The music industry revolves around the audience, constantly providing different products to suit different peoples needs, and a career in music can go down different paths depending on the role of the artist; swell as the levels of freedom in which the artist has. For example, if we take an X-Factor winner like Steve Brookstein who won the first X-Factor competition in 2004, below is the singer singing a song
During the show Brookstein received lots of votes and got the famous post X-Factor number one single and was signed by Sony BMG. However, eight months later he was dropped by Sony and now people pay around £2.50 to watch him in a pub.
The career of these kind of performers then seems to be a very short lived one, where the artist doesn't have much input in the product that is produced along with the image they take on. They have one large amount of exposure through TV, magazines, internet, radio and any other means of getting them heard, and then they seem to disappear, unable to follow up with new material to sustain a career.
What these artists seem to lack in musical ideas, they make up for with their pretty 'T.V.' faces, the career path of an X-Factor winner can often lead into other things such as T.V. show hosts and advertising, for example, here is a luckier X-Factor contestant, Alexandra Burke.
This performance led to her selling more than a million copies of Leonard Cohen's song 'Hallelujah', and unlike the previous, managed to cry on her success, with top ten singles and a best selling album. Her career has also led to T.V. appearances like judging 'So You Think You Can dance' on BBC1 and also appearing as a judge on the show in question, like some kind of turtle returning back to it's home beach to aid in breeding more brilliantly packaged karaoke singers. On a serious note, you get the message that this sort of career can lead down many paths. The market for this music is also a seasonal one, with X-Factors winners aiming for the Christmas number one, along with these figures being in advertising around Christmas time; i'm sure we remember the Marks and Spencer adverts running up to Christmas 2011, with the contestants featuring in most.
