Asiant -!dea Star Singer

This is for Asianet ISS viewers. Some of you might have wondered why good singers are going out. They are telling its because of SMS. But actually nothing like that. SMS is a real drama. Last elimination round was shoot almost one month back (I knew the yesterday's eliminated list almost three
weeks back through ISS blogs) but they were asking to send SMS until day before yesterday. Still do you think that ur SMS counted? So this is to inform u that don't send any SMS further. Elimination round drama is purposefully created to promote SMS. (Sending some good candidates out in the name of SMS)


If you want to know about the real background play, read following. I copied it from one of the blogs.



Answering to question "Anybody has real first hand information? eg: - any audience here who have already attended the elimination show?
Any of the contestants/ parents - can you please respond here? Is this true?"

the answer is - the contestants and all staff part of ISS are made to sign legal contracts that refrain them from going public even if they are eliminated. If you guys remember, we had one of the contestant publishing the results of elimination in Orkut but remved it soon. The contestant got away with a strong warning.. Now if the question is about the audience, the answer is there are no audience when eliminations are shot... even if they are shown, its edited...

Answering your SMS doubts...


do you guys know each of ur sms cost Rs. 4 to 6 depending on carrier... Out of this the carrier (Idea, Airtel, etc.) charges Rs. 1 and the rest goes to ISS . Cant disclose the no of sms's received so far but the fact is ISS and organisers have struck it rich...Rs. 40 lakhs is small piece compared tothe big pie Quote


Now answering to the doubts on the biased judgements, the answer is the sponsors have a lot of take on this... the strategy is to pick one or 2singers and portray them as favorites... automatically fans of other singers flood in SMSes to keep them going... eventually some deserving candidates turn out to be scape goats and get eliminated.. .Some even withdrew from competition knowing this... This is a common strategy used in almost all commercial reality shows... actually the concept originated from American reality shows...

You all shud now be thinking SMSs are meant only for adding public support to contestants. .. but the fact is, they are used to measure the popularity of the candidates.. in marketing, we call this "consumer psychology "... meaning change the strategy depending on how viewers react to the show... there is something called as Popularity Chart which is drawn for all these contestants. ..there are various factors which goes into the popularity charts..



e.g. region/city which the contestant represent, background of the contestant, and special abilities/disabilit ies which can draw viewers attention / sympathy, and ofcourse last but not the least, SMS votes... In other words, Judges award marks to contestants depending on where they are
positioned on the popularity chart (in other words how much votes they have received till date) ... if you are at the top, no matter what mistakes you
do, you still get more marks.. and if you are at the bottom, tough luck... and u get to hear all sorts of critisicm from the judges... ultimately the
contestant receive marks based on the popularity chart and not totally on their performance. .. and thats why you see some contestants scoring mor even if their performance in the performance rounds are worse than other better performing contestants. .. the internal rumour is there are opinion
differences on this concept within the Judges... but for the sake of the show, it remains backstage... Moroever do you guys know how much each of
the judges are paid to be part of the show... I ll give you a hint, the host of the show is paid approx 10K per shooting day... so u can guess how
much judges are paid.. so they dont bother even if deserving candidates lose out..