UNIONDALE, N.Y. — At the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum here, Scotty McCreery was the main attraction on the “American Idol Live!” tour, and he looked bored.

He was the winner of the show’s 10th season, which concluded in May, and as the winner he was spared the heavy lifting of the early parts of the concert, which was packed with contemporary pop karaoke from the other 10 finalists on the bill, some coordinated dancing and even more uncoordinated dancing.

When McCreery finally emerged about two hours into the night, he chuckled a bit during the opening lines of Josh Turner’s “Your Man,” the song that he sang ad nauseam during the auditions and that trails him like a lonely puppy. But it was during a duet of “When You Say Nothing at All” with the runner-up Lauren Alaina that McCreery’s mind appeared to be elsewhere. Maybe it was — just a half-hour earlier, while his comrades were sweating it out on stage, he was watching Vince Gill videos on YouTube. “Simply incredible,” he wrote on Twitter.

Stardom is the sum of many small efforts, and McCreery seems already to understand which of those are the smallest. The annual “Idol” tour is the first real moneymaker for the show’s finalists, and for most, also the test run for their post-”Idol” lives. For McCreery, at least, that’s already in full swing. He will release his debut album, “Clear as Day” (Mercury Nashville/19/Interscope), in October. His single, “I Love You This Big,” though, is a melodic snooze that takes no advantage of the many shades of his voice.

For everyone else, including Alaina, who will also release her debut album in October, the “Idol” tour is a chance to convert television fans into music fans and, as such, the finalists played up their differences: Casey Abrams and his jazz-pop, James Durbin and his quasi-metal, Jacob Lusk and his soft gospel, and so on.

This year’s installment also had something many previous tours lacked: a hometown hero. Pia Toscano, from New York, received the loudest reception, backed by supporters in neon-green T-shirts. But while Toscano, touted as a breakout star despite an early elimination and a flat personality, found the soul in Rihanna’s “California King Bed” and gave a surprisingly credible take on Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind (Part II),” she still lacked spark. And her single “This Time” was rote mid-2000s pop; it felt hopelessly outmoded.

She peaked early in the season and has been regressing, like many of this season’s Idols: Take Lusk, the onetime powerhouse who could barely keep a straight face during the show, even during Luther Vandross’ “Never Too Much,” or Alaina, who apart from a few moments during the Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” appeared to have lost her ability to improvise within a song, the skill that made her the most exciting contestant early on.

Some, though, used this tour to cement their new selves. Durbin entered singing Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” at the back of the arena and closed out the night in a Megadeth T-shirt, even if he kept his outrageous voice mostly in check. And Haley Reinhart, who always appeared on the show as if she were about to be scolded — and in fairness, she often was — was one of the highlights here, comfortable on stage even in her dancing, and singing robustly.

The “Idol” tour has evolved from its dour, linear early days into a smartly arranged revue. And this year’s iteration was a lean effort, with just five members in the backing band and no backup singers beyond the Idols themselves, who helped out when needed.

It also demonstrated how to extract additional revenue from a show of its kind, one reason that “The Voice,” the NBC competition that concluded in June, also offered a summer tour of its finalists.

And also why contestants from lesser shows still work lingering fame in small rooms. Johnny Marnell, a contestant on “Platinum Hit,” the recent songwriting competition on Bravo that featured Kara DioGuardi, a former “Idol” judge, played this month at Rockwood Music Hall, a New York spot hospitable to local singer-songwriters.

Marnell is a featherweight singer but has an easy way with songwriting; certainly he could work with a Jason Mraz or a Matt Nathanson. On “Platinum Hit” he griped about his career as a software programmer, but while his reality TV stint might have been a blip, it certainly helped fill the room.

“Platinum Hit” was just one new music competition fighting for attention this year, a crowded field that will soon include “The X Factor,” Simon Cowell’s new show, imported from Britain, which will make its debut on Fox next month, among others. (“Karaoke Battle USA” on ABC, anybody?)