First Week Download Sales Looking Good for Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina

With preliminary estimates of iTunes downloads for Scotty McCreery's "I Love You This Big" and Lauren Alaina's "Like My Mother Does" being projected, it appears Season 10 of American Idol may bring back improved sales for its winners. With estimates of 180,000 for McCreery and 140,000 for Alaina they will easily top the winners of Season 9 (Lee DeWyze with 95,000 and Crystal Bowersox with 49,000) and also Season 8 (Kris Allen with 134,000 and Adam Lambert with 115,000.) It is interesting to note that Lauren's sales should surpass the sales of all the Season 8 and 9 winners and runners up, and Scotty's sales will also surpass David Archuleta's first week sales (166,000) although not quite match the success of David Cook (236,000). Both tracks are also doing fairly well with airplay, and hopefully that is a sign of good things to come for both contestants. For fun I added the first week sales numbers of their albums (in red) to the first week singles of their coronation songs for the last three season winners:

It is interesting to note that for everyone except Kris Allen and Lee DeWyze, every contestant has sold more on the first week of their albums than their first week of their first single. Hopefully Scotty and Lauren will continue with the trends of all the other winners and not like the trends of Kris or Lee. The top increase was for Adam Lambert whose first week album sales of 198,000 was over 80,000 more than his first week single sales (over 70% more.) David Cook, David Archuleta and Crystal Bowersox all saw their album sales increase 10% to 20%
over their singles sales so if the same trend happens for Scotty and Lauren they could see first week album sales of 200,000 to 220,000 and 155,000 to 180,000 respectively.

American Idol Finale Results - Was Anyone Surprised?

Some folks thought you could not always believe DialIdol.com and their predictions, but yet again they correctly predicted the winner, Scotty McCreery by a landslide. I am not sure how many people actually thought there was a chance he might lose just because Lauren Alaina sang better on Tuesday. I would think people would realize by now that would not make a difference unless Scotty did something really stupid, which he did not. Another trend I had to check was how well Scotty and Lauren's tracks and albums were selling on iTunes, with hopefully Scotty outselling Lauren, or it would be very bad news for him. Luckily right now "I Love You This Big" is #2 on the singles chart (right behind Adele's "Rolling In The Deep") and "Like My Mother Does" is #4. On the album chart Scotty's American Idol album is also #2 (this time behind Lady Gaga) and Lauren's album is #8.

So that is my Season 10 wrap-up for now, until I can find some more numbers to track...

American Idol Season 10: The Morning After the Final Performances

With the final DialIdol.com numbers in, it looks like Lauren did close the gap a little bit in voting, but Scotty McCreery will most probably "win" American Idol tonight. However, I went and listened to both studio songs on YouTube, and I think Lauren's song sounds a lot better for radio, but may still not be a huge hit. We will all have to wait and see. For fun I have graphed the average busy percentage numbers for the top two shows from DialIdol.com over the past 4 years:

This year Scotty's four phone lines averaged 14.33% busy where Lauren's lines were 8.46% busy. That makes Scotty's line 69% busier than Lauren's. Last year Lee's three lines were 6.62% busy and Crystal's were 3.65% busy which means Lee's lines were 82% busier than Crystal's. It is notable that even with four lines this year, the busy percentages were much higher for the Scotty/Lauren finale than for the Lee/Crystal finale, but both of those seasons pale to the extremely high call volumes back in Seasons 7 and 8. In Season 7, Kris Allen averaged 48.44% busy signals compared to 42.92% for Adam Lambert, making that the closest competition in the past 4 years. Kris's phone lines were only 13% busier than Adam's. In Season 6, all three of David Cook's phone lines were substantially more busy (43.8%) than for David Archuleta's lines (30.6%), with Cook's phone lines being 43% busier. Since the busy percentages accurately predicted the winner in Seasons 7 through 9 easily, I cannot see them being wrong this season. Scotty should easily win tonight in terms of votes.

But the sad thing is this could be a large problem for his musical career when you compare his studio single, "I Love You This Big", to Lauren Alaina's "Like My Mother Does". First off, I will say that Scotty sounds better on the studio track than he did live, but it is still not that interesting of a song. Lauren's song sounds much better and more like a radio hit. However, I could see both of their singles doing better than Lee or Crystal's singles did last year, but that is not saying very much. I think both tracks would have worked better as "album filler" than being their debut singles. You would have hoped that Jimmy and Nigel worked a bit harder getting good singles for both of them since they could tell they would likely be the top two. I think the success of both of their debut albums is more in the hands of the producers and songwriters than in either of the teens themselves.