American Idol Top 4 - Morning After Numbers Review

Now that we are down to four very strong vocalists left in Season 12 of American Idol, I was curious if the voting on DialIdol would become more complacent. In reality not only did the total number of votes increase somewhat (from  under 19K to almost 20K this week), but the number of busy signals jumped up by over 50% (from 192 to 320) :

And after Angie Miller had repeatedly been the contestant earlier on with the most busy signals, that trend has now changed to be Kree Harrison two weeks in a row. I am curious how accurate of a measure of popularity that is now, however, after Kree had the highest number last week but was still in the Bottom 2. If we compare this week's raw vote numbers to last week's, the contestant who may have the most to worry about may be Candice Glover. Last week Candice received about 3.8K total votes and had the third highest number of votes after Angie and Kree Harrison. This week Candice is dead last with less than 2K votes and 3+5=8 whopping busy signals. In comparison Amber Holcomb received about 3.4K total votes with 9+4=13 busy signals. It is pretty obvious that Angie and Kree are the two contestants who have the most DialIdol using fans, but after Kree's Bottom 2 result last week (with strong DialIdol numbers) they may be getting less and less reliable as an indicator.

My other favorite numbers to check are the WhatNotToSing.com web ratings of the performances. If we compare the contestants using the preliminary ratings from the performances from last night, it would seem that Amber is the contestant most in jeopardy despite of (or perhaps because of) the very generous praise heaped on her by all the judges. I personally like Amber and think she has a lot of potential, but I still do not understand why the judges give her so many over the top, undeserved compliments when they should realize it does not really help her. If we average the two solo performances for each contestant we can rank them:

1) Angie Miller : 81 + 59 = 140 => 70 average
2) Candice Clover : 62 + 54 = 116 => 58 average
3) Kree Harrison : 56 + 45 = 101 => 55.5 average
4) Amber Holcomb: 54 + 28 = 82 => 41 average

If we look over the WhatNotToSing average ratings for their solos for the past three weeks we see some striking trends:

Despite the "growth" the judges like to talk about for Amber, the contestant who is really enjoying the "growth" trend right now is Angie, not Amber. All the other ladies are now in a declining trend. Before Lazaro's departure they all sounded so good in comparison, but now that he is gone, (as well as Janelle who had a nice spark of personality despite her vocals not being as strong) the remaining ladies are really not all that exciting, and Angie may be the most "entertaining" one left.

The only contestant I think is totally safe from the Bottom 2 tonight is Angie, but I have a sneaky feeling (like many people on the Internet) that nobody on the show has to worry about being eliminated tonight.