Since I am an obssessed American Idol numbers geek, I was reading on one blog site (
MJ's Big Blog, of course) where some folks were discussing how Idol always goes in a cycle of three seasons, so I thought I would create a new graph. This one takes the
list of total album sales by Idol contestants but then groups together by season so we can see how album sales have ebbed and flowed over the years. I took the top album selling Idols #1 to #50 (Carrie Underwood to Paris Bennett) and ended up with the graph above where the blue bar shows the top selling contestant for each season (not necessarily the winner), the orange the second best selling and so on. Sure enough, Seasons 1, 4, 7 and 10 create nice sales spikes and Seasons 3, 6 and 9 have so far created sales valleys. Of course super huge selling artists like Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson make the Seasons 6 and later harder to see, so I made a separate graph for Seasons 6 to 11 that has a maximum of 3 million in total sales:
Season 6 was a sales disappointment at the time since Jordin Sparks "only" sold about 1.0 million of her debut album with Blake Lewis selling about 350K of his debut. Season 7 was much better since not only did David Cook's debut sell over 1.3 million copies, but David Archuleta's debut sold about 800K as well with total sales from all the artists from that season surpassing 2.5 million. Season 8 followed up with a disappointing 350K in sales for winner Kris Allen, but Adam Lambert's nearly million in total sales helped push that season's sales to about the same level as Season 6 (slightly over 1.5 million.) Then there was Season 9 which Idol tries to forget existed, where for a second season in a row the runner up outsold the winner, but this time Crystal Bowersox's 200K in sales was not enough to keep that season from being a major disappointment. Total combined sales for Season 9 Idols has yet to reach 500K. Season 10 marked a significant improvement where Scotty McCreery has proven to be a huge album selling success (now the 7th highest selling Idol ever, and the highest since Season 6.) Along with Lauren Alaina's 300K in sales and additional sales from James Durbin, Haley Reinhart and Casey Abrams, Season 10 has better total sales than Seasons 6, 8 and 9. So far Season 11 only has Phillip Phillips and Colton Dixon, but like Scotty, Phillip's debut sales total has already eclipsed all of Season 9 by a large margin. Jessica Sanchez will release her album in a few weeks and that can only help to boost the Season 11 tally. I am not sure if any other Season 11 Idol will release an album soon, but it will be unlikely that they will match the success of Season 10.
So the big question is what will become of the Season 12 Idols when their albums are released. Will they end up like Season 9 or more like Season 10 (or something in between like Season 11.) First we will have to see who the winner and runner up will be and what their albums will be like.
