I was curious what the final DialIdol numbers would be for that group of ten guys that are supposedly the best 10 male voices American Idol could find in 2012. It seems like not that many people who still own dial up modems decided it was worth it to use their computers and phone lines to vote for any guy not named Lazaro Arbos. Incredibly, Lazaro ended up receiving more total votes than any of the ladies from Wednesday night, including the top 3: Angela Miller with about 3,300 calls attempted, or Janelle Arthur and Kree Harrison, both with about 3,000 attempted calls. Lazaro topped them all with 3,451 attempted calls, broken out as 3,395 votes and 56 busy signals. Interestingly, even though Angela received less total attempts, she had a lot more busy signals than Lazaro, 255 out of her 3,333 attempted calls which means her lines must have been busier with real people calling.
Nonetheless, in terms of total votes cast this year, this is the first time since DialIdol started tracking that figure in Season 6 that the ladies received substantially more attempted votes than the guys, 15,000 to 12,000, and what do you know, that was the last year that a lady (Jordin Sparks) won the competition too! However, if you look at a comparison of how the total number of votes cast on the first voting week using DialIdol has changed since season 6 it is pretty striking:
DialIdol saw its peak usage in Season 7 (David Cook's year) when over 110,000 votes were cast for guys and 107,000 were cast for gals on the first week of voting. Since then the overall usage has dropped dramatically. The closest year between guys and gals for first week voting was just two years ago in Season 10 (Scotty and Lauren's year) when there were about 40K votes for each gender that week. Last year was definitely a guys' year with 29K votes cast for guys and only 24K cast for gals. Finally this year the ladies received 25% more votes than the ladies, but the combined 27K votes is still less than the 29K just the guys received last year.
If we just consider this year again, it is pretty apparent that Lazaro should be back representing the guys which is already a pretty scary fact. There were only 227 busy signals hit for the guys last night (less than Angela Miller had by herself), and surprisingly the top busy signal recipient was Charlie Askew with 69, followed by Lazaro with 56 and then Devin Velez with 48. All of these numbers are pretty piddly however, and demonstrate how less informative these numbers are. But I will keep compiling and analyzing them since that is what I do for fun, and for some reason people keep reading my postings! Hurray!