Let’s assume that if you had a few mil­lion pounds, you could prob­a­bly buy your­self some hit songs from a song­writer, some stu­dio and musi­cian time, plenty of mar­ket­ing, and almost cer­tainly get your­self a pop career.

The ques­tion is; is it eas­ier to get your­self into this posi­tion (a mil­lion­aire pop star) via pure luck (by enter­ing the lot­tery) or by enter­ing a com­pe­ti­tion like the X-Factor?

We don’t know how many peo­ple apply for the X-Factor, but based on 10,000 peo­ple at a sin­gle Lon­don audi­tion, we could con­ser­v­a­tively esti­mate 40,000.

Although the X-Factor mar­kets itself on the win­ner receiv­ing a “£1 mil­lion record­ing deal”, recent infor­ma­tion about the con­tract has sur­faced that shows “the vic­tor may only receive £1 mil­lion after at least four albums” (note the ‘may’ and ‘at least’; we’ll ignore these for now and assume they will after four albums).

If we look at the num­ber of albums released by win­ners of this type of show (X-Factor, Pop­stars, Pop Idol), we find that less than one in five win­ners (to date) have released four or more albums.

18% chance of releasing four albums

And we can’t even expect this to improve; plot­ting all the chart posi­tions (for sin­gles and albums) for all of these win­ners, over time, shows a dis­tinct down­ward trend:

chart_positions

So, 1 in 40,000 appli­ca­tion odds com­bined with 1 in 5.5 “four albums” odds gives total odds – of enter­ing the X-Factor, win­ning and becom­ing a mil­lion­aire because of it – of about 1 in 220,000.

The chances of win­ning the lot­tery (with aver­age jack­pot win­nings of £2,053,984) is 1 in 13,983,816. You would there­fore need to buy £64 of tick­ets for a slightly bet­ter chance of win­ning the jack­pot than becom­ing a mil­lion­aire through win­ning the X-Factor. £64 may seem like a lot, but prob­a­bly doesn’t com­pare to the cost of trav­el­ling to/from the audi­tions, tak­ing a day off work to spend a full day there (with food and drink), etc.

Of course, if you funded your own career, you’d also get a much higher per­cent­age of earn­ings, wouldn’t be locked into a lengthy con­tract, and wouldn’t suf­fer from the stigma of being a real­ity star win­ner. So you’d prob­a­bly even have a longer career than these win­ners, as plot­ted below (each bar rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent win­ner from one of these real­ity shows). As a win­ner, you have a 55% chance of hav­ing a pop career of less than one year, and a 36% chance of less than six months.

career_lifespan