NBC’s ‘The Voice’: Billy Gilman, Brendan Fletcher make splash on iTunes after top 20 performance show
While last night’s “The Voice” may not have utilized iTunes as a voting criteria as we’re going to see over the coming weeks, we do still think there is something of value to looking at the results there. After all, you’re seeing sales by people who legitimately want the music as opposed to merely people wanting to keep their favorites in the competition. There’s a lot of significant value there for the future of the competition.
The big winner when it comes to sales is therefore Billy Gilman of Team Adam Levine. His version of “Crying” is, at the time of this writing (around 12:10 p.m. Pacific time), #27 on the iTunes top 100. He is the only artist in the top 50, and that to us suggests that he is the undisputed favorite to win the entire competition. There are of course two things to remember here:
1. He’s already got a fan base – There could be some discussion if Billy wins this season about artists with preexisting careers on the show, given that Alisan Porter also won this past season. Our sentiment is that it shouldn’t be banned, but we’d weed out the middle rounds and give America more live shows to get to know the entire field better. Some artists like Billy and Alisan simply have more awareness coming into these, and in some cases, more screen time in the edited opening rounds.
2. He performed last on the night – That’s always significant for sales, since it is the last thing you hear before the end credits. That can be said even more so in this instance, given that there were so many people to remember!
We should note that Brendan Fletcher, also of Team Adam, was #78 with “To Love Somebody.” He’s the only other artist who made it in the top 100, which is the only data we track. He probably also benefited from performing later, but this is very impressive to us given that he wasn’t at the tail end of Adam’s roster and didn’t have the same enormous audience going into this.
You can check out all of our reviews of last night’s “The Voice” performances over at the link here. (Photo: NBC.)