Word: idol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
Here's where the American Idol business gets dicey. Davis would like RCA to curate the careers of artists; Fuller wants his idols to have long recording careers too, as long as they don't forsake the Idol audience. (Fuller was incensed that Davis spent eight months refining Clarkson's debut for radio rather than getting it to market as soon as possible.) "You have to serve many masters when you have that many people with a vested interest in you," says Ennis. "You can't skew yourself one way and not speak to the people who spent all that...
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...
Because it pays the full retail price and doesn't download music, the Idol audience is a record company's dream; because it doesn't have indulgent, wide-ranging tastes, it can be an artist's nightmare. Studdard got so frustrated trying to tailor his upcoming album, Soulful, to the Idol audience that in early July he called his various managers and label representatives and, according to several sources, threatened to quit. "This is my car," Studdard said, according to an executive who was on the call. "If you guys want to navigate, that's great. If you guys want...
...great creative executives do. They don't make art, but they facilitate it, fight for it and nurture it, often in the face of public opposition or apathy. Record companies have always made plenty of music aimed at the heart of the market, but the frustration of the anti-Idol RCA executives--and many others throughout the industry--comes down to timing. At the exact moment that American Idol has created a surge of people who buy their music with their mints as an impulse item, file sharing has siphoned off nearly all the adventurous record buyers. That leaves...