Here’s another way to predict the American Idol winner: see which contestant people a) search and b) post Facebook links/blog comment/Twitter tweet about.
The link mentions a book by Bill Tancer called “Click”, which basically studies search traffic to determine trends in various industries. This is yet another really interesting application of Internet data to help understand what’s going on in the world. In this case, it’s a frivolous thing like predicting the winner of a so-called karaoke contest (says Jimmy Kimmel).
Basically, they’ve anointed Adam Lambert the runaway winner. I can’t really argue.
http://www.pr.com/press-release/144854
Here are a couple exit interviews given by Scott Macintyre:
Scott said a couple things in these interviews that bothered me:
“You never know what the judges are going to say, but I think if people watch the performance back, especially in the context of everything else that went on that night, it was a good, solid performance.”
I did re-watch the performance, and my opinion stands: it wasn’t very good. In fact, it was awful.
I watch American Idol to see undiscovered talent blossom into superstars. I DON’T watch American Idol to listen to amateur-sounding songs. Listening to Scott’s performance, it sounded off-key, formulaic, and disjointed. Using another word, amateur.
I hated the guitar playing, because a) the arrangement was so basic that a 15-year old could have played it and b) his voice did not match the emotional tone of the song. If you’re going to “shock” people with a guitar power ballad, then you better sing it with more power, too. Unfortunately, he basically sang it like Billy Joel would behind a piano with no accompanyment (i.e., like last week), and it ended up sounding really weird.
In the end, this is the main reason why Scott is not the American Idol. It’s not because he can’t sing (though he is off-key a lot). It’s not because he’s not talented. It’s not because he’s visually impaired.
It’s because he didn’t connect emotionally with the songs.
I believe he’s so involved in the musical technicalities of the song that he can’t quite convey the feelings of the song. If it’s a harder-edged song, sing it that way. He seemed to sing everything the same way, all within the same adult contemporary realm. He’s only 23… perhaps he hasn’t discovered that part of his musical repertoire yet. And again, this has NOTHING to do with his visual challenges. I remember watching the similarly visually-impaired Raul Midon in concert a couple years ago, and feeling every ounce of emotion in every one of his songs.
I think Scott is a talented musician who happens to be visually impaired, and who happens to be relatively young. To become a superstar, perhaps all he needs is a little more time.
After every elimination, predict the order that the contestants will get eliminated. After submitting your predictions, you’ll see the average of all predictions across all users. Just click and drag each contestant’s name. #1 represents the Winner, and #7 represents who you think will be eliminated next week.
I like this blog a lot: Scouting The Idols. Like most people, this blogger rates each performance, but does so by breaking it down into different components: vocal ability, consistency, versatility, star power, and song choice.
It’s a very logical way of rating the contestants. I also like his Power Rankings that he posts every week. Please go check this person out, it’s good stuff.
http://scoutingtheidols.blogspot.com/
In a previous post, I noted that the week’s eliminated contestant has never performed in any of the last 4 slots. (The rule was broken this week, when Scott got eliminated going 5th out of 8).
What if we looked at the bottom 3 contestants each week? With the exception of this week and Top 13 week (bottom 3 was never mentioned), you’ll see that the first performer of the night has ALWAYS been sent to the bottom 3!
Here are the bottom 3 each week, with performance order in parenthesis:
Top 11 Week
Top 10 Week
Top 9 Week
Top 8 Week
Clearly, the moniker “Dead Man’s Spot” is totally appropriate for describing the first performer of the night.
As the number of contestants dwindle, will performance order still matter? Based on this week’s results, perhaps performing in the MIDDLE, and NOT the beginning, will hurt the contestants the most. What do you think?
In the week that they were eliminated, the contestant has performed either at the beginning or toward the middle of the show. This definitely suggests that performance order matters in how people vote.
You only have 2 hours to vote right after the show, and it’s so much easier to remember the those who performed last than those who performed first.
Also note that the bottom 3 this week was Anoop (performed 1st), Megan (2nd), and Allison (4th).
Here were the performance orders of eliminated contestants during the week they got booted.