ago after a show, so I am guessing that would put it after the elimination show where Didi left the competition. I know in her exit interview with Michael Slezak, Didi Benami had mentioned that she wanted to collaborate with Crystal so I am guessing that the two of them had grown quite close. In fact, Katelyn Epperly had mentioned that Crystal, Lilly Scott and her liked to hang out and jam together, so it sounds like all of Crystal's female friends kept getting eliminated. And now with Katie Stevens gone it is just her and Siobhan Magnus with five male contestants. Since the two remaining ladies are sharing an apartment together and are probably the two most "unique" individuals left, I bet they share a close bond and mutual respect now as well. I cannot see either one of them leaving the show before the final three or four, or it would be a very lonely place for the last remaining female. If Crystal were to leave early the show would definitely be in trouble for the season.

I also just watched Andrew Garcia's interview with Ellen on her show. I really liked his appearance until he started performing again! I then went back and watched his "Straight Up" performance which he definitely nailed. There is some originality and dynamic he had when he performed "Straight Up" that he never really regained again, which is pretty sad. He sure is a likable person though.

Final Pre-weekend graph of Facebook Fan Numbers

2010-04-16T14:04:00.000-07:00

I just had to compile my numbers for my graph again before the weekend. Even though Andrew and Katie are off the show, they actually will now get their week of talk shows (Ellen, Letterman, etc) and they will be back for the tour so they may actually pick up more fans than if they were performing! I thought Andrew was particularly gracious after his elimination, and Katie held her composure quite well for a 17 year old who has not even graduated high school yet! Katie actually seems like a very nice girl when she is not performing, and I think Andrew also has a lot more personality when not performing as well. Since he lives in the LA area I bet we see Andrew around in the audience for the rest of the show, probably cheering on Lee. He seems like a pretty cool guy overall. Anyone who will call himself "corny" is okay with me.

But on to my numbers for today! The same trend as before had continued with Crystal gaining over 3,500 new fans since Wednesday (61,885 total), and Lee gaining almost 3,000 as well (31,651). Tim continues to gain a following with over 2,200 new fans (to a total of 17,695). The eliminated Andrew actually gained almost 2,000 (45,585 total) and Katie gained over 1,600 (23,564 total). Casey, Aaron, and Siobhan all gained about 1,000 (Casey to 34,028, Aaron to 28,518, Siobhan to 21,344). Bringing up the rear continues to be Mike with a total of 6,031 fans.

Bye Bye Andrew and Katie!

2010-04-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

I was impressed that the bottom two that I selected in my previous posting were actually the two that were eliminated. I had expected Andrew to be one of the two, but Katie's departure was definitely not as certain. I also received a message from HCD Research/Mediacurves giving their results from their Idol Democracy poll where every person can only have one vote. I decided to graph their trends over the five past weeks to visually see the numbers better than their chart of numbers. If you look at my graph above you will see that Aaron Kelly has consistently run at the bottom of their poll, but we know he is still around. He is definitely one who benefits from many multiple voters. Now that Andrew is gone he will be dwelling at the bottom of the vote graph alone. You can also note the two peaks Lee and Casey have enjoyed, Lee's two weeks ago and Casey's last week, but then they both fell down into the pack, with Mike having a slight peak this week. Siobhan has been in a slow descent from four weeks ago, until now she is nestled amongst the pack between 8 and 12 percentage points. And through it all the consistent winner for the poll has remained Crystal whose advantage has actually been increasing the past two weeks as the others fight for a few percentage points. Andrew and Katie accounted for about 15 percentage points between the two of them, and it will be interesting to see who gains from their departure.

Two more bite the dust tonight!

2010-04-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I for one will be happy to see two more people leave tonight and get the crowd down to seven. That means I can stop updating two of the nine lines on my Facebook Fan graph! Since it has only been two days instead of three the rate of increase is not as great for any of the contestants, but we can note the trends to see who has the most momentum. The top three gainers in number of fans over the past two days have been:

1) Crystal - gaining 2,499 to 58,371 from 55,872
2) Lee - gaining 2,029 to 28,766 from 26,737
3) Tim - gaining 1,574 to 15,491 from 13,917

Everyone else gained 500 to 800 new fans over the past two days except for Big Mike who only gained 286 more. I never would have believed the number three gainer would be Tim a few weeks ago, but after watching some of the other performers I am starting to understand why. Lee and Tim both have a lot of momentum now, and Crystal just transcends everyone else as the clear favorite. For tonight's double elimination round it is easy to pick two of the bottom three (Andrew and Aaron) but it will be interesting to see who the final one of the bottom three will be. The obviously safe are now just Crystal, Lee and Casey, and the next safest contestant may actually now be Tim Urban! Checking the latest WhatNotToSing web ratings, the third lowest after Andrew (14, ouch!) and Aaron (42) is Siobhan (46) and then Big Mike (54) with Casey right behind him (55). I cannot believe WhatNotToSing has Katie at 59 over Casey at 55 right now, and Tim at a whopping 65 for third place for the evening (behind Crystal at 80 and Lee at 74). My rankings for last evening (using my 10 point scale) would be more like:

1) Crystal - 8.0/10 - solid and not spectacular, but compared to the competition...
2) Lee - 7.5/10 - great vocals but starting to get as predictable as Crystal.
3) Casey - 6.5/10 - undo the hair bun and rock out more!
... the top three are great vocalists and guitar players, but all three need some more stage presence.

4) Mike - 5.2/10 - He is so much more enjoyable on the slow songs -- I cannot watch him otherwise.
5) Siobhan - 5.0/10 - She has a great voice but I am losing interest in her. She still seems to be holding back.
6) Tim - 4.0/10 - Blah, bland boring but not as difficult to listen to as some of the others
7) Aaron - 3.8/10 - Even more boring than Tim, and that is saying something
8) Katie - 2.5/10 - I personally cannot stand to watch her perform anything.
9) Andrew - 2.0/10 - Without a guitar he seems lost. He needs to go home to his family; they need him more than we do.

The amazing fact now is I would rather still have Tim or Aaron on the show instead of Andrew or Katie. I actually like Aaron as a person but his performances just are not very interesting. Put a cowboy hat on his head and let him release a country album and be the male Taylor Swift. And I actually like Mike when he is performing a slow ballad, but not when he is actually being himself! Siobhan is an interesting case of someone with a ton of vocal talent, but something about her no longer clicks with me. I am almost to the point where I would not mind the bottom six going, and I want the top three (Crystal, Lee and Casey) to have wireless headsets and cordless guitar pickups and show more life out there.

I also just checked out last night's numbers from DialIdol and it is incredible to see that Tim actually received the highest number of total votes at over 22,000 (over Siobhan, Crystal, Katie, Lee or Casey.) How many supporters could VoteForTheWorst possibly have?

Over the Weekend Facebook Fan Numbers

2010-04-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

Since it has been three days since my Facebook Fan count for the nine remaining American Idol Season 9 contestants, I thought I would update my SigmaPlot graph is so I can have four whole data points! I was curious how many new fans would actually sign up for each contestant over the weekend, especially with the double elimination taking place this week. It looks like Lee (26,737) has continued his ascent with his current count being almost identical to Aaron's (27,069). Lee actually added more than 2,500 new fans over the weekend, the largest number of anybody not named Crystal, who at 55,872 gained 3,400 fans over the weekend. Just about everybody else gained around 1,000 new fans this weekend with the exception of Michael who only gained 342 (from 5,044 to 5,386.) Things are not looked too good for Big Mike, and I can possibly see him surviving this week after his near removal the last time, but I doubt he will make it after the "Idol Gives Back" week when there will be another double elimination week. By the end of April there will only be five remaining contestants, and the only two I see as definitely there would be Crystal and Casey. The other three would be between Siobhan (probable), Lee (probable), Andrew, maybe Katie and possibly even Mike if he can stage a huge comeback. I cannot imagine that Aaron or Tim could make it in the top 5, but you never know with all the weird American voters. I think Siobhan and Lee are probably in the top 5 unless they have a disaster or play it too safe in the next three weeks, which is actually possible between the two of them.

Latest Facebook Fans Numbers

2010-04-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Here is the Facebook Fan graph I just compiled with the latest fan numbers this morning. Since I now have the numbers from April 1 and 6 to go along with today, we can see some interesting trends. The most noticeable change in the past 9 days is how Lee's count (now 24,208) had started near Siobhan's count (now 18,301), then it came up to Katie's (currently 20,687) and passed it and is now approaching Aaron's (26,204). In fact Lee has the highest increase of anybody except Crystal who just keeps on gaining more and more FB fans (now at 52,439). Andrew (41,970) and Casey (31,105) are also still gaining new fans, but not as quickly as Crystal or Lee. I was curious what would happen to Mike in the past couple days after his near departure on Wednesday night, but his number (5,044) still trails even Tim (12,834) substantially. My guess is he will not last much longer on the show, which again shows that vocal talent and popularity are not necessarily correlated. However, since Andrew was in the bottom two this week, Facebook fan count obviously does not match the total voting counts on the show. This week's HCD Poll results also does not correlate well with the Facebook fan numbers, even if it did pick, two of the bottom three correctly this week (Aaron and Andrew). The HCD results, however, put Big Mike safely in the middle of the contestants, which definitely proves he does not receive as many repeat votes as contestants like Aaron and Andrew. It was also interesting to note that the number of respondents to the HCD poll continues to fall, from the 7,397 they reported two weeks ago, to 3,418 last week and 3,305 this week. I guess people are getting tired of the poll. even if it only takes 10 seconds to do it.

Contestant	% that voted for contestant to move on
Crystal Bowersox	30.1
Casey James	13.6
Katie Stevens	11.3
Michael Lynche	10.3
Lee Dewyze	9.7
Siobhan Magnus	9.5
Tim Urban	6.4
Andrew Garcia	5.4
Aaron Kelly	3.8

Wow, Big Mike received the lowest number of votes!

2010-04-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

Who would have guessed it was going to be Big Mike to have to sing for the save this evening? I was trying to figure out the bottom three from amongst Katie, Andrew, Tim and Aaron, and the actual bottom three were Aaron and Andrew as expected, but also Big Mike. Neither Tim nor Katie even made the bottom three this time, which is even more surprising after being among the bottom three for the past two weeks. I guess it all depends on how many avid fans you have calling in for you repeatedly, and Mike must not have that many. I would actually vote for him next time if I actually cared if he won or not. When it comes to actual vocal and performing talent, he is definitely head and shoulders above some of the other contestants, but that still does not mean I would ever purchase his album or pay to see him in concert. Or call in for him either. With the 130 million votes that Ryan said they received for the program, you definitely must call in many, many times to make a difference. All of this surely makes for some interesting television!

How dare Tim not stink it up!

2010-04-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

I was really hoping for a cheesy, pathetic performance from Tim Urban last night so I would be happy to see him be eliminated tonight. Unfortunately, the Teflon Titan performed a bland but not horrific rendition of "All My Loving" which all three judges actually praised. I think perhaps they were praising him to lessen his pity votes and finally get him off the show. But little Timmy was not the worst performer on the show last night, which may have ended up being more of a "most boring" award as opposed to just plain out bad. That would probably go to Aaron Kelly, although Katie and Andrew were not too far behind (as well as Tim.) I know those would be my bottom four of the night, but it is hard to determine the bottom three for this evening. I am guessing Andrew has the fan base to keep him out of the bottom three in votes, so it will probably be between Tim, Aaron and Katie. I doubt the show producers would let Katie leave the show (to have four girls leave in four weeks), so it is likely between Aaron and Tim going home tonight. With the resilience that mighty Tim has had in the past, that may be very bad news for Aaron Kelly!

After checking the preliminary scores on WhatNotToSing.com, I agreed with most of the top and bottom performers (Casey, Crystal on the top, Aaron and Andrew on the bottom), but I cannot see why people liked Katie's performance so much (more than Lee? more than Big Mike? Siobhan?) And just because Tim did not fall flat on his face does not put him higher than Lee or Mike either. Yes, Lee was weird to have the bagpiper join him, and Mike did cheese it up a bit too much, but I would still much rather listen to either of them than to boring Tim or plastic Katie. I think Katie probably reminds many people of those snotty "popular" girls in high school many of us did not like, and I find it very difficult to enjoy watching her perform. I think she is one of the performers who work much better with the sound on and the picture off (Big Mike is another good example, although I find him much more likable.) So here is my personal final rankings for the evening:

1. Casey (nice change for him -- he showed some emotion and stopped smiling!) 8.6/10
2. Crystal (a little off here and there, but still strong) 8.2/10
3. Lee (more comfortable sounding, not much originality except the bizarre bagpipes) 6.9/10
4. Mike (nice soulful vocals, way too much overacting) 6.6/10
5. Siobhan (pleasant but too restrained, rather boring for her) 6.3/10
... rather large gap here ...
6. Tim (boring, but actually better than some) 3.9/10
7. Andrew (why he is behind the judges? weird arrangement, but still better than Katie) 3.8/10
8. Katie (stop scrunching your face!) 2.5/10
9. Aaron (double zzzzz) 2.0/10

Facebook Fan numbers update

2010-04-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

On my never ending search for more numbers to compile, I was able to grab the latest Facebook fan numbers for the final nine contestants to see how they have changed since I first reported them April 1. The rankings based on total fan count have not changed but there are some interesting trends:

1. Crystal Bowersox, was 40,576 now 45,328, gained 4,752 (11.7% increase)
2. Andrew Garcia, was 38,396 now 40,179, gained 1,783 (4.6% increase)
3. Casey James, was 27,662 now 28,694, gained 1,032 (3.7% increase)
4. Aaron Kelly, was 23,527 now 24,812, gained 1,285 (5.2% increase)
5. Katie Stevens, was 18,536 now 19,264, gained 727 (3.9% increase)
6. Lee Dewyze, was 14,887 now 18,394, gained 3,507 (23.6% increase)
7. Siobhan Magnus, was 14,845 now 16,173, gained 1,328 (8.9% increase)
8. Tim Urban, was 8,746, now 10,122 gained 1,366 (15.6% increase)
9. Mike Lynche, was 3,805 now 4,104 gained 299 (7.2% increase)

The obvious big winner in Facebook fans over the past week was Lee Dewyze who had been about the same as Siobhan but now is getting closer to Katie's fan count. He gained a whopping 23.6% more Facebook fans due to his performance last week. Another amazing statistic here is the second highest percentage gainer was Tim Urban who gained 15.6% more fans, and with 1366 new fans has the 4th highest number of new fans behind #1 Crystal (4752), #2 Lee (3507) and #3 Andrew (1783). Why is Tim getting so many more new fans? Another interesting stat is how many new fans and total fans Crystal now has. Her 4,752 new fans is 13.6% more new fans than Lee received even though he was perceived as the big "breakthrough" performance last week. Her total count of 45,328 is now more than 10% higher than the 40,179 of second place Andrew Garcia, and more than 10x more than Big Mike Lynche. This really needs a graph, which I will probably compile next week when I will have three data points.

Record producers: choose Dewyze James

2010-04-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

This morning while I was listening to my Crystal Bowersox mix, I was saddened that none of the quite talented male singers are quite at the level of Ms. Bowersox. Then I realized I had the solution for two of them that could make them big stars. The answer is the pop rock duo Dewyze James. Yes, that is Lee Dewyze on lead vocals and acoustic guitar and Casey James on lead electric guitar and vocals as well. Just add any talented bass player and drummer who look half good and you have a band. Since both of them have slight stage presence problems, putting them together should help them both out. Lee will have the tall, blond Casey playing lead guitar so he does need that 100% pressure on him which should allow him to be more comfortable and be able to express himself vocally better. Casey will have a rocking vocalist with a more interesting, growly voice to add to his very nice, but not overly exciting vocals and also allow him to loosen up more while just playing his electric guitar leads. I could see the two of them trading off vocals, or Lee doing most of the lead vocals with Casey adding harmonies. I would be interested in hearing the two of them sing together with some harmonies. If their two voices sound good together that could be quite unique and marketable. The ladies could go to concerts saying they prefer either Lee or Casey, and guys could show up since it is a real rock band, and not just one dreamy guy performing on stage. I think Casey's guitar work would make it more genuine and appealing to guys as well. The music world could use a genuine rock band with not just one lead star. Think Page and Plant, Daltrey and Townshend, Roth and Van Halen. -- why not Dewyze and James?

Latest HCD Polls results and my own Facebook Fans Stats

2010-04-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, I just love American Idol statistics. Here are the results from the HCD survey which I received in my e-mail. I had heard on the news that a poll had suggested that Aaron Kelly would be departing, and I realized that it was the HCD poll that I had participated in! I am curious of the demographic breakdown of the 3418 people who responded to this poll.

Respondents were asked to pick the one contestant that they thought should advance to the next round of the competition:

Contestant	% that voted for contestant to move on
Crystal Bowersox	29.2
Lee Dewyze	14.5
Casey James	10.4
Katie Stevens	9.1
Michael Lynche	8.8
Siobhan Magnus	7.4
Andrew Garcia	6.4
Tim Urban	5.5
Didi Benami	4.8
Aaron Kelly	3.8

This poll did predict 2 of the bottom three correctly, but Katie is again much higher on this poll. just as she was last week. I believe there are a lot of Katie Stevens lovers taking this poll! I was also surprised to see the number of voters drop so much from the 7397 they reported last week to only 3418 this week. I would think as the season progresses there would be more people taking the poll. not less.

I have now performed some quick searches on Facebook to create my own poll to see how many people become fans of each of the contestants as a sort of "popularity contest" which might be more indicative of how many people will actually vote for them, and especially those who will vote multiple times. For more data I decided to add the complete top 12 so we can see how many Facebook fans some eliminated contestants had.

1. Crystal Bowersox - 40,576 fans
2. Andrew Garcia - 38,396
3. Casey James - 27,662
4. Aaron Kelly - 23,527
5. Katie Stevens - 18,536
6. Lee Dewyze - 14,887
7. Siobhan Magnus - 14,845
8*. Didi Benami - 13,621
9. Tim Urban - 8,746
10* Lacey Brown - 8,488.
11. Michael Lynche - 3,805
12* Paige Miles - 2,785
* = eliminated

This is interesting first off since it demonstrates that Andrew has a ton of Facebook fans, almost as many as Crystal. It is also interesting to note that Tim Urban does not have nearly as many fans as Didi, but she was still eliminated. I am also amazed how few fans Big Mike has on Facebook. I wonder why that is? Andrew has 10x as many Facebook fans as Big Mike. And Katie has more fans than Lee, Siobhan and Big Mike, but she has been in the bottom three two weeks in a row. Her fans must not be calling enough!

WhatNotToSing finalized their results for this week too:

Slot

Performance

Web Rating

Result

8/10

Treat Her Like A Lady

Lee DeWyze

9/10

Midnight Train To Georgia

Crystal Bowersox

3/10

Ready For Love

Michael Lynche

2/10

Hold On, I'm Comin'

Casey James

6/10

Forever

Andrew Garcia

10/10

Ain't No Sunshine

Aaron Kelly

7/10

Chain Of Fools

Katie Stevens

4/10

What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted

Didi Benami

1/10

Through The Fire

Siobhan Magnus

5/10

Sweet Love

Tim Urban

Siobhan was definitely hammered in their compiled web ratings, but luckily she survived. Otherwise there are no big surprises in their results. And Tim Urban keeps slipping through despite being pounded on everybody's ratings. The fellow should definitely run for office someday, If you look at the updated contestant list sorted by average web rating, it gives some interesting information. Crystal's "off week" actually solidified her lead since Siobhan's average fell substantially while Crystal's hardly fell at all. Lee, Big Mike and Casey are now all very similarly clustered in the top 5 with average ratings in the low 60's and Aaron, Andrew and Katie are now all clustered around 40 as the ones to disappear in the next few weeks. Then there is Teflon Tim still at the bottom, below eliminated Lacey and Paige but still showing up on the program for some unknown reason.

1. Crystal: Average Web Rating: 83.8
2. Siobhan: 67.8
3. Lee: 63.0
4. Mike: 62.2
5. Casey: 60.2
6*. Didi: 52
7. Aaron: 42
8. Andrew: 39.8
9. Katie: 39.7
10*. Paige: 29.6
11*. Lacey: 28.8
12. Tim 23.7

Holy Camoly! Tim Urban is STILL SAFE!!

2010-03-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

Wow, I am still in shock. The bottom three contestants were just as I expected, Katie Stevens, Didi Benami and "Teflon" Tim Urban. First Katie was sent back so I was thinking Tim Urban had finally seen his last performance. But no, it was the ever emotional Didi Benami who was saying good bye, and Tim Urban will remain to murder a Lennon/McCartney song next week. The VoteForTheWorst crowd must be ecstatic. The rest of America will have to suffer. That is three ladies gone in three weeks, with only three remaining in the competition. So much for the "year of the women" performers. After Siobhan Magnus performed at a less that wonderful level yesterday, the only lady still going strong is the consistently outstanding Ms. Crystal Bowersox. The only performer more consistent than Crystal has been Tim who is consistently bland and lifeless. How much longer will he last?

Checking the Overnight Statistics!

2010-03-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

It is always amazing to see what numbers are coming out of DialIdol after each performance. You can definitely see whose fans are using their PC modems to mass vote the system. If you check the raw vote numbers for last night, for example, Siobhan Magnus actually received more votes than Crystal Bowersox (18K to about 16K), despite her not so stellar performance. Even more amazingly Tim Urban received almost as many votes as Lee Dewyze (both around 10,000 votes.) In terms of their performance Tim was not even close to performing at Lee's level. I sure hope that does not mean that Tim is staying around yet another week. In terms of total votes on DialIdol the lowest voted contestant was Big Mike with about 5,000 votes, who was definitely not the worst performance of the evening (although I do not personally like his singing as much as the judges do). How on earth did Tim receive twice as many votes as Big Mike? Is VoteForTheWorst that powerful? I even just checked USA Today's Idol Meter, and was surprised to see who they put up on top -- Big Mike tied with Lee Dewyze! Somehow he ended up with the same score as Lee and above Crystal. Go figure.

Next checking WhatNotToSing, their ratings has Lee on top as expected with a score of 89 with Crystal right behind him with an 81. One of my biggest surprises there are how much Siobhan fell so that her rating last night was a 28, the same as Didi and much lower than Katie at 44. On the other side is Andrew who was rated at a 65, almost as high as Casey with a 70. Just because Andrew was a lot better last night than he had been in the previous two weeks does not place him in the same league as Casey. At least he did not end up near Lee or Crystal which would have just been crazy.

Who to Vote for to get rid of Tim?

2010-03-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, tonight's episode just ended so I thought I might actually vote this time to try to help someone worthy stay on the show. My favorites of the evening were Crystal and Lee, but they are definitely both very safe anyway. Instead I was curious if I could vote for someone so to help them stay on instead of Tim Urban who I find very unpleasant to watch perform. He is worse than the merely boring performers and makes watching an almost irritating experience. The problem is that the likely other two bottom performers are Didi and Katie, neither of which I actually enjoy watching either. I could vote for Siobhan for sympathy for her not so wonderful performance tonight, but she is most likely safe due to the popularity of her screeching (which I believe she does not need to perform so much to succeed.) I could vote for Big Mike since I thought his performance tonight was better than the one from last week although I do not understand why he performed behind the judges which seems unfair. Shouldn't all the performers be required to face the judges? I also do not understand the great praise for Andrew tonight. Although he did seem a lot more comfortable with his guitar again, and performed much better than previous weeks, I thought he was more prepared to play a bookstore or a coffee house instead of a concert. It was a great background music performance, but not a powerful "main event" type performance. I also thought Casey was loosening up a bit more which he definitely needed to do since he often seems too stiff when he performs. But as the judges all stated the best improvement tonight was definitely Lee who has always had a good voice, but this week is finally starting to not look like he is hiding from the IRS any more. There is something about his posture when he performs that seems a bit withdrawn. I think Big Mike has to give some of his "swaggerness" to both Lee and Casey so all three of them can have the proper amount of presence. Then there may actually be a male present who can actually compete with Crystal and Siobhan (who hopefully will improve again after tonight!).

My rankings and scores (just my personal opinion!):
1. Lee 9/10
2. Crystal 8/10
3. Casey 7.5/10
4. Mike 7/10
5. Aaron 6/10
6. Siobhan 5.5/10
7. Andrew 4/10
8. Didi 2.5/10
9. Katie 2/10
10. Tim 1/10

The Ultimate Idol Database site for Geeks

2010-03-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

Since tomorrow night is another performance show I was Googling around for some more statistics on the current contestants since I'm a geeky numbers guy. I found the ultimate American Idol numbers site at WhatNotToSing.com. It looks like it has been around a while, but since I have never really watched much Idol before, it is new to me! They have compiled data on every performance from Season 1 to the present and tracked how highly they have all been rated on the many different polls, blogs and Idol review sites they can find. The results are quite interesting. One thing I have found interesting is that they have listed the top 40 best and worst rated performances of all time, and two of the best rated 40 and four of the worst rated 40 are already from Season 9, and they have only up to 5 performances rated for each of the current season contestants. So after only 5 weeks Season 9 already has 10% of the worst rated performances (from 4 different performers, Tim Urban, Haeley Vaughn, Paige Mills and Lacey Brown), and 5% of the top rated performances (both by Crystal Bowersox.) Interestingly, of the four contestants who rated so poorly only one remains -- the VotefortheWorst.com favorite himself, Tim Urban. He sure is a resilient fellow, and I am curious to see what he does this week. It is truly startling to imagine he will be going on tour this summer with the rest of the Idol contestants.

Interesting Poll response after the March 23 performance.

2010-03-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

I am a voluntary member of the HCD Research survey panel that allows every person to vote for one person who should move onto the next round and they just sent the results from their survey of 7,397 people. This are the results from their poll:

Respondents were asked to pick the one contestant that they thought should advance to the next round of the competition:

Contestant	% that voted for contestant to move on
Crystal Bowersox	34.4
Siobhan Magnus	10.7
Katie Stevens	9.9
Casey James	8.2
Michael Lynche	6.7
Tim Urban	5.9
Lee Dewyze	5.6
Didi Benami	5.2
Andrew Garcia	4.8
Aaron Kelly	4.5
Paige Miles	4.0

So even though this properly predicted Paige would be eliminated, the other two from the "bottom three", Tim and Katie, were substantially higher on this poll than one would have expected. If the 7,397 people polled here are representative of the callers for the program, that means that callers for contestants like Aaron, Andrew and Didi must have called a lot more times than the ones who voted for Katie (who was surprisingly in third place on this poll over both Casey and Big Mike) or Tim (an even more surprising sixth over Lee and Didi.) The other solution would be that the 7,397 on this poll are not representative at all and include more Katie Stevens and Tim Urban fans than the general populace.

To register yourself for the weekly Idol Democracy studies go to: https://www.hcdsurveys.com/panel/join.cfm?source=idol2010.

The obvious poll to compare this to are the raw numbers from Dial Idol which are easy to convert to a similar percentage based table. They had a total of over 90,000 calls and busy signals, but it may actually be from a smaller sample of people, but perhaps more representative. Here are the results for this week including both the raw and percentile scores:

Contestant	Votes/Busy Signals	Percentage
Crystal Bowersox	16148	17.6%
Siobhan Magnus	13513	14.8%
Lee Dewyze	10385	11.3%
Casey James	9492	10.4%
Tim Urban	9331	10.2%
Aaron Kelly	8945	9.8%
Didi Benami	8700	9.5%
Mike Lynche	5982	6.5%
Katie Stevens	5597	6.1%
Andrew Garcia	2274	2.5%
Paige Miles	1213	1.3%

The results are quite difference here with Crystal still leading, but with her percentage of total votes substantially lower. Paige is still the unlucky eliminated contestant, but with an even lower percentage of total votes. In both these results Andrew was in the bottom three, but that was not the case on the show, although Dial Idol did predict Katie being the third from the bottom. Tim is even higher here in fifth place, which rather blows my mind. Could there possibly be that many VoteForTheWorst followers, or does he actually have that many fans? Yikes! Who would actually pay money to see him perform on stage or buy one of his recordings? Definitely not me.

My first post -- helping out the guitarists!

2010-03-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

My first post here will be about a topic quite appropriate this season when there are a number of guitarists among the contestants, and there is also a lack of much stage presence. I noticed that Crystal did once walk up to the microphone carrying her guitar, so it must have had a wireless transmitter on it, but she still had to walk up to a stand and sing into a wireless mike placed in the mike stand. Why can the producers not allow contestants to wear a wireless headset microphone when they perform? If they want the guitar toting performers to interact with their audience more that is the obvious thing to do. The handheld microphones are obviously wireless and allow people to walk, dance and strut about stage, and allowing headset microphones would help out a lot of performances as well. I am thinking the vast majority of the contestants actually play guitar so it could benefit everybody.

My very own American Idol Blog!

2010-03-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

Since everybody else blogs about American Idol, I thought I would do so too, just since I do not have much of a life and it is the top rated TV show on the air. This season there are only a couple interesting contestants, and plenty of mediocre ones. I even find a couple of the "Top 10" downright unwatchable. So instead of talking so much about them, I have some other topics to blab about, just to see if anyone will actually read this thing.