New Year, Last Post

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!

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.