I read a great book recently.
It’s called "I Don't Want To Be Rude But” by Simon Cowell, the guy who created the Pop Idol TV show. (That later became American Idol in the US.)
In this book, Simon tells the story of how he stumbled upon this successful TV show model…
You see, he used to be a young record executive in the UK...
And one of the many difficult jobs he had was to find talented artists. But not only that. Once he found them, he also had to turn them into stars. Make them famous. And build an audience around them...
Anyway.
One day, another popular TV show in the UK, East Enders, had a group of actors singing a Christmas song during an episode...
And suddenly, all these people started calling radio shows across the UK, asking about that song… where they could get it… and if the stations would play it…
Of course, no radio station had the record… because there was no record released. It was a fictitious song performed in an episode of a TV soap opera...
But Simon saw something nobody else did. He reached out to those actors, signed them to his record label, released that single…
And made a bunch of money.
What he realized was... those actors had something he struggled so hard to build for all of his unknown musicians...
They had the audience.
All these people who already loved East Enders, who already loved the actors… were now buying his single in droves.
But here’s the thing…
It didn’t matter that these guys were super talented actors or singers. The only thing that mattered, and the only thing that made the record successful was...
The only thing that mattered, and the only thing that made the record successful was...
They were super loved.
Simon went on to produce records with Teletubbies… the WWE wrestlers… Until he met Simon Fuller and together they created Pop Idol.
But again, the genius of the show, (and why it’s so popular), isn’t in the talent of the participants. That’s secondary, at most...
The genius is in the way Simon makes the audience love the contenders.
In other words, by making the audition process the product…by letting people watch as they went out looking for stars… and then letting them vote on their favorites…
He created raving fans around whoever ended up being the winner... Even before there was a winner!
And by the time they released the winner's album, Simon already knew it was going to be a hit…
Because the winner already had an audience. They came with the audience already built-in.