Did Glee Dupe Fans Into Free Promotion With Myspace Auditions?

Over 34,000 Gleeks auditioned for Glee in a huge Myspace casting call that closed at the end of April this year, and not a peep has been heard about it since from Myspace or from Fox. Rumors have been spreading that Fox scrapped the whole thing, and the Glee hopefuls who uploaded videos to the Myspace auditions are left in the dark. Could it be that Fox simply used the Myspace campaign as a ploy for free publicity from fans? Or are the Glee auditions still on? We turned to Myspace for answers. The original rumor that the Myspace Glee auditions had been shelved was brought about by a New York Magazine article posted at the end of June, announcing that Fox was canning a Glee casting reality show, thought to be made up of hopefuls that auditioned on Myspace. New York Magazine wrote: "Fox unveiled the never-titled-reality project last January at the same time it confirmed it was renewing Glee for a second season. It solicited audition videos on ye olde Myspace from contestants who wanted to compete for one of the three new roles on the show; the ensuing happy-off would be filmed for an American Idol-like multipart special that would lead up to the season-two premiere. "There's never really been an unscripted program like this on television before," Fox realty overlord Mike Darnell promised at the time. "Now there still won't be. Though they collected the tryout videos, Murphy and Fox execs have since quietly agreed to kill the on-air competition after it became clear that working on the reality show would mean less time for planning season two (and the recently announced season three)." What does this mean for all the Gleeks that tried out for a spot on the coming season in the Glee Myspace auditions? According to New York Magazine, several winners will still be chosen from Myspace and will receive spots on Glee, though they may not be recurring roles. However, despite this change of plans announced by New York Magazine, nothing has been posted on the Glee Auditions Myspace page and people who auditioned have not received any sort of update since the competition closed nearly three months ago. I have also heard from an inside source close to Glee's casting company, Ulrich/Dawson/Kritzer, that UDK doesn't have anything to do with the Myspace casting call and is not personally reviewing submissions. So who exactly is reviewing the videos uploaded to the Myspace casting call? I reached out to Myspace for answers and here's what they had to say: "As always planned, the MySpace GLEE casting call closed submissions on April 26th and submissions are now being reviewed. The GLEE casting call on MySpace was extremely successful receiving over 34,000 auditions, over 105 million gold stars given, over 23 million video views and over 1.3 million friends. The casting call was promoted with three video shout-outs by GLEE's Mark Salling and Naya Rivera which received over 7.5 million views as well as a shout-out from Matthew Morrison and Cory Monteith which received over 1.4 million views each." However, is it possible that Fox knew all along that their Myspace campaign would fall by the wayside? The social media casting call was incredibly hyped up, and 34,000 hopefuls created videos, shared them with their friends and did a huge deal of free promotion for the television network. It's likely that the auditions were always more about branding for Glee than about really finding the next new teen singing and dancing stars. Did you audition? What do you think about the fact that Glee, Fox and Myspace are leaving competitors in the dark? And would you audition in a similar campaign in the future?

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Did Glee Dupe Fans Into Free Promotion With Myspace Auditions?

Megan O'Neill

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Megan O'Neill