Simon Cowell's (reverse) Midas touch
How much of Cowell's starmaker image is a mirage?
Simon Cowell is back in the news. He has a new boyband project in the works, and wants “future megastars” to audition for him, so he can create a new One Direction.
Cowell’s primary driver, according to him, is that “record labels aren’t signing enough new talent.” It’s an interesting complaint because he isn’t in control of a label anymore, and as I’ll discuss later, his own track record is highly questionable.
The recruitment website SimonNeedsYou.com is tied to a production company which was incorporated last year. He’s looking for reality show contestants, and entertainment fodder, not musicians. It makes sense considering he gave up the music arm of Syco Entertainment in 2020, opting to buy back the rights to the reality show division and maintaining that ownership, letting Sony absorb and dismantle Syco Music.
The show already has a title, “Simon Cowell: Midas touch,” and has been shopped around streamers for months. News of a Netflix deal being “imminent” have been leaked to Cowell’s preferred tabloids, but things aren't looking good, as multiple planned auditions have already been axed.
Part of his publicity rollout included an appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast, which seems like a bizarre choice considering the end result was essentially anti-advertising for his services as a mentor. Is it good publicity to talk about how you should've controlled your previous brand more tightly, while asking people to apply for your services?
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His only regret with 1D is apparently that he doesn’t own the name. On its face, this is a strange misstep for someone with the reputation he's cultivated for himself, and since he’d already been in the biz for over a decade when he got 1D under his thumb.
It might not even have been possible, since decades earlier, Maurice Starr unsuccessfully claimed the band New Edition’s name in court, alleging the band members were, “replaceable actors in a play written by Maurice Starr.”1
And 90s mogul, Lou Pearlman, at least knew to write himself into contracts as the sixth member of both Backstreet Boys and *NSync, so owning their names wasn’t really an issue.
This interview predictably resulted in a revived anti-Cowell sentiment online. Whether related to this reveal on Cowell’s part or not, two former 1D members unfollowed him on socials, and it made some headlines. In response to this reporting, Cowell announced that loyal Harry Styles had called him to reminisce about the good old days.
As the search for recruits intensified, scouts began contacting artists directly on Cowell’s behalf. This backfired as lead singer of the band Stone shared a TikTok of him turning them down under no uncertain terms. His public performance of this rejection may be due to his band being an opening act on former 1Der Louis Tomlinson’s tour, which means plenty of Stone’s followers are also invested in taking Cowell down a peg.
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Maybe Cowell is just having a bad year. After all, he did strike gold with his very first signing, securing the coveted Christmas #1 in 1997 and exceeding a million sales. The artist? The Teletubbies.
Whether that translates into mogul status for band management and recruitment is something I would challenge. Despite his grandiose proclamations, his track record isn’t that great when it comes to fostering careers. He seems to adhere to the pump and dump school of thought rather than investing in talent, his accusation that labels aren’t doing just that ringing incredibly hollow as a result.
While Cowell keeps flaunting 1D’s name to entice wannabe-stars, they are not actually the last boyband that he steered. That honor goes to PRETTYMUCH, which were launched the year after 1D’s permanent hiatus, clearly groomed to be their replacement.
They received a lot of opportunities. I didn’t follow them, but since I was in my 1D stan era, I was paying attention to Syco Music because they signed and subsequently shelved Tomlinson. Fans of the girl group Little Mix,2 another Cowell X-Factor creation and Syco signee, had been waiting for a stateside launch for years and were also loudly complaining that a new unproven group was monopolizing resources and receiving opportunities that LM could have gotten.
The new era PRETTYMUCH were supposed to usher in never materialized, with the fan bases they targeted more interested in BTS and K-pop acts.
Their failure to launch didn’t disrupt business for Cowell, as he continued to sign contestants from his reality shows, The X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent to his label. While a Syco Music contract was framed as a prize, it failed to result in a career for the majority of signees, mostly ushering artists into the stable of acts Cowell could trot out to perform on his reality shows as needed. For some, those were the only performances they were granted.
The last proper X-Factor UK edition was that of 2018, and that year’s winner, Dalton Harris, has said that his appointed team would turn down performances despite him wanting to work. He was still signed to the label when Cowell left and it was shuttered. He said he found out the news online, and never heard from his manager or label contacts again.
This is standard for former proteges of Cowell’s. Going through the available documentation of former acts on the label, I’ve found:
24 were dropped after releasing one album/EP.
7 released a few (or in some cases, just one) singles and were subsequently dropped.
2 were never allowed to release anything.
Another handful released two albums with questionable levels of support before being dropped or shuffled to another label.
This isn’t even accounting for the months, or years in some cases, that some of these acts were stuck in contractual purgatory, not allowed to leave of their own volition but also not permitted to release music or perform on their own.
Of the former signees who have spoken of their experiences, many have said they were blindsided by being dropped. It’s easy to look at the numbers and say not all of these people could be worth the investment, but plenty of them performed well. They had been handpicked by Cowell himself, the star-maker, and there were multiple #1 and #2 albums among those who were dismissed, as well as singles that performed.
To me, what really stands out is that even those who experienced success on the label have very few good things to say about their experience.
The incredibly successful boyband Westlife were not a Cowell creation but, they were signed to the label for a long time, and left on their own volition because they felt deprioritized. Little Mix had an acrimonious split with him and the label, and never received the international push that many fans believed they deserved. Cher Lloyd, who released two albums under Syco was plagued with delays and lack of support.
Leona Lewis shared in 2015 that a Christmas album she released was only recorded, “on the condition that her next album would be a studio album, but that didn’t happen.” Syco reneged on their agreement, and wanted her to release an album of covers instead. Her refusal left her in limbo for a year.
And then there’s Rebecca Ferguson, a recent MBE recipient who released multiple albums under Syco, yet has nothing good to say about Cowell and the music industry in general. She has spent years speaking out about abusive practices she witnessed and endured. Just last year, she gave evidence at the House of Commons detailing her experiences.
All that said, I can imagine the question becomes: but what about 1D? They were an undeniable international success. Was that not Cowell’s doing?
In my view, they were a fluke. Their success has more to do with timing and clever marketing than his genius.
The 2010 edition of the show, when they were put together, had the highest ratings of the show’s run. They amassed millions of Twitter followers when the site was in its infancy. A 2011 tweet of Tomlinson’s had the honor of being the most retweeted until it was overtaken by the Oscar selfie of 2014, and it supposedly remains in the top ten today.3
Their online popularity was global, not local, which is probably why they didn’t win their edition of the show. Still, a budding international brand was too good to pass up, and Cowell secured them and assigned them to his go-to management.
Mark Hardy, Marketing Director at Syco (2010-2013) said in a BBC documentary that Cowell saw the band as, “Justin Bieber times five,” because Bieber at the time was the blueprint on how to use social and to establish a high-profit brand.
To follow in Bieber’s footsteps, Hardy says they decided to, “create this boy brand that we would export internationally, but using social media and digital as the kind of primary driver.”
This push was successful and lead to the big stateside win of landing a number one album with their debut, making them the first British band to do so. This added wind to the sails, and things snowballed from there. Beyond social media, the fanbase was closely consulted with. This created endless feedback loops of fans “steering” the narratives, but never the business decisions, allowing for a devoted stan culture to develop.
This is also why the fandom was tapped early by other sectors of industry as a fandom to mine, becoming a lynch pin of fandom profiteering.
Infamously, the decorated hitmaker that helmed their first two albums was sidelined on the band’s initiative. They demanded more involvement in their sound, and while this can often be seen as a death knell to the product, their last three offerings were of far superior quality. Can Cowell claim the subsequent success as his own, when his selection was overidden?
Sure, he can, and he does.
1D were lightning in a bottle, and he was fortunate enough to milk it while he could. It’s no surprise that he’s trying to replicate that feat, and I suspect he’s chalking up the failure of PRETTYMUCH to the lack of provided narrative around them, the lack of voyeuristic intimacy that the early days of 1D provided. They were pure product, hence, he’s back to selling a story for fans to invest in.
But the climate has changed drastically in the last 15 years. Even his years-long shows have stumbled in the ratings. A new show of his would’ve been an obvious get years ago, but it might be too late for that now.
As long as the price is right, I can imagine the show making its way onto streaming. If it does, I suspect it will end up more of a boyband version of Fake Famous than anything.
Perhaps everybody no longer wants a piece of Cowell, proving Niall Horan right when he said, “Not anymore, Simon.”
Starr went on to form New Kids On The Block.
Little Mix has since disbanded and Perrie Edwards is receiving the big push from Columbia Records. Edwards also publicly dated Zayn Malik in the early days of the band, a clear cut case of cross promotion, and singling her out as one to know.
I’m not sure if anyone is still tracking this anymore, but it’s what Wikipedia says. According to their data, the top 3 are giveaway tweets, which certainly says something about shifting usage of the platform over time.