David Cook skips Idol finale for charity event

Every American Idol winner returned to the Idol stage tonight together to give outgoing judge Simon Cowell a sendoff – except season seven winner David Cook. It turns he had a good reason for skipping the event, however, as he was committed to a charity event in Kansas City and simply couldn’t be in two places at once. Still, it would have been an sight to see if Cook could have joined his seven counterparts in what would have been an octet performance.

David Cook did perform on Idol earlier this season, during Rolling Stones week. Cook also delivered a public message for the winner.

Spoiler: if you want to know who won American Idol tonight, click here.

American Idol voters need an electoral college

American Idol voting is done on a strictly populist system, despite the omnipresence of four on-screen judges. Everyone around the United States calls in their votes for their favorite after each episode, and all the but the least popular contestant is retained for the next episode. Except not everyone votes. In fact one of the worst kept secrets of American Idol is that most of its voters are located in America’s south and midwest and small towns. And that’s a problem for American Idol, one that’s existed from the start, but one that hasn’t become a problem until the past season or two.

Why are people less likely to vote if they live in a big city? For one thing, they’re less likely to be watching in the first place (if you’re skeptical of this, try moving to New York City or Los Angeles and see how little time you suddenly feel like devoting to something as comparatively mundane as television). And even among Idol’s audience, those viewers in places like LA are less likely to choose a favorite and cast a vote for the same reason that the city “can’t have a football team,” as former contestant Katharine McPhee phrased it when speaking with Beatweek about the subject late last year. In other words, LA is full of transplants from other parts of the country, without enough of a native local population who feel like they should back a particular contestant just because the contestant is from that city. Contrast that with places like Alabama and Arkansas, where local Idol contestants get hometown rallies and keys to the city. In that light it becomes clear why no contestant from Southern California has ever won American Idol, despite the show’s Hollywood connotations.

And that’s not the fault of the people in the south or midwest; voter apathy in big cities isn’t Alabama’s problem. But it’s more of a problem for the show itself. If votes had come in equal measures from around the country last season, Adam Lambert would likely have won going away; his inability to win the show finally and squarely drove home the point that no one who’s more likely to play well in Hollywood than Small Town USA will ever win the show. And not only did it appear to cause viewer erosion among the kinds of viewers whom Lambert appealed to (as evidenced by the sudden ratings slide), it also seemingly affected a shift in the kinds of contestants who tried out for the show for the current season. If the word “milquetoast” comes to mind when watching the current season, it might be more than mere happenstance.

So how to fix the problem before the ratings slide becomes irreversible? The electoral college system, in which the U.S. Presidency is decided by a relative handful of electoral votes cast by each state based on population, has not exactly been our friend over the past decade as it’s prevented the popular vote from directly determining the outcome of Presidential elections. But what’s turned out to be one of the Founding Fathers’ biggest mistakes in a constitutional sense might actually be a good idea when it comes to American Idol voting. Essentially it would give each State a weighted number of votes based on its population, and the next Idol winner would then be determined by nationwide input; over-voting in Alabama or under-voting in California wouldn’t be a factor. Would it be fair to those folks in the south and midwest, who sit home and dutifully vote their hearts out after each episode? Absolutely not. But the current system is unfair to contestants – at least those contestants who are more Adam Lambert than Kris Allen at heart – and now it’s threatening to take the show down with it.

Congrats to Lady GaGa, Colbie Caillat, Black Eyed Peas on Grammy wins

Official GRAMMY iPhone app

With the 2010 GRAMMY awards less than a week away, the new “Guess the GRAMMYs” app is designed to help iPhone and iPod touch users pass the time until the airing of the annual music industry award show. The free app presents users with trivia about the GRAMMYs along with the opportunity to predict winners from twenty-one current GRAMMY categories and register their guesses in order to be automatically notified of how their predictions fared.