L.A. Reid On "X Factor": "It Was The Worst Thing I've Ever Done" (INTERVIEW)

L.A. Reid has slammed "The X Factor", in which he served as a judge for the first two seasons. 






L.A. Reid, 59, calls the talent show "the worst thing I've ever done."

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the music exec said: "The first season, yes, I had a great time."

"It was a little bit of a vacation. I'd been making music, working at running labels for a long time, and it was a little bit of: "Let me just have some fun." But the second season I was fully engaged trying run a label, and it wasn't fun anymore," he went on.

"And more importantly, it really affected my taste - it almost destroyed it," L.A. Reid revealed.

"It completely threw me off - by the way, I have a book coming out soon, and it'll all be on my book," the musician laughed, noting: "But yeah, what works for television isn't necessarily the thing that works in the traditional journey of music, so I adjusted my taste for television. But the truth is, I lowered my bar - my bar was quite high, if I'm being honest, and as a result I didn't have the same level of success. The bar is quite high again now, but it was damaging. I worked with Simon Cowell, who I love and have great respect for and he has great taste, but being around him for that long, I started to take on his taste, and I'm an amateur at having his taste - I'm good at my kind of taste."

"We definitely had the audience," Reid explained, adding: "And I can't criticize Simon because it was his show, and we did well. But I think he made the statement that if we didn't do 20 million viewers, it was a failure. We did 14 million, which is actually a runaway success, but because we didn't do 20, it was a failure. To be honest? The truth is: The Voice cleaned our clock."


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