Modern Media, Timeless Talent: The Search for the Ultimate Diva

The music business and technology have a complex relationship. For every artist promoting an upcoming tour on social media, another is losing album sales to illegal file sharing. For every aspiring musician uploading homemade performance videos, an established act is fighting the proliferation of unlicensed live recordings. Studio software is more accessible and versatile than ever, but purists argue that tracks spliced together on a laptop lack the character of analog cuts.

Most controversial of all for traditionalists is the widespread use of vocal correction tools like AutoTune.

“With today’s technology, we have a number of ways that allow singers to cheat,” says Gary “The Maestro” Catona, go-to vocal coach for some of the biggest stars in the business. “But the capacity to transport the listener with the sheer power and passion of a natural singing voice is something else entirely—the mark of a true diva.”

Now Catona plans to harness the best aspects of modern technology to find that voice. He is launching The Ultimate Diva, an international contest and TV show designed to find the next female singing superstar.

The Search for the Ultimate Diva Begins

The show, backed by the Disney-owned Maker Studios and due to begin in March 2015, will bring selected singers from all over the world together in a Los Angeles mansion. There they will learn from Catona what it takes to be a true diva, and compete for viewers’ votes.

But first comes the Destination Diva Tour, when Catona will travel through Europe and the United States, searching for performers with diva potential. Sidestepping the tired talent show format, he will rely instead on social media to help him find the best of the best. To be eligible for consideration, artists must already have at least one million online followers.

There will also be one wildcard—a member of the public plucked from obscurity to compete with these established singers. And social media will be key there, too.

Wildcard entrants will simply upload to YouTube a video of themselves singing their favorite song. The video must have received at least 500 likes by the deadline in order to be watched by Catona and his team. The best performers will soon be on their way to L.A.

Ultimately, Catona will select 10 women to join him in the mansion. And having worked with stars like Andrea Boccelli, Steven Tyler, Robin Thicke, and Usher, he is no stranger to extraordinary talent.

Building a Career

It was when he began to apply isokinetic exercises—typically used by athletes—to his vocal muscles that Catona discovered his now-famous “Voice Building” system. Combining traditional Italian operatic training techniques with the modern science of exercise physiology, this system not only strengthens and develops the voice, but provides an effective alternative to invasive surgery for sufferers of spasmodic dysphonia and other conditions affecting speech.

“Most techniques are about breathing, the larynx, breath, things like that,” says Karl Talbot, Catona’s longtime business partner. “Gary’s technique is on muscle training. He treats the vocal chords as muscles, and he can take someone who isn’t a singer, or isn't confident in their voice, and give them better tone, better pitch. Vocal training isn’t just about singing, it’s about creating a stronger, more confident voice.”

In the latter stages of Whitney Houston’s career, it was Catona who nursed her voice back to health, enabling her to recapture some of the brilliance she had lost. And it was Houston’s death that first got him thinking about where and when the next diva would emerge.

“I realized that the singing world was in jeopardy,” Catona says. “There is a lack of honest, powerful singers—what I consider Great Divas—like Whitney Houston. With her death, the diva flame was extinguished.”

“Without that kind of powerful singer—someone passionate, authentic, with some kind of artistic truth in their heart—singing becomes boring, tedious, repetitive.”

And so The Ultimate Diva contest was born.

Everyone Wins

As well as reinstating the power of the natural voice, Gary Catona wants to reclaim the word “diva,” which has become loaded with negative connotations.

“When people hear it, they think brat, bad temper, high maintenance. But a great diva is one of the world’s most powerful women, with a voice that can change people’s lives.”

Tempers may well fly inside the mansion as the cameras roll and the pressures of competition mount. But for Catona it is less important to find a winner than to re-establish the diva in today’s complex musical landscape.

“Of course there will be a winner, voted by the viewers, but there will be no losers in this program. All the girls will become icons.”