If there’s one thing I can reliably count on to provoke the ire of CD Baby artists, it’s ‘American Idol.’
For almost a decade I’ve heard your outcry (in emails, in podcast calls, in blog comments): the American Idol-ification of music is destroying true art!
Last year, when Shook Twins turned down an invitation to appear on the game show, more than a hundred commenters on this blog shouted “hooray” in independent solidarity.
Well, your day of vindication has come. Fox has canceled ‘American Idol.’ The show will not return after its final season in 2016. For eight of its fifteen year history, the music competition was the most watched program on TV. But lately it’s had to make due with a mere 11 million viewers.
[Ah, what any one of us might do with 11 million viewers!]
Anyway, if you’ve been waiting to dance on the grave of ‘American Idol,’ you’ll have your chance following its last season — which will be full of retrospectives, special appearances, and other gags to get viewership way up again for the grand finale (thus boosting advertiser involvement, and proving that even when something as huge as ‘American Idol’ loses, it’s still winning).
But my fellow indie artists, temper your rejoicing. You can wave bye-bye to ‘American Idol,’ but not its cultural impact. And whether you view ‘American Idol’ as a culprit or a scapegoat for many contemporary music biz woes, we will be living in an ‘American Idol’ world for years to come.
American Idol is dead. Long live American Idol?
Let me know in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.