NBC singing competition The Voice returns for Season 23 on March 6, with Chance the Rapper and Niall Horan serving as coaches for the first time and Blake Shelton sitting in his Big Red Chair for the last time. But will the show’s new season finally turn a singer into a chart-topping star?
Not likely. So far, only one winner of The Voice, Season 1 victor Javier Colon, has reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. Rival singing competition American Idol, meanwhile, made superstars out of Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, and Carrie Underwood in its first few seasons.
Winners of The Voice land Universal Music Group recording contracts through the show, but past champs told the New York Post in 2021 that they felt unsupported once the cameras stop rolling.
“It was sort of like, ’I got this record deal, but what do I do now?’ ” Alisan Porter said. “Once you win, they’re on to the next season within two months, and you’re a has-been.”
Added Sawyer Fredericks: “Everybody thinks that the person should be set. That’s not the case.”
Even Shelton and former Voice judge Adam Levine have called out Universal’s treatment of the winners. “Year after year … they win this record deal with Universal, and so many times, the ball’s been dropped,” Shelton said on Entertainment Tonight in 2020, per the Post. Levine, for his part, told Howard Stern in 2015 that he and the other coaches do “so much great s—t for these singers, and then they go to a record label … that f—ks it up.”
By our calculations, only the first 13 of the show’s 22 winners so far have reached the Hot 100 — and usually, they’ve only done so during their time on The Voice. Here are those singers, their top-performing tracks, and those tracks’ peak positions on the chart.
The Voice, Season 23 Premiere, Monday, March 6, 8/7c, NBC
