NBC’s ‘The Voice’ preview: Has iTunes made Cassadee Pope, Nicholas David safe?
In some ways, we do very much understand the change to the voting on “The Voice” that puts so great an emphasis on iTunes sales: it makes consumers put their money where their mouth is, and the basic assumption here is that if someone is willing to pay for music now from a given artist, they will do so again later once their solo album is available.
However, there is also a flaw in it exhibited by Amanda Brown’s exit last week: what if someone wants to support an artist, but just doesn’t like songs on any given week enough to vote? There’s also a difference between wanting to purchase original music from someone and covers that do not stray too much from what the original versions are.
(Warning: the following contains possible voting spoilers. Read at your own risk.)
The iTunes results are starting to come in now when it comes to the final four this season, and if we were to use iTunes as a sole indicator for voting (which seems to be smart based on what has transpired all season), Trevin Hunte is probably heading home. The other three remaining artists in Cassadee Pope, Terry McDermott, and Nicholas David are all currently in the top ten, which gives them that all-important multiplier they need to surge on through to the final round.
Considering that the purchases from iTunes are also being used in a cumulative way this year, there is one other thing that we can take from this: Cassadee is almost sure to be drowning in confetti come next week. This is the third straight week she has notched a #1 bid on iTunes, and her cover of Miranda Lambert’s “Over You” has continued to sell over a week after she sang it live. You can call part of this the Blake Shelton bump, but the other part of it is that she has given a series of fantastic performances that make her most deserving of taking home the title.
Do you think Trevin is going home, or is it possible in your mind that he could have one of those “silent” voting blocks who calls in all of their votes and are not tech-savvy? If you want to read our review of the final four performance show, you can do so over here.
Photo: NBC
icstars
December 11, 2012 @ 3:23 pm
Cassaddee is doing very well on iTunes, but so is Terry.
Can anyone explain the iTunes “10 purchase vote limit per song”? I buy it once and can’t figure out how a “single user” can “purchase” the same song more than once. Not that I’m crazy and want to buy the same song multiple times, but just sayin’…..I still don’t understand that rule. Do people have multiple iTunes accounts? I thought that would be counted as a separate user?
Shelley
December 11, 2012 @ 10:03 am
Get over the iTunes thing. For one, it follows all the same information you find on Twitter and Facebook and Youtube hits. Itunes votes (non-top 10) are sooo small compared with phone+internet voting where you vote 10 times per artist per phone or email address or facebook account. If there are a small fraction of people willing to spend money for more than 1 copy of a song, first off they are crazy, but mainly there aren’t that many of them compared to the millions of votes you get from the 4 other methods. Amanda wasn’t the only one who was singing covers. THEY ALL ARE! She didn’t get as many votes. She wouldn’t have gotten as many votes even if you didn’t have iTunes to point to. We are jumping on the iTunes because it is a real-time representation of voting and this is the only time we have any clue about that–usually it is all the producers black box. Watch Twitter at the end and look for the official NBC tweet your vote tweets and Cassadee cleans up. Amanda didn’t. You liked her. Not everybody did.
Tony
December 11, 2012 @ 10:00 am
The idea of buying a song being 10 votes is good, but they still allow unlimited voting on the website. Which means I could go there and if I have enough time, vote way more than 10 times. I think they should limit the number of votes one person can make. With unlimited votes it favors the teens’ choices.