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.