American Idols with RIAA Certified Albums

Now that Phillip Phillips' "World From the Side of the Moon" is certified Gold and Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" has broken the million mark, I started to look for something else to graph! There are now 18 American Idol alumni with RIAA certified platinum and/or gold albums, so I had to generate a lovely pictorial of the group. I grabbed the data from the American Idol Alumni sales Wikipedia page and noticed some interesting groupings. The first weird fact was that Kelly Clarkson's "All I Ever Wanted" sold over 900,000 copies but was never certified by the RIAA, not even gold. She should have 5 platinum albums but the RIAA only thinks she has 4. I searched their database and "All I Ever Wanted" does not show up at all.

Once you skip that weird fact there are a few "groups" of Idols here:

Multi-certified:

1) Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood: 4+ platinum albums
2) Daughtry and Clay Aiken: two platinum albums and one gold album
3) Fantasia Barrino, Ruben Studdard and Scotty McCreery: one platinum, and one gold album
4) Jennifer Hudson alone: two gold albums

Single certified albums:

5) David Cook, Jordin Sparks, Taylor Hicks: one platinum album
6) Kellie Pickler, David Archuleta, Adam Lambert, Josh Gracin, Bo Bice, Elliot Yamin, Phillip Phillips: one gold album

Kelly and Carrie are obviously the superstars of the bunch. The #2 group is interesting in that neither of them was a winner. However, the #3 group of 1 platinum + 1 gold are all three winners of their seasons (2, 3 and 10). At #4 Jennifer Hudson is the only Idol with two gold albums, which makes her different. Then #5 there are the three winners (from seasons 5, 6 and 7) with only a single platinum album. And finally there is #6, the group with just a single gold album. None of #6 were winners except for Phillip and he still has time to take "World From the Side of the World" to platinum. So if we remove Phillip from the list you can categorize the 6 groups:

1) winners (season 1 & 4)
2) non winners (seasons 2 & 5)
3) winners (seasons 2, 3 & 10)
4) non winner (season 3)
5) winners (seasons 5, 6  & 7)
6) non winners (seasons 2, 4, 5, 7 & 8)

It is interesting how they alternate between winners and non-winners with each grouping. That once again proves that winning does not guarantee long term success, but it sure did not hurt Kelly and Carrie either (or Fantasia or Ruben or Scotty!)