Now that Lee DeWyze's "Live It Up" has been off the BillBoard 200 for about a month (even though Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter" continues to rack up consistent sales, breaking 160,000 in total sales this week), it is time to start looking at American Idol Season 10. Now that we are down to the Top 24 and can start voting, real numbers for the contestants will start emerging. I find it interesting how they are changing the voting this year. It seems that after this week there will be a top 12 which consists of the top 5 guys with the most votes, the top 5 ladies with the top votes and two "judges picks". I am not sure if it will definitely be one guy and one gal or if it could be two of the same gender. If we follow the DialIdol scores from last night, the top 5 vote getters will be Scotty McCreery, Jacob Lusk, James Durbin, Stefano Langone and Paul McDonald. I personally would go for 4 of the 5 there, and would replace Stefano with Casey Abrams, but that is the first sign this season that votes are about popularity and not talent. Using DialIdol rankings both Jordan Dorsey and Tim Halperin received more votes than Casey which seems out of sync with the performances last night.
I am also curious how the 50 online votes each Facebook user can have will play. I know I tried voting online last night, and I could not actually vote until well after an hour after the telecast ended here in St. Louis. I tried logging in using both my Facebook account and my americanidol.com account and neither would let me vote for that time period. Now there are three ways for people to vote, via phone calls, AT&T text messaging (Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular users are still all out of luck) and online. I would think the fastest and easiest way would still be text messaging, especially since the Web based voting requires you to enter in a 6 character "captcha" type code every time to keep people from running automated voting scripts. Anyone with AT&T text messaging can easily vote more than 50 times in just a few minutes compared to the 10 seconds or so it took me to vote each time with my browser. I wonder if they limit the number of text messages or phone calls from the same number. They definitely should if they are limiting online voting. I am not sure if the 10 or so online votes I sent in for Casey Abrams can really help him out very much. DialIdol is definitely a good tool to use, though, to see how to best utilize your votes to try to help out talented folks who are not ranking so well. With half the contestants disappearing by the end of the week, those votes could be important. Will one web vote count the same as one text message vote? In my voting algorithm I would count the online votes more since they are limited and take more time, but I have no idea how American Idol does it. Plus giving preference to people using AT&T's unlimited text messaging plans is just plain wrong. I do not see why everybody from any carrier cannot vote using text messaging if they allow AT&T subscribers to do it.