Now that is basically promoting selling out, like xxx Idol, etc. That is, ‘I’ll do whatever you want to get my 15 minutes of fame, even performing stuff you wouldn’t catch me dead doing if I wasn’t here’.
Of course these shows perpetuate the myth that there can only be few winners, when the industry could support a whole lot more people full-time, but just not excessively rich.
When we did our CD in 2004, I worked out that if we sold as few a 200 CDs a week at that time, we would have as much income as I was getting from my full-time lucrative IT work. Now, in Australia, a gold record is 35,000 album sales, which means that at 200/week, it would take over three years to get a gold record.
After Casey Donovan won Australian Idol in 2004, her album sold over 200,000 copies, or hex gold = triple platinum, but her record company considered her a failure because they expected a lot more (despite rushing it out in a week, which showed) and dumped her.
The big labels really only want a few really-successful artists who are very industry-savvy. They want to minimise advertising overheads, and lots of artists means lots of money down the drain. Sponsoring these ‘talent’ shows is supposed to produce guaranteed sales to people who have emotionally invested in their favourite ‘sacrificial lambs’, er … artists. They have not really been interested in artist development for several decades, especially since they have been forced to stop fleecing artists of their royalties.