American Idol Season 10: The Morning After the Final Performances

With the final DialIdol.com numbers in, it looks like Lauren did close the gap a little bit in voting, but Scotty McCreery will most probably "win" American Idol tonight. However, I went and listened to both studio songs on YouTube, and I think Lauren's song sounds a lot better for radio, but may still not be a huge hit. We will all have to wait and see. For fun I have graphed the average busy percentage numbers for the top two shows from DialIdol.com over the past 4 years:

This year Scotty's four phone lines averaged 14.33% busy where Lauren's lines were 8.46% busy. That makes Scotty's line 69% busier than Lauren's. Last year Lee's three lines were 6.62% busy and Crystal's were 3.65% busy which means Lee's lines were 82% busier than Crystal's. It is notable that even with four lines this year, the busy percentages were much higher for the Scotty/Lauren finale than for the Lee/Crystal finale, but both of those seasons pale to the extremely high call volumes back in Seasons 7 and 8. In Season 7, Kris Allen averaged 48.44% busy signals compared to 42.92% for Adam Lambert, making that the closest competition in the past 4 years. Kris's phone lines were only 13% busier than Adam's. In Season 6, all three of David Cook's phone lines were substantially more busy (43.8%) than for David Archuleta's lines (30.6%), with Cook's phone lines being 43% busier. Since the busy percentages accurately predicted the winner in Seasons 7 through 9 easily, I cannot see them being wrong this season. Scotty should easily win tonight in terms of votes.

But the sad thing is this could be a large problem for his musical career when you compare his studio single, "I Love You This Big", to Lauren Alaina's "Like My Mother Does". First off, I will say that Scotty sounds better on the studio track than he did live, but it is still not that interesting of a song. Lauren's song sounds much better and more like a radio hit. However, I could see both of their singles doing better than Lee or Crystal's singles did last year, but that is not saying very much. I think both tracks would have worked better as "album filler" than being their debut singles. You would have hoped that Jimmy and Nigel worked a bit harder getting good singles for both of them since they could tell they would likely be the top two. I think the success of both of their debut albums is more in the hands of the producers and songwriters than in either of the teens themselves.