NBC
Some winners of NBC’s The Voice have gone on to have successful careers in the music industry, but many have not been as lucky.
When a singer takes home the title of The Voice, they also earn $100,000 and a recording track. The point of the show isn’t really to generate superstars anyway, according to Executive Producer Audrey Morrissey. She told Huffington Post the show is really more like a bootcamp and contestants put in their blood, sweat and tears to get to the finale.
“Pretty much all the winners are picked up,” Morrissey said. “There is choice amongst the label what they do with them, but we, as a television show, once they won, we’re not necessarily personally involved in their careers. We do everything in our power to prop them up, as we can, but that’s when it flips over to, really, the music business.”
Some people argue The Voice is more about making bigger stars out of its coaches than it is about making the American Dream come true for contestants.
Alisan Porter Says Winning ‘The Voice’ Was Terrifying
In an interview with The New York Post, season 10 winner of The Voice, Alisan Porter, talked about how she felt after she won the show.
“It was sort of like, ‘I got this record deal, but what do I do now?” she said. “Once you win, they’re on to the next season within two months, and you’re a has-been. And I was, like, terrified that I wasn’t gonna use this momentum to make it in the music business. It was definitely not what I had expected.”
She later added, “In the industry, if you win a singing show, you are a singer, not an artist. And that couldn’t be further from the truth for so many people I knew on The Voice.”
Fans of singing competitions know that superstars Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson were both skyrocketed to fame by American Idol, but not many of the winners of The Voice have gotten the same treatment.
Season three The Voice winner Cassadee Pope is one of the more successful stories from the show, spending 20 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and selling 181,000 copies of her debut album. She has also been nominated for a Grammy and won a CMT Award.
‘The Voice’ Winners Say the Transition to the Music Industry is Difficult
The winners of The Voice do earn a recording contract, but some winners have said that they didn’t like the way they were seen by the label and people in the industry, according to the New York Post.
Javier Colon, who won the first season of The Voice, said that the music industry made him prove himself since he was only seen as a singer and not a singer-songwriter.
“But after being on television and having so many millions of people watching, you would hope that you’d at least have a fighting chance,” Colon told the outlet.
Season 8 winner Sawyer Fredericks said that he was disappointed after the win as well.
“I feel like they’re trying to cookie-cutter every person that comes out of ‘The Voice’ ’cause they think they’re all the same,” said Fredericks. “I don’t think they put the time into figuring out what kind of artist I was.”
The Voice airs on Mondays at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific on NBC.
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