Zero, humiliation: The Voice fans outraged by this new rule.

Florent Pagny, Amel Bent, Lara Fabian and Tayc are the four judges of season 15 of “The Voice”.

“I have a very bitter taste.” Several loyal viewers of “The Voice” expressed their disappointment on social media on Saturday, May 3, as the program changed one of its rules. For this 15th anniversary edition, TF1 decided to add a new challenge.

Named “the qualifications,” this new stage comes just after the blind auditions. The talents, who were selected by the coaches, must now go through an additional elimination phase before reaching the battles.

Specifically, after the blind auditions, each coach of The Voice must now divide the talents of their team into small groups of four or five candidates for this new stage of the “qualifications.”

This phase takes place with the help of a co-coach: Anne Sila for Florent Pagny, Gaëtan Roussel (from the group Louise Attaque) for Amel Bent, Quentin Mosimann for Lara Fabian and Patrick Fiori for Tayc.

The coach and their co-coach choose a theme to impose on these groups of candidates, who then have 24 hours to prepare a song related to it.

On the day of the challenge, the talents take turns on stage, with only a minute and a half to try to make a difference. Once all the performances are done, the coach and their co-coach immediately deliberate: only two candidates per group are selected to move on to the battles. The others are eliminated on the spot.

“It’s nonsense, a big flop”

This faster and particularly selective mechanism has strongly sparked reactions from internet users. Many criticize a lack of value placed on the candidates and deemed the elimination too brutal.

“This stage is cruel, in a way that if you are selected in the auditions and then fail, you don’t get to sing on stage for the battles?” laments one internet user, while another denounces “new rules that are worthless and incomprehensible.” Others point out the lack of visibility given to the candidates: “They just announce that you’re out and it’s over? You barely get 5 minutes of screen time? What kind of humiliation is this?”

Viewers are disappointed to no longer witness as many battles as before: “This format is disrespectful to everyone,” declares one of them. “It’s nonsense, a big flop with this new format,” adds another. “It’s sure that it’s no longer the ‘The Voice’ that we have loved for years,” concludes a fan of the show.

In a statement to Puremedia, the director of flow programs at TF1, Rémi Faure, explained that “75% of candidates selected in the blind auditions will be eliminated to give more visibility and allow the audience to attach to the remaining 25%.” He added, “The problem we had in previous seasons is that when you have 60 or 70 talents, it’s very difficult for the audience to identify and attach to them. So, we needed to go faster, to regularly review the talents more. After this stage of the Battles, every talent will be back on screen every Saturday night.”