I’ve been watching Rockstar Supernova over the last five or six weeks. I was surprised by both the quality of the performances, but also how much I like the band members, notably Gilby and Jason. Then, as the votes started coming in, and I started to see who was in the bottom three in votes, I started to question the premise. Then, last night, Tommy Lee made a comment about the fans voting and buying tickets, so they had to listen to the votes.

I know there are issues with the voting system already–and there has been controversy around the system during American Idol seasons. I think there is another more simple question to be answered. Are Rockstar viewers, and more so, the voters, Rockstar Supernova fans? If the show’s live audience is representative of the viewer base, I’d say definitely not. If Supernova is looking for an Audioslave version of Motley Metal Roses, I don’t think they’re watching the show, and I surely wouldn’t trust them to be voting multiple times for their favorites.

I’ll keep probing on this one for hard numbers–but my take: Rockstar Supernova is good evidence of the disconnect between TV audiences, participatory audiences (go with your web2.0 badness!), mobile, and web users. Then lay a taste/preference overlay, ROCK, over all that. It’s a recipe for mediocre… but I guess it is good entertainment. Just not the way to do a rock audition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 6:18 am and is filed under Music, Media. It is further classified using the following tags democracy, Media, Music, participation, rock, rockstar, supernova, television and voting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.