Singing sensation Mariah Carey officially joins Fox’s American Idol, effective immediately.
At Fox’s Television Critics Association press tour today, Fox president of alternative programming Kevin Reilly announced that Mariah Carey would be joining the 12th season of American Idol. As of now, there is no word on the price that it took for Carey to join Idol, but it’s been made public that Carey asked for a whopping $17 million/year to join Idol – $2 million more than what Jennifer Lopez asked for to sign on for another season of the show. Fox turned down Lopez’s demand, so were they willing to pay that much for fresher talent?
In the past few weeks, American Idol has been doing a clean sweep of their judging panel, not unlike The X-Factor‘s bloodbath earlier this year. First, Steven Tyler announced that he would be leaving American Idol to focus on a new album for his band Aerosmith. Days later, Jennifer Lopez decided to leave the show after it revived her dying singing/acting career. Shortly after that, Randy Jackson announced that he’d be stepping down from the judging panel but would still be a “mentor” on the show.
It was evident that Fox wanted to do something new with Idol since Jackson has been with the show since the very beginning.
This seems like a great decision on Fox’s part. Carey is a bona-fide star with a hit singing career spanning two decades. The decision of hiring Carey seems much better than the head scratching decision to hire Ellen DeGeneres to judge the show back in 2010.
With Carey officially joining American Idol as a judge in the spring, do you think that Carey will be good at judging this hopeful musicians? And what other artist would you want to see sit next to Carey on the judging panel?
