S06.E25: Live Final Performances

[FormerMod-a1]

The final singers perform

[kechara]

Well - I'd give it to Josh. I didn't mind Grimmie singing with Adam. My favourite part of the night was Adam and Usher though

[FormerMod-a1]

If I can hear the breathe issues, they are bad.  And I hear them with every song Grimmie sings.  If she has to sing more than 3 words in a row, the last one always either trails off or gets cut short.  I can hear her take breaths in the middle of words.  It's just not good. She seemed to have the best breath control on Can't Help Falling In Love, but she made it *so* draggy.  I still can't figure out how she made it this far, even with her Youtube fans.  But since she's my least favorite, she'll probably win.  I also thought Adam sounded better than Gimmie in their duet. 

 

Liked the Usher and Adam song well enough.  It's not a song I love, in general, but they sounded good.

 

I liked the Blake and Shakira song.  She started off a little shaky, but came around pretty quickly.  I think I'll download this one.

 

I also liked the Blake and Jake duet, but more for Blake.  Jake just isn't that good either.  I'm surprised he lasted this long.  But what do I know, I didn't like Scotty McCreery either (from Idol) and he seems to be doing well enough.

 

That leaves Josh, who is obviously my favorite, but that wasn't a good performance to end on.  It wasn't horrible, but he's done much better.

[kechara]

It's relative I guess. He was better than the other 2. None of them had the best pitch I thought.

[KayElektra]

I'm annoyed with this final 3.  They are by far NOT the best "voices" of the season. 

 

Jake is sweet and has the country fanbase, but he was horribly pitchy quite often.  He, to me, also doesn't have much stage presence.

 

Josh was one I thought could win, but I just wasn't feeling him tonight.

 

Grimmie...ugh.  I might like her more if her fans weren't so goddamn obnoxious.  That and she seems to have this entitled attitude.  I did kind of like her song with Adam, but it bugged that she did about 6,000 runs through the Elvis song and no one mentioned it.  They give other people hell for doing that.

 

I guess I kind of want Josh to win so someone other than Adam or Blake "wins" even though Adam will probably lay a partial claim for that win.

[Song of Roland]

Grimmie sounds good singing a capella, but Lord, that screeching was a big ol' mute for me.

 

I assume Grimmie's minions were the 'fans' who voted for Set Fire to the Rain for Josh, because that did NOT play to his strengths, at all. I don't blame the show for not wanting a nearly 40 year old gnome as winner (no matter how great his 'Voice' is), though.

 

The Jake thing is a total mystery: he's very unattractive, can barely sing, and has only the most rudimentary stage presence. I suppose that means he'll win, and go on to rival Blake Shelton himself as a country music success story.

 

I don't want to hear Signed,Sealed and Delivered, Every Breath You Take, or Can't Help Falling ever again.

[pivot]

I thought Shakira and Blake had the best performance of the night by far.

 

The best contestant song of the night was Josh's last one. He really knows how to deliver an amazing vocal without oversinging. Something Christina clearly has never learned.

 

Christina butchered her last song and I loved the look on all of the other judges' faces after that performance. They clearly hated it but struggled to say something nice about Christina. Then, Adam has to be a giant douche and scold them for not falling all over themselves to praise Christna's mess of a performance.

 

I thought all of the duets with the contestants and coaches were lacking this season. Usher's song choice was lame. That song doesn't really go anywhere or allow vocalists to shine through. Adam outsang Christina on their duet and Blake and Jake's was such a giant cliche and Blake still managed to sing circles around Jake.

[mantecol]

Man, there is something really sinister going on.

 

When you search for "Josh Kaufman" in the Windows iTunes application, "Set Fire To the Rain" does not show up in his songs list. It is down below in his Album list, however. I saw a theory on Television Without Pity that the song was incorrectly listed as an album, but if you look at iTunes' underlying API, there is an entry for the song that looks totally normal. So in the deepest depths of their system, everything is listed just fine.

 

Album: https://itunes.apple.com/us/lookup?id=879954148

Song: https://itunes.apple.com/us/lookup?id=879954149

 

When you search for his songs using their search API, again "Set Fire To the Rain" does not appear at all, even with a max limit of 200 (he has 19 results total). I can't think of any reason for this. Even if had only gotten 1 download total, it should show up.

 

When you search for josh+kaufman+the+voice vs. christina+grimmie+the+voice vs. jake+worthington+the+voice, Christina and Jake have 11 results, whereas Josh only has 10.

 

Can anyone see anything that I missed? It looks like something is specifically blocking Set Fire To the Rain from showing up in Josh's song results, and I don't think it's just that it's the lowest ranked song of the night. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets "fixed" overnight once the damage has been done, so that these claims are harder to confirm. We'll see in the morning! It's getting harder to deny that this show isn't rigged, what with this treatment of Josh, and the plethora of "glitches" Kristen went through.

[mantecol]

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topsongs/limit=400/json

 

You can see the top 400 songs from this link. Adele's version of the song shows up at 295, but Josh's is nowhere to be found. Every other The Voice song of his is on the list. Impossible that this is due to low popularity of the song.

[photo fox]

There's like a 1% chance Jake will win this thing, but if he does, it will be because of his duet with Blake. Call it pandering or call it a brilliant strategy, but between the subject matter and respect for the Williams family, there's a lot of love for that song.  Every guy I went to high school with is probably power-voting right now. LOL

[mantecol]

My guess is: if iTunes/NBC acknowledge this at all, they will say something like: Songs are blocked until the end of the show, and we forgot to take the final song (Josh's) off the block list. But we are sure this didn't affect the outcome of the show. They can only be sure of that if Josh wins in spite of this setback!

 

Even if this was an accident, it became intentional the second they let it persist more than 20 minutes. There is no way it should take this long to fix. Even in the insanely improbable case that there is only 1 person who knows how to fix this and he lives 2 hours out of town with no telephone or internet, they have had enough time to drive to his house, knock on his door, and drive him back to the city to fix it. No excuse.

[pivot]

Yeah, Josh's one song got loaded incorrectly into iTunes. It's loaded like an album and not a song which is why people are having problems finding it, you can't preview it and it won't show up on the charts.

 

Josh and some of the other booted contestants have been tweeting about the problem since last night and sending links to the song. It was an easy fix and The Voice must be aware of the problem but they did nothing to fix it.

[treebyleaf]

Songs are definitely not blocked until the end of the show. I've purchased songs from iTunes hours before the show airs. One would think NBC would have people monitoring this.

[mantecol]

Yeah, Josh's one song got loaded incorrectly into iTunes. It's loaded like an album and not a song which is why people are having problems finding it, you can't preview it and it won't show up on the charts.

 

Josh and some of the other booted contestants have been tweeting about the problem since last night and sending links to the song. It was an easy fix and The Voice must be aware of the problem but they did nothing to fix it.

 

Not sure if it really matters, but I don't think this is quite the problem. All The Voice singles are released as songs on 1-track albums of the same name, and Set Fire To the Rain is no different (as I showed above). However, the Set Fire To the Rain song is not showing up in any iTunes song results. It looks like the song is being explicitly blocked, not miscategorized.

 

Songs are definitely not blocked until the end of the show. I've purchased songs from iTunes hours before the show airs. One would think NBC would have people monitoring this.

 

The text on iTunes says that iTunes purchases only count if they occur between 9:55 PM EST and 12:00 AM (sic - they mean noon). So there is some sort of blocking that occurs prior to that, and prevents songs from charting before the show ends. I am guessing they "forgot" to remove it for Josh's song.

Edited May 20, 2014 by mantecol

[mantecol]

I maybe see what you guys are saying about the song being incorrectly listed as an album. If you click on "TOP SONGS" in the iTunes desktop application, "Set Fire To the Rain" is currently showing up at #101. In the Name column is "Set Fire To the Rain (The Voice Performance) - Single", which is actually the album's name. And the Album column is blank for this song. If you click on the right and "copy link", you get the link below, which is actually the link to his album. None of the other The Voice singles are like this; they are all normal. So somehow his album is charting on the songs chart. Not sure what to make of that, but it's definitely still true that the song is being blocked from showing up in songs results (see the links I posted earlier).

 

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/set-fire-to-rain-voice-performance/id879954148

 

Work time now--we'll see how this shakes out tonight! Hopefully the silver lining for Josh is that he ends up with a better deal than he would have if he had won.

[SunnyBeBe]

I hope Josh doesn't suffer due to the glich on Itunes.  I passed on the Finale performances and don't intend to watch the results either, but I did cast all my votes for Josh.  I'm not impressed with the deal regarding Grimmie.  

[Babalooie]

If the contract is similar to Idol, then the fine print reads that the producers have the final say-so in determining the winner if they choose to.  We'll see what happens.  Nicholas David is doing okay for himself without coming in first.  To me, there is a similarity in that they are both soulful and don't look like your stereotypical star, which was supposed to be the premise of The Voice, anyway.

 

http://www.thefeelin.com/

Edited May 20, 2014 by Babalooie

[kj4ever]

I tried voting for Josh for a good hour by telephone last night and it was busy.  I hope it was busy because so many were voting, and not because of the whole Voice Conspiracy.  Did anyone else try and vote by phone and get through?

 

It's the first time I've voted all season, and I wasn't voting for anyone - I was voting against Christina.  I feel bad for the kid a bit because I don't think it is her fault, but the show has just went way obvious with it and Adam has been almost if not more of a douche bag than he was in Season 2.  That's a bad combination.

 

What I do think is awesome is people without a ton of You Tube followers or who haven't been on a major tour or have big time management teams working for them are selling just as many/sometimes more iTunes than her.  Go Josh and Jake!

[Nedsdag]

With all the shenanigans regarding Twitter and iTunes, a merciful conclusion for this season would be Jake being declared the winner.

 

Let's hope Mark Burnett and company have learned valuable lessons from this monstrosity of a season. Knowing them, probably not!

Edited May 20, 2014 by Nedsdag

[SunnyBeBe]

looie

Yest. @ 1:20 pm

If the contract is similar to Idol, then the fine print reads that the producers have the final say-so in determining the winner if they choose to.  We'll see what happens.  Nicholas David is doing okay for himself without coming in first.  To me, there is a similarity in that they are both soulful and don't look like your stereotypical star, which was supposed to be the premise of The Voice, anyway.

 

 

 

I had no idea the producers on AI had the final decision on who wins? Where can that be found?

[ToxicUnicorn]

After checking out for the past few weeks, I finally gave this performance show a listen and was pleasantly surprised.  I enjoyed everything to some degree, most especially the coach-contestant duets.  Christina had a very good night, Jake really does have a gift of delivering sincerity and a sweet tone, and Josh just sings his butt off, every single time he gets up there.  I thought Usher made a big mistake with his pick for Josh's closing song - it was too melodramatic for me and I thought it might have been one of Josh's worst (or maybe unrelatable?) performances all season.  But that made it a bona fide contest, 'cause I thought the other two stepped up.  I honestly did not know who would win.  Who ever knew that there could be suspense on this show?

 

For the first time, I think, I'll compliment a Voice stylist.  Josh's transformation from beginning to end of season was remarkable.  I loved his dark on dark navy tuxedo so much, I could even get behind the return of the hat.

 

Usher's smile is a thing of beauty.  That is all.