I thoroughly enjoyed last night's American Idol episode with the ladies definitely showing some good versatility and variety performing Whitney Houston songs. I have been listening to quite a bit of Whitney lately myself (reliving my youthful years fondly). Some of the gals did an excellent job with their performances, and yes, it was pretty obvious which ones did well... the short ones! Whitney was actually not so short but for some reason the three tiniest females delivered the best performances of the night (Jessica, Hollie, Skylar.) But what is really more important to figure out is not who is staying, but who might be leaving tonight. For that I will look at the data. If you look at
last week's DialIdol scores, they were actually not very useful:
There were just too many contestants with hardly anybody using DialIdol for them anymore so the scores cannot predict very much any more. You have to look at the
raw numbers instead to see who has the fans willing to tie up their land phone line for hours dialing for their favorites:
If you look at last weeks raw numbers, the Top 5 ladies were among the top 6 in raw votes and the top 5 guys were also among the top 6 vote getters for them. The only two that snuck in the top 6 were Jen Hirsh and Reed Grimm, both of which interestingly were picked as possible wild cards last week (although neither made it through.) With that knowledge, let us look at the raw numbers for this week:
The first thing I noticed is that last week there were more votes for the guys (29K vs 24K) , but this week there were more votes for the ladies (19K vs 15k). I also noticed there were some big week to week changes for some contestants both in a good way and in a bad way. The best news was for Erika who only received 2K in votes last week and received over 5K this week. Unfortunately there was a lot more bad news than good news, with several other contestants seeing big drops in raw votes, including Shannon (2.9K to 1.5K), Elise (2.4K to 1.7K), Jermaine (3.5K to 1.3K) and Heejun (3.2K to 1.4K). This week Heejun, Jermaine and DeAndre are all pretty close, so along with Jeremy (who had hardly any DialIdol votes both weeks) one of those 4 is likely to be one of the guys in trouble tonight, and it looks like it is between Elise and Shannon for the girls. If we look at the preliminary
WhatNotToSing scores as of now they confirm those predictions:
So will it be Elise or Shannon or Jermaine or Jeremy tonight? I am thinking Heejun and DeAndre may be safe with their fan bases, but you never know for sure, since Heejun's DialIdol votes dropped in half and DeAndre's were pretty low both weeks (1.2K and 1.5K). We will have to wait until tonight to see for sure.
