(4 of 5)
Ennis and 19 have market research on their side. As Davis suggests, avid music fans expect their stars to evolve. But the Idol audience, which has an unprecedented ownership stake in Aiken's career, is not made up of avid music fans. A disproportionate number of copies of This Is the Night were sold at Wal-Mart and Target stores, and a large number of those discs were picked up in the check-out lane, where Sanders positioned Idol merchandise to catch the eye of people who wouldn't think of stopping in the music section. "Our consumer is the middle 80% of the population," says Gerry Lopez, president of Handleman Entertainment Resources, which stocks and manages music offerings at such stores as Wal-Mart. "These are moms and dads making $26,000 to $36,000 a year...We're not catering to Napster or Kazaa folks, just people who like a nice song sung by a nice kid."
Because it pays the full retail price and doesn't download music, the Idol audience is a record company's dream; because it doesn't have indulgent, wide-ranging tastes, it can be an artist's nightmare. Studdard got so frustrated trying to tailor his upcoming album, Soulful, to the Idol audience that in early July he called his various managers and label representatives and, according to several sources, threatened to quit. "This is my car," Studdard said, according to an executive who was on the call. "If you guys want to navigate, that's great. If you guys want to drive, then you better get a new car." Studdard is now working with Missy Elliott and R. Kelly on what an RCA executive termed "a credible, clean hip-hop album."
If Studdard appears to be a Clive Davis kind of guy, then Aiken definitely sides with Fuller. "Simon Fuller is the one person I trust in all this," says Aiken, and the proof is on Measure of a Man, which is the rare pop album completely free of innuendo, let alone sex. Instead of adding edge lyrically, Davis and another A.-and-R. executive, Steve Ferrera, were forced to play with Aiken's sound, using crunchy power chords in place of benign synth pads and encouraging Aiken to put some power into his ballads. Says Aiken: "I'm very satisfied with my album. I grew as a singer, and Clive deserves a lot of the credit for that."
Still, pop isn't just music. It's a package, and Aiken has had numerous frustrations with the way RCA has tried to tweak his image. Everyone--label, management and Aiken--was thrilled with Aiken's Rolling Stone cover shoot, so photographer Matthew Rolston was hired to direct a video for This Is the Night. In it the story line was...Clay Aiken does a magazine photo shoot. "They had me in this tight little vintage T shirt and jeans and a leather jacket," says Aiken. "And [Rolston] had me sing the song in one scene with this angst attitude--popping my neck and mean looks on my face...It's trying to make me somebody I'm not. I'm not mean, and this is something the label just doesn't get. 'How the heck do we market this boy? We're used to marketing Christina Aguilera and Dirrty. We can't market clean!'"