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

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

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

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"

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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"?

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

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

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"

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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?

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

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

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.