American Idol deals

Which 'American Idol' Season 10 Alums Have Management Deals?

Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina are assigned to Carrie Underwood's manager, while Red Light Management, home to Dave Matthews Band and Tim McGraw, has an option to co-manage "Idol" finalists 3 by Shirley Halperin

With the American Idol summer tour about to kick off (July 6 at West Valley City, Utah’s Maverik Center is the first date of the two-month trek) and the careers of Season 10’s alums soon to launch, some key management decisions have been made in recent weeks.

It was announced back in March that Simon Fuller, now heading his own XIX Entertainment, would personally watch over this year’s winner and runner-up. That remains the case, but THR has learned that season 10 victor Scotty McCreey and runner-up Lauren Alaina have been assigned to Ann Edelblute, who manages Carrie Underwood at XIX. Alaina's day-to-day responsibilities will be handled by Michelle Young, who manages David Cook along with 19 Entertainment's Iain Pirie.

Meanwhile, contestants who placed anywhere between third and 11th are automatically spooled into a co-management option with Red Light Management, the Charlottesville-based company that looks over the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Tim McGraw, Phish and Alanis Morissette, among dozens of rock, pop, country and roots acts. So far, the three Season 10 Idols picked up by Red Light are second runner-up Haley Reinhart, fourth placer James Durbin and Pia Toscano, who went out ninth and is rumored to have already signed a recording contract with Interscope Records (the label will not comment).

Says Toscano, who confirms that she has been working on music with producer Rodney Jerkins: "I feel like I'm in really good hands. The most important thing for me is feeling safe with my team. I think they have a good vision for me and where my career is going to go, and if I'm ever not happy with something, I just tell them. They're amazing." 

What do you think of these pairings, Idol Worshipers? Can the Carrie Underwood formula turn into magic for Scotty and Lauren, too? Who else from the Top 11 deserves a management deal?

REALITY TV WINS

We are watching nothing but successful Entertainment Reality Talent COMPETITION SHOWS on American Network Television Nets.   America's Got Talent, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, 

• Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (1948 )
• Star Search (1980)
• Bands on the Run (2001)
• Pop Idol (2001-2003) (UK)
  • American Idol (2002)
• America's Next Top Model (2003-present)
• Last Comic Standing (2003)
• Nashville Star (2003)
• the Apprentice (2004-2007, US, NBC)
• The Assistant (2004)
• The Contender (2004)
• Can You Be A Porn Star? (2004)
• Dancing with the Stars (2004) (many countries)
• Dream Job II (2004)
• Dream Job (2004)
• Hell's Kitchen (2004 - UK, 2005 - US)
• Next Action Star (2004)
• The Next Great Champ (2004)
• Project Runway (2004) (US)
• Wickedly Perfect (2004) (US)
• The Rebel Billionaire: Branson's Quest for the Best (2004)
• The Next Food Network Star (2005)
• Rock Star INXS (2005)
• The Scholar (2005)
• So You Think You Can Dance (2005)
• The Ultimate Fighter (2005–present, USA, Spike)
• America's Got Talent (2006)
• American Inventor (2006) (ABC)
• Dirty Dancing (2006)
• Knight School (2006, USA, ESPN)
• The One: Making a Music Star (2006)
• Rock Star: Supernova (2006)
• Skating With Celebrities (2006) (US)
• Top Chef (2006)
• Who Wants to be a Superhero? (2006) (Sci-fi)
• Grease: You're the One that I Want! (2007)
• Ego Trip's The "White" Rapper Show (2007)
• The Next Iron Chef (2007, US, Food Network)
• Phenomenon (2007, US, NBC)
• Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll (2007, US)
• The Singing Bee (2007)
• The Shot (2007, US)
• America's Most Smartest Model (2007, US)
• America's Best Dance Crew (2008, US)
• Ego Trip's Miss Rap Supreme (2008)
• Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious (2008)
• My Kid's a Star (2008)
• I Know My Kid's a Star (2008)
• Scream Queens (2008)
• Redemption Song (2008)
• America Got Talent(2009-present) (North America)
• Live to Dance(2011) (North America)
• America's Best Dance Crew (2011) (North America)
• The Voice (2011) (North America)
• The X Factor (2011)(North America)

We don't follow anything the WINNERS have done because we are TOO busy watching NEW Entertainment on Reality COMPETION SHOWS.

We're watching the COMPETITIONS.........
But NOT THE WINNERS.

We can call it  CATCH 23.....

It's in the SONG!

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Consumers tuning out over-the-air TV

No surprise here, and more fuel for the fire of auctioning more broadcast spectrum: New research from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) found consumers are relying less and less on over-the-air TV signals, reporting the number of homes that rely on over-the-air signals for TV programming plummeted last year to 8% of all U.S. households with TVs. CEA recently found that 96% or 114 million, of U.S. households own a TV. Therefore, said the association, there are just nine million homes now exclusively watching OTA TV.

Over-the-air viewing has been steadily declining since 2005, according to CEA’s research, and few U.S. households have interest in cancelling their pay-TV service. 76% of respondents said they were unlikely or very unlikely to cancel pay-TV service. By contrast, 10% of households said they were likely or very likely to cancel service.

“Over-the-air TV was once the defining distribution platform,” said Gary Shapiro, CEA president and CEO. “But using huge swaths of wireless spectrum to deliver TV to homes no longer makes economic sense. Congress should pass legislation to allow for incentive auctions so free market dynamics can find the best purposes for underused broadcast spectrum, such as wireless broadband. Contrary to the National Association of Broadcasters’ assertions, antenna sales are falling and cord-cutters are not shifting to over-the-air television but rather to the Internet. The only cord being cut these days is the one to the antenna. It’s time we accept this shift away from over-the-air TV as an irrevocable fact of the TV market. The numbers tell the story.”

Dennis Wharton, BAB EVP/Communications, says the numbers are pretty questionable: "CEA has zero credibility when it comes to calculating over-the-air TV viewership. Knowledge Networks has stated that over-the-air exclusive homes are more than 14% and rising. We trust an unbiased research firm over a survey paid for by CEA."

Nonetheless, the CEA survey also found consumers are more and more viewing Internet video from Hulu, Netflix and others on their TVs, which is still the dominant device to watch video content. Computers, car video devices and smartphones are also increasingly being used to watch video content. According to CEA’s 13th Annual Household CE Ownership and Market Potential Study, U.S. households owning a smartphone is estimated to skyrocket from 33% in 2010 to 45% in 2012.

RBR-TVBR observation: Broadcasters bamboozled or just the push of new technology? First, broadcasters were forced to move to digital almost two years ago and then most consumers’ TVs no longer picked up anything without a converter box and antenna. If they used the same antenna sitting atop the TV set with the box, viewers would likely only get a few of the channels they previously got, so a rooftop antenna became necessary. Most folks found it easier just to pay a monthly cable or satellite bill than to deal with pixilated/poor reception or getting up on the roof. Now, lo and behold, only 8% are watching OTA TV today and more of the small spectrum left to broadcasters needs to be auctioned off. Go figure

icloud news

With Eye On Digital Dominance, Apple Offers iCloud Free
By Mark Walsh

With Apple making its long-awaited iCloud announcement today, one of the things I found most striking about the new service is that Apple won't charge for the basic offering. That's an uncharacteristic move for a company that's historically eschewed the let's-make-everything-free business model of the Internet.

Speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said iCloud will replace the company's $99 a year MobileMe service, which he admitted "wasn't our finest hour." The new digital locker offering will basically let users store content and then transfer it wirelessly to all of their devices. That extends to things like contacts, calendars and email. It also syncs the App Store and App Bookstore. But Apple won't charge for multiple (if not unlimited) downloads to multiple devices.

By hitting a "purchase button" in iTunes, people can push material already downloaded to nine other Cloud-enabled devices. Of course, much of the speculation and anticipation about iCloud was about music, with reports Apple had signed deals with all the major labels in advance of the launch.

Despite some rumors, iTunes for iCloud won't be a subscription-based offering. Rather, users can download previously purchased music to all their iOS devices at no extra cost, and new purchases can be downloaded automatically to all their gadgets. The new wrinkle is iTunes Match, which scans a user's music library to identify any tracks that haven't been bought through iTunes. It then creates a DRM-free copy of those songs and uploads them to the cloud for users to access on any Apple device.

Not everything's free. Apple will charge $25 a year for iTunes Match. Apple's iCloud press release assured the scanning process would only take minutes, "instead of weeks to upload your entire music library," a dig at rival locker services from Amazon and Google which require users to manually upload music collections.

By doing away with the $99 fee it had for MobileMe and not hitting users with other fees in connection with iCloud, except for the $25 for iTunes Match, Apple showed it's more interested in locking users into its ecosystem than creating a new revenue stream. It's also trying to lure new users with a more attractive cloud storage option than Google or Amazon.


That's a smart strategy because it considers the big picture instead of trying to nickel and dime consumers. It creates what CNet columnist Larry Dignan last week called a halo effect for Apple. "The direct revenue attributed to iCloud doesn't matter as much as the value in the Ap

ple chain," he wrote. Apple already dominates digital music with iTunes, and iCloud will

only help the company tighten its grip.

What's more, Apple is making the "digital everywhere" concept a reality to an extent that hasn't been possible before. While many of the features Apple's digital locker includes aren't new, "iCloud brings all of these compelling features together in a compelling, easy-to-use and intuitive manner," noted Giles Cottle, a senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, in a res

earch note today about iCloud.

When it comes to packaging, distributing and selling digital media across platforms, Amazon, Google and Microsoft still have a long way to go to catch up with Apple.

LOOSING VIEWERS

Fighting for Attention
The Web is drawing viewers' eyes away from TV, yet it's far from the only distraction
By Mike Chapman

If there wasn’t already enough proof that the old boob tube is under assault from the home computer: Three-quarters of respondents to the most recent Adweek/Harris Interactive poll confirmed that they have watched a TV show online, and nearly 70 percent have watched a show online before watching it on an actual television.

Yet the threat to television watching is coming from old media too. Of those people still tuning in, many say they aren’t necessarily paying attention while they have it on. Some 44 percent of our respondents said they’re reading a book, magazine, or paperback while watching TV.
(Reading, in fact, was the second-most popular activity after surfing the Web.) Thirty-seven percent are texting while watching, and 40 percent are connecting with friends via Facebook and other sites. (No wonder Lost fans didn’t understand the show’s ending last year!)

The good news for TV (and the advertisers who love its reach)? Only 3 percent of our respondents said they don’t watch TV at all. We’d say 97 percent means it’s a medium that isn’t going anywhere—not yet, anyway.

REALITY NOT REAL????

Are reality stars real?
Personalities often more comfortable on television
By Malina Saval
Citizens of the world live in a world of ambient intimacy, a voyeuristic society where, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, everyone can monitor each other's every move down to the smallest intimate detail.

Television, too, has earned a deserved rep as an emotional free-for-all, where unknowns around the country are plucked from their humdrum lives, slapped on to reality series where they are trailed by cameras and crew, and lay bare their deepest, darkest and most embarrassing secrets for the entire universe to watch.

From the groundbreaking 1973 PBS docu series "An American Family" to E!'s seminal "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," reality has replaced fantasy in mainstream media entertainment. Fake is out; real is in.

But how real is reality TV?

"Personally, I felt more like I was more myself in front of the camera than I was off," says Dustin Zito, the 25-year-old Louisiana-reared castmember on MTV's "Real World," now in its 25th season and set in a luxe pad in Las Vegas' Hard Rock Hotel. "The cameras actually gave me the opportunity to show who I really am. I made sure to articulate the way I really felt about things. Some people on the show dumbed it down because there were things they didn't want America to know about them, but for me, that was never an option."

 Zito, who defended his porn star past on a recent episode, admits the presence of cameras was a bit distracting. But very quickly they became as incidental as moving furniture or a lamp in the room.

 "By the end you complete forgot they were there," he claims of the film crew following him around 24/7. "You don't look at the camera. You don't acknowledge the camera. It's like the camera isn't there."

Heather Marter, Zito's 22 year-old "Real World" castmate, was initially intimidated by the prospect of surveillance cameras charting her every waking breath.

"We were always miked," she recalls. "If we turned off our microphones then we had to completely stop talking."

Eventually, though, she made a commitment to bare all and hide nothing.

 "If there's anything I can say about this cast, it's that all of us went into it promising to be ourselves," says Marter, a television production major at New Jersey's Monmouth U. "Whether or not it was going to be controversial, we wanted it to be relatable and honest. We all agreed that if you change yourself for the camera, you're only hurting yourself. We were extremely ourselves. You make real friends, have real fights and real romances. You get so involved in your life that you sometimes forget that you're on a show."

 Jeff Jenkins, exec producer on "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" -- the E! skein about to enter its sixth season -- refers to the cluster of on-set cameramen as "ghosts."

"For some people it takes a few days, others a few weeks, but eventually the crew, cameras and lights really become like wallpaper," he explains. "The cast and crew develop a relationship of trust. While the cast can feel the cameras or maybe see them out of the corner of their eyes, it's like we're not really there."

If there's one thing viewers can't possibly accuse the Kardashian clan of, it's that they are not real, contends Jenkins.

"This family is the reason that people find the show so compelling," he asserts. "Their lives are an open book. Khloe got married on TV. Bruce Jenner had a facelift on TV. Kourteney pulled a baby out of her vagina on TV. We could have chosen any family, but we chose a loud, sexy, pleasantly dysfunctional and unique family on purpose. That's what makes it a reality show."

While some reality stars find themselves at a gig signing autographs at an Ohio mall or a brief appearance on a network affiliate talkshow, the Kardashians have successfully turned themselves into a multimillionaire-dollar branding juggernaut, a feat to which Jenkins attributes the brood's tight-knit dynamic.

"At the end of the day you want to be in this family," says Jenkins. "They love each other and they have each other's back. They don't have armies of friends; they are each other's best friends. The moms can identity with Kris, the dads with Bruce. It cuts across the whole family spectrum."

For Zito, his stint on the "Real World" has opened up a world of opportunity, one he doesn't see as hampering any future career in the works.

"I don't think my experience on the show will typecast me in any way or prevent me doing what I ultimately want to do," says the aspiring salesman who hopes to continue in the field. "I was myself the entire time, and I'm still me now. For me, what happens after the show is the best part of the journey."

TV Networks See Key Audience Erode

Season Ends With High Viewership for Finales but Overall Trend Shows Decline in 18-49 Group

Fewer young people watched TV on traditional sets over the past television season, the second consecutive year of decline as viewers face a proliferation of ways to watch TV shows.

U.S. TV networks marked the official end of the TV season on Wednesday with a flurry of widely viewed send-offs, including the last episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and the season finale of "American Idol." But those big programs are closing out a TV season in which few new shows became hits, and ratings for the four most-watched networks fell.

At any given time of day, about 25.1 million people between 18 and 49 years old were watching TV of any kind—live or recorded, broadcast or cable —this TV season through May 8, according to Nielsen Co. That number is down 1.4% from the same period a year earlier, and 2.7% from two years ago.

Although the overall TV audience grew 1.5%, to roughly 61.3 million people watching at any given time of day, the continued decline among younger viewers is unusual in a medium that for years has seen generally growing consumption.

The four most-watched broadcast networks have been among the hardest hit. Roughly 3.6 million people between 18 and 49 years old watched prime-time shows on the four biggest broadcast networks this TV season through May 22, down 9% from a year earlier, Nielsen said.

The only major broadcast network to see its audience expand this TV season was No. 5 Univision, which has benefited from a growing Hispanic population. Through Wednesday, the Spanish-language network said it averaged 1.9 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 years old, up 7.6% from a year earlier.

Some of TV's most-watched shows fared better than average.

"American Idol," on Fox Broadcasting, averaged 29.3 million viewers in its finale on Wednesday night, up 21% from the finale a year ago, according Nielsen. (Both Fox and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.)

Meanwhile, "Dancing with the Stars," on Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, averaged 21.4 million for its finale on Tuesday, up 16% from a year ago, Nielsen said. The finale also bested Tuesday's "Idol" by 855,000 viewers according to Nielsen.

Last week, CBS Corp.'s "NCIS" averaged 18.6 million viewers for its season finale, up roughly 14% from a year earlier.

CBS again won the race for the most viewers in prime-time. For the TV season ended Wednesday, CBS averaged 11.6 million viewers, down 1.5% from a year earlier, according to Nielsen data provided by multiple networks.

Fox was again No. 1 among viewers between 18 and 49 years old in prime time. It averaged 4.6 million viewers in that age group, down nearly 5% from a year earlier.

ABC and Comcast Corp.'s NBC were Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, by both measures, with NBC seeing a precipitous 15% decline in its prime-time audience. Its biggest new hit, singing competition "The Voice," saw its audience on Tuesday drop 16% from a week earlier to 8.5 million viewers, according to data provided by NBC.

Meanwhile, Ms. Winfrey proved that she can still put up big numbers, although it remains unclear if she can bring her audience to her new OWN cable network, a joint venture with Discovery Communications Inc.

Approximately 13.3% of the households in 56 of the largest U.S. markets tuned into the final episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," during the day on Wednesday, according to preliminary Nielsen Co. estimates provided by CBS, which distributes the program. It was the show's biggest audience in 17 years, CBS said.