It’s become standard for US TV music-talent shows to make performances available to buy from Apple’s iTunes store, pioneered by American Idol. Now rival The Voice has announced a milestone: 20m such downloads sold since its launch in April 2011. Billboard notes that this is just downloads sold while the series is airing, rather than releases by winning artists once each series is done. The biggest seller so far is Cassadee Pope’s cover of Miranda Lambert’s ‘Over You’ with 363k sales, ahead of Matthew Schuler’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ with 272k sales. Broadcaster NBC’s Paul Telegdy says that sales are a better mark of popularity than streams for contestants. “Digital downloads are the simplest, the easiest to track,” he says. “If one of my daughters said, ‘Oh my god, this young emerging artist had 2 million YouTube views and 16 million starts,’ I’d say I only want to know how many starts and finishes.”
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