American Idol
American singing competition

American Idol is an American singing competition television series created by Simon Fuller, produced by Fremantle North America and 19 Entertainment, and distributed by Fremantle North America. It aired on Fox from June 11, 2002, to April 7, 2016, for 15 seasons. It was on hiatus until March 11, 2018, when a revival of the series began airing on ABC.
It started as an addition to the Idol format that was based on Pop Idol from British television, and it became one of the most successful shows in the history of American television. The concept of the series involves discovering recording stars from unsigned singing talents, with the winner determined by American viewers using phones, Internet platforms, and SMS text voting. The winners of the first twenty-four seasons, as chosen by viewers, are Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Hicks, Jordin Sparks, David Cook, Kris Allen, Lee DeWyze, Scotty McCreery, Phillip Phillips, Candice Glover, Caleb Johnson, Nick Fradiani, Trent Harmon, Maddie Poppe, Laine Hardy, Just Sam, Chayce Beckham, Noah Thompson, Iam Tongi, Abi Carter, Jamal Roberts, and Hannah Harper.
American Idol employs a select panel of judges who critique the contestants' performances. The original judges, for seasons one through eight, were record producer and music manager Randy Jackson, singer and choreographer Paula Abdul, and music executive and manager Simon Cowell. The judging panel for the last three seasons on Fox consisted of singers Keith Urban, Jennifer Lopez, and Harry Connick Jr. Season sixteen brought three new judges: singers Luke Bryan, Katy Perry, and Lionel Richie. Beginning in the twenty-third season, Underwood replaced Perry, alongside returning judges Bryan and Richie.
“American Idol” enters the record as american singing competition. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, Idol and singing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“American Idol” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, American, Idol and singing provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q201052. VIAF identifies the subject as 75149066594465601945. The Library of Congress control number is no2002092134. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2016 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Idol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.