What did Taylor Hicks think of your support?
Taylor Hicks gets it. He held up our shirt for a photo on our front page. He understood why we voted for him. The producers were screwing with him and didn't want him to win, so he gets it.
How did the producers screw with him?
He's said they would change his songs at the last minute. He got mad because they wrote this terrible song for him to sing at the finale and demanded that they change it. They wanted to promote this robot singer who'd do whatever they want, but Taylor totally went against that because he had a mind of his own, but that meant he wasn't the marketable Carrie Underwood from the year before.
So in part, you're protesting that the show doesn't produce the best singer but the most marketable one?
Oh yeah. They also want someone who doesn't have much artistic integrity. They want someone who will sing, make them the money, and go home. American Idol is a karaoke contest. There's no artistic integrity to it. They don't want someone who wants to write their own songs. They just want someone who will walk in, make them a profit, and go home.
In that sense, there is a subversive element to what you're doing, in that you are saying that you are voting for someone with artistic integrity who goes against what the show is all about?
Yeah, definitely. That's why we voted for Taylor or Brenna Gethers. If Brenna Gethers would've won, she'd have told them she doesn't want to sing that kind of music and told them what she wanted. But they don't want that.
It seems to me that you have created a new layer of interest for a demographic that didn't previously care about the show.
Exactly. We're merely giving them more ratings. They've known about the site for years, but we're giving them ratings so they don't want to stop it. They've come up with these stupid metaphors for our site like, ''flies swarming around a cow,'' I think Nigel Lythgoe said of us. But they don't want the site to go anywhere. People tell us the same thing, that we're just giving them ratings. Well, yeah! Duh!
Are you making any money off the site?
There are advertisements, but the bills are so high on the site just to keep it running with all the traffic it gets, I thought for a while we wouldn't be able to afford it. It costs us more than $700 a month just to run it. If we didn't have those ads up there I don't know how we'd afford it. It's making a profit at this point, but it's just for fun. It's not a career or anything.
What would spell the end for Idol?
Maybe by like season 15 they'll have a string of unsuccessful winners and maybe people will stop getting record contracts from the show, and then it'd die down. At this point, there are so many people who get famous from the show that it won't die down. There's always gonna be people who want to become famous, so they'll keep trying out and people will keep watching. These people are swimming in money at this point. Great idea. Good for them.
If Sanjaya is voted off, who will you back next?
We're not sure right now. Tough call. We would discuss it. We'd open it up to the entire site to discuss. If Sanjaya goes home, it won't be nearly as fun to vote for somebody else. Maybe Phil Stacey because he looks like a vampire? It's just not as fun.
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