L.A. Reid calls American ‘X Factor’ with Simon Cowell ‘worst thing’ he has ever done

We knew that L.A. Reid was a man with strong opinions, but who would have imagined that he would have been so blunt when it comes to his time with “The X Factor“?

When Simon Cowell originally launched the series in America, he proclaimed that this show was destined to receive 20 million viewers an episode, and anything less than that would be considered a “failure.” Well, the series didn’t meet those goals, and Cowell realized soon after that he did not necessarily have the same sort of enormous clout with viewers that he long assumed that he did stateside.

However, it was not the lower-than-expected ratings of the show that is leading to the Epic Records executive saying that doing the show was the “worst thing [he’s] ever done.” Instead, he said (per The Hollywood Reporter) at a Midem breakfast chat in Cannes that his style and his taste in music was impacted in ways by being on the show:

“The first season, yes, I had a great time … It was a little bit of a vacation. I’d been making music, working at running labels for a long time, and it was a little bit of, ‘Let me just have some fun.’ But the second season I was fully engaged trying [to] run a label, and it wasn’t fun anymore.”

The irony here exists in two separate parts. Reid was speaking at an event sponsored by Pepsi (which was ironically the lead sponsor of the series for the time that he was on the air), and that his act Tate Stevens actually won the second season of the show. That group did produce girl group Fifth Harmony (who Reid has since worked with), but in between some format shifts and Britney Spears’ performance as a judge, it was a pretty lifeless competition.

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