At dinner last night, I posed a similar to question to a few of my friends. I noted that MTV once held a contest to be the next MTV veejay, and that the winner got his (or her?) requisite however-long stint -- but the runner up actually got a full-time veejay job out of the deal. Would this happen with American Idol? My friends all agreed that it was indeed probable.
I think the same thing holds true for American Idol, Survivor, etc. Winning it isn't the ultimate prize, necessarily -- making it to the finals is about as good. That and the baseball analogy would lead me to believe that the key is not so much victory, but exposure. At some point -- probably the top 5 or 10 for American Idol -- the candidates are on TV so often that they become household names. They've hit some sort of saturation point for marketability, and when/if the record companies or whomever recognize this, they get contracts commensurate to this level. Dan Lewis At 10:26 PM 8/25/02 -0700, john hull wrote: >Consider another metaphore: American Idol. The final >ten, if not the final fifty, were virtually >indistinguishable. Yeah, individual differences >existed, but they were just variations on a theme. >One wins, but that's the contest rules. What rules >make Britney such a big winner? Why not squeeze >Normandie into the cute-blonde market with Christina, >Jessica, Mandy, and Britney? > >It makes me question the baseball metaphore, but only >slightly. My meditation leads me to think that maybe >the cute-blonde market is a Cournot game. There's an >optimal number of cute-blondes on the market and the >record industry has found the equilibrium.
