NBC’s ‘The Voice’ winner rankings: Where everyone stands
Before we go too much further, let’s try to outline what the criteria here is: We’re looking at success on the show, success after the show, memorability, and also what their victory means to the series’ overall legacy. Two things that we’re not doing is factoring in here any sort of personal preference, or ranting too much about the many failures of Universal Music to support many of these artists after the fact. Several of these winners have been let down on that side of things.
13. Jermaine Paul (season 2) – We’re starting the list with the winners whose victory was a little bit of a surprise, and we haven’t heard all that much from them since they got the title. Jermaine was a good singer who, for whatever reason, simply fell off the map, and we feel like many people expected Juliet Simms to win entering the night.
12. Craig Wayne Boyd (season 7) – You can say that Craig was in a relatively similar spot versus Matt McAndrew and Chris Jamison, and out of all the country winners so far, he’s had the smallest overall exposure to date.
11. Tessanne Chin (season 5) – The fact that we haven’t actually heard more from her since the show is a little bit of a surprise, given that to us she had a musical style that was unique enough that she could’ve stood out more in the industry. Ultimately, this is one where we put a lot of blame at the foot of the label.
10. Josh Kaufman (season 6) – He’s done some great work on the stage since the show, but for whatever reason we feel like “The Voice” in particular didn’t really give up enough love in the weeks and months that followed him winning. You could say that him beating the late Christina Grimmie was a surprise, but we personally saw it coming.
9. Sundance Head (season 11) – We’d say something similar about Sundance versus Billy Gilman, another artist with a lot of public exposure on the season. Right now, this is just a natural landing spot for him, but this could easily change very much depending on what he does moving forward. It’s still a little early.
8. Alisan Porter (season 10) – We’ve seen her get some promotional gigs here and there promoting some new music, and given that her win certainly was a predictable one (she was dominant for most of the season), this also feels right — but it could change, given that we’re still fairly early out.
7. Chris Blue (season 12) – Chris earns this ranking because of the overall quality of his work during the season, and also what he had to overcome to win: A country singer on Team Blake, not having a big pre-show following, and being the last person to get a coach during the blind auditions. Unless someone ranked below him comes out with a big hit, it’s hard to see him changing too much.
6. Javier Colon (season 1) – There was a reasonably push for the show’s very first winner way back when, and we do think that this is enough for him to be higher than many of the other champions to come since — even if he’s been quiet the past several years.
5. Chloe Kohanski (season 13) – The show is entitled The Voice, and with that Chloe’s voice is so distinctive that she may have a chance of making a splash in the music industry in the years to come. She’s far more memorable than many other winners so we imagine much of her future success will depend heavily on the material.
4. Sawyer Fredericks (season 8) – The thing about Sawyer is that he’s still so young, and we do think that there is a lot of his audience that will come to him over time. We like the original music that we’ve heard from him since the show, and his potential is such that he could have a long career performing what we feel to be fairly timeless music.
3. Jordan Smith (season 9) – Other than the country artists, we feel like the record label did a pretty good job of pushing Jordan and his debut album following its release, just we also think that he had one of the most dominant victories we’ve ever seen on the show. Other than the #1 choice here, we don’t think there’s ever been such a consistently strong champion.
2. Danielle Bradbery (season 4) – There were times during her win that we weren’t quite sure that it was going to happen, but she was consistently solid throughout and we cannot argue with success — “The Heart of Dixie” on its own is probably one of the more successful original songs to come out of the show, and like with Sawyer she’s still very young and has lots of potential.
1. Cassadee Pope (season 1) – This is really a no-brainer in our mind. Cassadee had the most dominant win on the entire run of the series in our mind, and she’s since also gone on to have by far the largest career with several hit songs — she’s also the first artist from “The Voice” to have a Grammy nomination courtesy of her duet with Chris Young.
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