Cowell tells us after holding so many auditions, details on specific contestants starts becoming a blur: "I can't remember who came from which city after I've done the auditions. I never can. If anything I watch the shows back and it all comes flooding back. I can't at this point differentiate, for instance, Dallas or Philadelphia. It's all a bit of blur to me still. Do you know who can remember everything? Amazingly is Paula. She's got a photographic memory for these things. But within two weeks of doing auditions, I can't remember anything."

The contestants will all vie for the spot as this year's American Idol, which comes not only with the honor, but a record contract. Just in the past couple of months, though, some previous Idol alums, including Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee, parted ways with their record labels. Cowell tells us that getting dropped from a label is the nature of the music industry these days: "I think it's the reflection on the unpredictability of the record business where fortunately we got it right more times than we got it wrong. But I've run a record business for 25 years and the one thing I know about the business is that it's horribly unpredictable."

As for contestants on the upcoming season, Abdul tells Zap2it, "The 50 (finalists) this season narrows down to, I can honestly say there are probably 30 that are unbelievable, and about six or seven that are stellar. If we do this right -- 'we' meaning all of America (through the after-show voting) -- we could have a Top 12 that all could vie for record deals as well as the top spot. That's never happened before."

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