If you were with us during Season Seven, you may recall that we took a hard look at Idol song ages. At the time, I called the numbers “preliminary”. Since then, I’ve wanted to take a closer, more detailed look at the numbers. Unfortunately, that little thing called real life decided to interfere and delayed it, but eventually I found the time.

For people who didn’t read the early version, here’s the short summary. Song age turns out to be a pretty influential factor in the success of Idol contesants – both on and off the show. The younger an Idol contestant’s song, the more likely he/she is to succeed – either on the show, after, or both. This shows itself in a few ways, but we’ll get to the exact details later.

The Rules

Of course, before we get to analyzing song ages, we need to discuss the ground rules. Analyzing each and every contestant in the seven seasons of American Idol would result in a classic case of information overload. Besides, for semi-finalists there isn’t really enough data to draw any sort of useful conclusions. So, we’ll limit ourselves to everyone who’s made it to the finals stage – top 10 for Season One, top 12 for the other seasons. That’s 82 contestants in all.

The other thorny question is, just how do you measure song age? Cover songs cause the most problems in this area; do you measure from the original or the cover version? We’ve decided to stick with what’s called the primary song age – i.e., when the song was first made famous in the US. Occasionally, this results in some oddities. For example, David Hernandez sang It’s All Coming Back to Me Now when the theme was the 80s. However, because the song was made famous by Celine Dion in 1996, we date it to that year – not 1989, when it was first released in Britain.

But the song age is just the raw data – to get any meaning, you need to use some statistics. Everyone knows what the average is, but sometimes it’s not too useful. One song with a disproportionately high or low age can distort the data. So, we use something else called the median. The short version is: for our purposes, the median will be an age where half of the songs being considered are younger, while the other half is older. Check the link to Wikipedia for the details.

Let’s give credit where the credit is due as well. Our first effort – and this one – would not have been possible without the data provided by Nick over at What Not to Sing. They have our undying thanks, and any serious Idol viewer should check them out.

And now, let’s take a look at each season of Idol, and see what the numbers tell us. Continue reading ‘How Old Is This Song? 2.0’ »

For the past week or so, the Idolsphere has been abuzz with talk of the changes for the upcoming season. Now, I haven’t talked much about them because they were still at the rumor stage, and I wanted something more solid before talking about it.

Now, though, Ken Warwick has talked about these changes, so it’s safe to put our two cents out there. For those who want to catch up, we suggest reading these posts from MJ here, here, and here; USA Today also has a good article here. Here are the “highlights” of these changes, and what we think of them:

1. The semi-finals go back, in essence, to the Season 1-3 format.
   Now, we have to admit to a little bias. We didn’t watch Idol from the beginning, but from the middle of Season Three – largely because it wasn’t aired locally. While we have issues aplenty with Idol, the format isn’t one of them. The Top 24 system was a good one; the only change I would have made was to remove the unneeded gender split.The old system strikes me as a fundamentally unfair way of organizing things. It leaves to much to chance and producer manipulation. We’re liable to end up with another Group of Death like Season Two, where the entire top three came out of one group. In addition, this one-shot approach to qualifying leaves things too much to chance for our taste. Consider: David Cook’s opening song was a fair-to-middling rendition of Happy Together that wouldn’t have been good enough to put him through, either by voting or a wildcard in the new format. More songs before the finals means that the ultimate makeup is less determined by luck and more by overall talent. Who in the world thought that this was a good idea? Curious minds would like to know.
2. The wild card comes back.
   Oh boy. I’ve spent many, many years decrying the increasingly blatant – and one-sided – producer manipulation. And what do TPTB give us viewers at home? Why, tossing us back to the bad old days when a large part of the field was chosen largely on the whim of the judges. Considering that Randy spent most of the last season deaf to any criticism of the Boy Wonder David Archuleta and Paula is well-meaning but useless, is this such a good idea? The only thing this will do is ensure that Idol pundits like me will have more ammunition whenever we complain of bias.One more thing. Has anyone figured out how this will work with four judges and only three wildcard slots?
3. More Hollywood week, less auditions.
   Let’s face it – after the whole Paula Goodspeed mess the status quo wasn’t acceptable. The bad auditions are funny, up to a point – but the past few seasons had gone too far. Let’s face it: it’s one thing to feature people who can’t sing; it’s another to feature people who are clearly not right in the head. This change can only be a good thing. If they went ahead and threw out the ridiculous elevator episode, it would be even better.

Overall, the changes strike us as a little… less than inspired. The “changes” so far have a retro feel to them – and not in a good way. They’re going back to the bad – no, awful – way they were before. This is madness. This is like trying to cure a headache with an amputation. They do nothing to address the basic problems from the last season: biased judges, silly themes, and geriatric songs.

The most worrying part about this is it betrays the fact that the Idol PTB don’t really understand what they’re dealing with here. American Idol may have started as a cheesy, ridiculous show – but it’s gone beyond that now. With household names like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and Chris Daughtry emerging from the show, viewers are becoming more demanding. The smart thing to do would be to concentrate on the core of the show: the music. Make sure there won’t be clearance issues, pick good quality themes, pick legitimately talented contestants, etc. This should be simple.

However, that’s not what they did. Instead, Idol has been treated like any other reality show that can be saved by “twists”. That, in itself, is a stupid idea, but that’s for another day. What this whole episode reveals is that the producers are clueless and fall back on their bag of tired tricks.

If this was the sort of thing that was supposed to reassure us that Idol is back on the right track… it isn’t. Once again, if the show is to be as good as it can be, it will have to be entirely on the backs of the contestants, and in spite of the best-laid plans of the PTB.