Browsing through one of the thousands of articles about the Idol finale last night, I came across one that was entitled Seven Reasons Why Lee DeWyze Won American Idol. Like many of the articles and comments I had come across on the web, the number one reason Lee won was the tween power texting vote.
According to the writer, when Lee sang Hallelujah, those younger viewers identified it as the song from the television series My So Called Life, and Everybody Hurts from The OC and implied it’s familiarity led them to power text.
This was dissonance to me. A wrong chord. With the exception of repeats, My So Called Life has not been on the air since 1995 I did not remember Hallelujah being played in the OC, in fact I think Imogene Heap is more representative of The OC than Leonard Cohen. It had been so long – wait, it had been so long since the OC was on. It ran from 2003-2007. Now tweens are 10-12, roughly speaking-the years between childhood and adulthood is how it’s repeatedly defined. The OC aired when today’s tweens were 3-8.
Somehow, I don’t think many of them were watching The OC in between episodes of Sponge Bob.
That led me to wonder, who exactly was voting for Lee? Was it really 10-12 year olds power texting as so many people kept commenting? Well, how would you find this out? First you need to look at who watches Idol in general. According to the demographics, 89% of the viewing audience is Caucasian. 61% Female. 2% of the audience is under 12. 2%. Well that kinda blows that whole tween theory right out of the water. The largest Idol demo is a white woman who is college educated and between the ages of 35-49. The next largest is the 19-34 group. 60% have no children yet.
Not only are tweens not watching idols, but only 11% of its viewers are under 18. This is backed up if you look at social media.
Idol Stats measures the mentions of the contestants on twitter and other social media with a constant stream of data. They do this 24/7 throughout the week. This is not a measurement of bloggers, or editorial article writers, but of the fans. Lee carried two thirds of the trend and 66% of those mentions were positive. They have a small chat window that streams the data they are mining on the page so you can see exactly where they are taking their numbers from.
What Not to Sing includes the bloggers and music writers, who were overwhelmingly pro Crystal, and the commenters on those sites, but according to them, the sample they get is from the writers and commentators on an article and they only use a tiny, tiny fraction for sampling. From their FAQ:
“How many different opinions go into each rating?
Never fewer than 200, and usually 300 or more.”
When an Idol is a trending topic on Twitter, they can get at least 300 comments in 2 minutes– all from different users. There is also a psychological ramification when reading comments on a page that leans one way or another-most people comment when they agree with the commentator. This has been termed “The Drudge Effect” because when the website Drudgereport.com posts a link to a story, it will almost immediately attract a group mentality in the comments section-everyone basically saying the same thing agreeing with the tone of the piece written. This is the major problem with What Not to Sing. Although they claim not to pull comments from “fan sites”, Writers like EW’s Micheal Slezak ends up being like a fan site because he gives very strong opinions on his favorites, so once you know how Slezak feels about a contestant, you will go back there looking for validation of what you are feeling.
Twitter has an amazing immediacy to it so that people will post what they are feeling more than what someone else is feeling. An example of this is readily seen on a Saturday night. Saturday Night Live is almost always a trending topic within a few minutes of going live. If you read the tweets they can be either very positive or very negative, and they are immediate reflections on what people are feeling in the moment. For instance, when Tina Fey was hosting SNL she did a Faux commercial about having a man shaped brownie as a companion. Within 30 seconds of the ad airing, it was a trending topic and overwhelmingly people thought it was funny. While a sheep mentality can take over when a topic trends for a long time, with people basically just retweeting to keep the topic up, (see Justin Bieber), it is very clear in the first hour of a topic to get a good sense of what hundreds of thousands of people are thinking.
The interesting thing about Idol Stats is their graph, you can see a very steady incline for Lee Dewyze with an enormous peak right before and after the final 3 show. Yes, I said before. The week of May 9th shows a huge upward momentum for Lee. He started this trek up after Sinatra and it grew steadily over movie week and peaked with the final 3.
Compare this to Crystal who had a bumpier ride– a few weeks were higher than average and then she would fall but overall, she was not significantly higher than Lee throughout the season which backs up the number Ryan Seacrest gave in the finale-of a 2% difference in the votes going into the last vote and her highest peak was a month before final 3 night and that peak was a fraction of Lee’s highest point.
Taking all this information into consideration, we can look at those Youtube, Facebook and Twitter profiles of the people who are pro Lee compared to the people who are Pro Crystal.
Lets grab some Youtube profiles. I am not going to mention names, but pulling a random’s profile up and looking at their favorite videos can reveal a little bit about that person.
Crystal:
Random positive commenter 1 – Tom Petty, Alex Chilton, Styx, Radiohead, Incubus.
2 Angry Video Game Nerd, Aquateen hunger force, Bert and Ernie Gangsta Rap, Star Wars Kid.
3: Velvet Revolver, Vicky Beeching, Seether, Crystal Bowersox
4: Michael Savage, Michael Savage, Michael Savage, Horseland.
5: Rascal Flats, Lou Bega, Didi, Bloopers for laughing.
Lee:
1: David Cook, Michael Johns, Wisconsin, Lee Dewyze, montage for her son’s birthday.
2. Green Day, Lee Dewyze x 3 dif videos
3. David Archuluta, Daughtry, David Cook, Taylor Swift
4. Adam Lambert, Muse, Daughtry, Kris Allen, Megan Fox is a hot Bitch.
5. Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Rhianna, Lee Dewyze
What that says to me is that Crystal fans have a much broader choice in favorites, they like different kinds of music in general, but in looking at about 50 of her very, pro Crystal commentators across 5 videos, they are not Idol Nerds. It was rare to find any idols in their lists and more often than not, Crystal herself was not in their list.
Lee, on the other hand had definite Idol fans. People that know the show, know you have to vote a lot to make a difference. It was hard NOT to find someone who was obviously voting for lee and who did not have at least one idol favorite in their package.
Moving on to Facebook and Twitter, I looked at the commentators who left positive comments within the last 24 hours. You can look at them on the fan page yourself on Facebook and will probably come up with the same consensus. I looked at about 200 fans per idol.
Crystal Fans: Mostly women although there were postings by men but I did not see many men under 40. Lots and lots of retired and older people, and by older I mean graduated from college in the 70s. Almost all of her fans are American or Canadian. Musical interests are again very diverse American musicians who are not typically played on the radio except on classic rock stations.
Lee Fans: Hugely diverse group, the first thing that stood out was how many fans he had who were not American. This is really evident on Twitter as well, in fact many of the tweets are in other languages and I had to get a translator site to make sure they were positive. The guys who commented were almost all young. The women were right in the Idol demos– almost all of them were over 18 and under 45 IE. lots of young mothers and college students. Their musical interest include bands that are currently heard on the radio (Dave Matthews, Train, 3 doors down, Daughtry) Many of them include Idol as their favorite show and have Idols in their list of musicians they liked.
Now anyone can go and find 10 people in any of these lists that do not fall into these profiles, but there is an big difference in the fan base and you can easily see multiple examples of the above profiles.
Here is what becomes clear on average when looking at everything combined:
Lee has more fans. While Crystal has more Youtube hits by a large margin, the people who have chosen an idol and put it in their profile, liked one of the contestants and favorited a video were generally pro Lee.
2. Tweens are not represented in either fans base. They simply are not there.
While it may be that they are not allowed to go to Youtube, have Facebook profiles or get on Twitter, if that is the case it’s hard to believe that, looking at the demographics, they vote like mad on the show. An 11 year old who cannot get online, probably does not have unlimited texting. Her mother probably does.
3. Idol regulars chose Lee. This is pretty clear, too. If someone put American Idol as a favorite television show in their profile, they almost always were a Lee fan as well as a fan of a former idol.
4. People who comment on articles that are slanted towards a contestant, even slightly will usually comment about the slant of the article. If the article is pro Lee, lots of commentators were agreeing, if the article was pro Crystal, lots of commentators were pissed at Lee. This is not the case with Twitter or polls. Polls that are conducted on sites that favor Crystal were usually pro crystal, but generally polls that were conducted on neutral sites like Dial Idol were usually pro lee, sometimes only by 4% points or less, sometimes much larger.
5. Momentum is HUGE. It cannot be understated. If you go into the final 4 with momentum rising, you are much more likely to win and a final 4 and final 3 great performance is much more likely to propel you to a win than the final 2 performance. No matter how great someone was during the entire season, if they wait til the last moment to have their best night, its too late.
6. Tone is more important that Tune. Because you can now get studio versions of the itunes singles, sometimes while voting is still going on– and because Itunes is heavily promoted, even if you cannot sing consistently well live, if you sound good on those studio versions, you will get fans.
7. Lee’s win is not the end of American Idol. It is still the number one show, and while the ratings have dropped this year, they have not dropped nearly as much as they did between season’s 6 and 7 and season’s 7 and 8 according to Billboard Magazine.
The reason Idol numbers were down this year was because total television viewership has fallen off and because of Kate Gosselin. Almost all analysts claim that it was Kate that drew viewers who love train wreck TV to Dancing With The Stars. They ended up staying for a while after she was booted, but the DWTS Finale show was actually its lowest rated finale ever.
The fact that Idol’s demographics voted for Lee and that Lee voters were regular Idol watchers, you could actually argue that a Crystal win would have hurt Idol more. Not because she was less talented, but because the core idol viewer did not vote for her as much. If Idol is “owned” by the 18-45 white females, and they are the ones the sponsors are paying a hefty fee to reach, (Idol earns an average of $623,000 for a 30-second commercial, compared to Dancing with the stars gets just under $200,000 ) Idol will always, always cater to them. This is a business. They want to make money. If they change the formula to allow less votes– AT&T loses money and won’t want to pay the +20 million dollars as a sponsor. Idol does not want to cater to the AARP crowd. Sponsors pay the most money for that 18-49 target. If you lose that, you lose your sponsors. They are currently number one and while some changes will be coming next year, they will not mess too much with their goose that lays the golden eggs.
The biggest question that was directed at Fox at this years ad pre-sales, was not “What if you have weak contestants?” It was “What about Simon?” Simon leaving is the one thing that could kill Idol, not a poorly chosen contestant pool. Idol brings in the viewers early in the city auditions because they want to see Simon be mean as much as they want to see good singers. While almost everyone says that this year was the worst contestant pool ever, number one is still number one.
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