Despite being the highest rated reality show on television, The Voice — now in its seventh season — has yet to produce a winner who has reached enduring success after their run on the show, unlike its rival American Idol. The latter catapulted multiplatinum artist Kelly Clarkson — who won the show's inaugural season — and fourth season winner Carrie Underwood to superstardom.
At BuzzFeed Brews on Nov. 17, The Voice coaches Blake Shelton and Adam Levine commented on why their show has yet to launch a winner into a major career after the infamous red chairs turned around.
"I think mostly because people like that are one in a million," Shelton told BuzzFeed News. "The odds of American Idol having done that are astronomical. I don't think it's ... because of that show — it was just luck of the draw that those two girls came strolling through those auditions. If it was just the result of a show, then there would be 30 superstars right now that have come out of all these shows. But it's not. It's just people, whether it's on one of these shows, or YouTube, or somebody who got a record deal and got on the radio. You never know where they're going to come from, and it just so happens that they had a couple."
Levine had his own take on whether it even matters whether The Voice produces a Kelly Clarkson-level superstar, and noted that, whether or not they achieve fame at that level, the contestants' careers have moved ahead just by coming on the show.
"I think we have developed a very skewed sense of what success is, because the people you mentioned are mega superstars, and that, like you guys were saying, is one in a billion," Levine said. "We definitely provide the platform for that to happen, and it may or may not, and we're all hoping that it will. But let's not forget that these people are so much better off after they've been on The Voice than before. There's forward movement and there's evolution and there's progression. As far as we're concerned, that's amazing. And if we keep churning out people who are less successful, do The Voice and now they're more successful. So we win all day long. And ... I know that eventually it will translate into what is now called, I guess, a 'superstar.' But until then, we're just going to keep plugging away and it's going to happen."
