Word: aikens
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...artist-and-repertoire) man, which means he loves matching singers to songs. It is Davis' job to gather material from professional songwriters for the Idol albums, oversee their production and put his stamp of good taste on every finished product. Shortly after the Idol finale, Davis invited Aiken to his home to discuss Aiken's debut. "I told him," says Davis, "that he is a marvelous talent and that This Is the Night is a very strong song, but it is a souvenir of a television show, and we have to get beyond that. It is my feeling that when...
Before appearing on American Idol, Aiken was a special-education teacher in Raleigh, N.C. He is a devout Baptist who does not smoke or drink, though he claims to have a temper that emerges when he sees "people with disabilities treated like they're 4 years old." In his piety, Aiken can make Billy Graham seem like a rogue. He listened to Davis' advice about edge and then respectfully asked that he not be required to sing any songs about sex. "Clive tried to tell me that saying certain words in a songor as he says, 'putting some balls into...
Davis counters that Aiken is no longer selling to a TV audience. "You can't worry about who bought the last single," says Davis from his seat in an office studded with platinum-record plaques. "You can't be paralyzed by what the public expects of you. We're now competing against Justin and Christina and Avril and Pink, and if you allow the television audience to program your music, you will not be on radio and you won't make MTV. And then where are you? We have to stay ahead of the curve...
...Aiken had been forewarned by Clarkson and Guarini that if he was happy with 50% of his completed album, he'd be "doing real good." The problem, they told him, was that there were too many people wrestling for control of their music. "Simon Fuller did not create American Idol to be in the television business," says Tom Ennis of Fuller's production company, 19 Entertainment. "He created American Idol as a new way to find talent to manage and nurture." 19 is the idols' official record label--RCA is the American distributor--and Fuller, who managed Annie Lennox before...
Ennis and 19 have market research on their side. As Davis suggests, avid music fans expect their stars to evolve. But the Idol audience, which has an unprecedented ownership stake in Aiken's career, is not made up of avid music fans. A disproportionate number of copies of This Is the Night were sold at Wal-Mart and Target stores, and a large number of those discs were picked up in the check-out lane, where Sanders positioned Idol merchandise to catch the eye of people who wouldn't think of stopping in the music section. "Our consumer...