American Idol --- Is it still an option for stardom?

By: Joshua Alston (Vibe Magazine; pg. 31-34; May 2008)

American Idol creates music industry royalty. But with the finale of Idol's seventh (7th) season looming (David Cook won), labels are dropping past winners and the model is floundering. Are the days of pop reality show dominance dead?

On November 28, 2007, the word "failure" had its parameters reset. That Sunday, the previous week's record sales were released, revealing that Jive's self-titled debut album from 18-year-old Jordin Sparks, the sixth winner of American Idol, debuted at the bottom of Billboard's top 10 albums. Not only did Sparks' debut appear in the lowest first-week chart position of any idol winner, moving 119,000 copies, the album's total sales were the lowest in the show's history. In today's imploding music marketplace, a previously unknown artist selling 119,000 copies of their debut would be deemed a massive success. Though Sparks was previously unknown, she was also---at least in theory---the country's hottest new pop star.

When reality television began to boom, producers quickly realized that viewers were invested in how the contestants got there, the drama in the joys, creative meltdowns, and quiet backstabbing inherent to glamour professions. Idol, like Making The Band and others, was borne of this idea and the notion that cross-platform products---like a pop star and a television show---could sell each other. But after peaking with megastars like Fantasia and Kelly Clarkson, the genre appears to be on the decline. In both television ratings and record sales, the relationship between show and artist has become increasingly lopsided.

Says Sharon Dastur (Program Director at N.Y.'s Z100 [WHTZ-FM]), "In the finals, American Idol winners always have that championship song, and back in the day, people asked, 'When are you going to play it?' But over the last four years, that hasn't been the case."