Guy Sebastian Claims ‘The Voice AU’ Runtime is Too Short to Find Success
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The Voice franchise has always received criticism not producing winners as large as other talent shows. The Voice AU judge Guy Sebastian recently revealed that it’s not much different down under. Is the lack of success from The Voice winners a franchise-wide problem?
It’s no secret that The Voice isn’t known for producing the biggest stars. While many may think this is a problem native to the American series, The Voice AU judge, Guy Sebastian proves otherwise. Since Sebastian succeeded following a talent show, he claims that The Voice isn’t the series to find ultimate stardom one. He attributed the claim to the fact that this series doesn’t run long enough.
“I think there’s no chance for anyone unless they are prepared to be thrown to the wolves, it’s a really challenging industry and it’s changed a lot in the last 20 years,” Sebastian said. “It’s unrealistic to have this notion that we’re finding a superstar because we’re removing one of the most important equations out of that, which is time.”
He views the series as more of a stepping stone, than the end all be all. From his experience winning Australian Idol in 2003, Sebastian believes that the public doesn’t fully get to know the artist within The Voice series.
To put this into perspective, The Voice U.S. consisted of 26 episodes in its most recent season, while The Voice AU had 14. The Australian series averaged around 1.3 million viewers for the duration of their 14 episode arc. When it’s put like that I think it’s hard to disagree with Sebastian’s statement. His former show, Australian Idol ran for 19 weeks… The Voice AU‘s last season ran for three days a week, for three weeks.
Guy Sebastian is Against The Voice AU‘s Battle Pass
On top of noting that the series itself is too short, he aired out his feeling toward this years format. Differing from The Voice U.S., The Voice AU features a round of the competition called The Cut. This round forces each singer to face their coach to prove their star power the day after their blind audition. At the end of this round, coaches are only able to pick five remaining singers.
This year, a Battle Pass has been added into The Cut. The Golden Button will send the most impressive singers directly into the Battles round. Sebastian expresses that this honor could do more bad than good for the singers in the long run. He claims that skipping a week of the competition will make it so Australia will not hear the singers develop throughout the weeks of the competition.
It’s no secret that the point of these competitions are for singers to gain national recognition. Removing them from a whole round of the competition could make it so less people know their name in the long run. From season three to present day, The Voice AU winners are known for slipping out of the public eye. While they often still pursue music after the series, it doesn’t end up on any charts.
