The host dishes on what’s ahead for next season’s show, including longer blind auditions.

Coming off of Wednesday night’s season finale, The Voice host Carson Daly talked to The Hollywood Reporter about what’s next for both the music competition show and its superstar coaches — Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton — all of whom will be back. (On Thursday, NBC made it official, announcing that all four coaches will sit in the red chairs when the second season launches next year.)

The Hollywood Reporter: Javier Colon was crowned the first Voice winner last night. Did America make the right choice?

Carson Daly: I don’t think they could have made a wrong choice. Our whole goal was to put the best artist on the stage all year long and by the time we got to our top 16, you’re looking at really strong artists. I think they definitely got it right.

THR: What’s your advice for these contestants who are entering – or in some cases returning to — the music industry looking to translate their success on The Voice into a sustainable career?

Daly: They’ve got this great launching pad, so now it’s about being smart with their business. Javier has a record deal so he has to really get to know his record reps. It’s not time to go on vacation. It’s time to get with your producers and start thinking about making a record. I talked to a lot of our top eight finalists at our party and this has brought them exposure that has gotten most of them managers and record producers. A lot of them are already putting careers together.

THR: What has this show meant to NBC, which for many years has really struggled?

Daly: It’s meant a lot on a lot of different levels. Most importantly, The Voice has been the first example of NBC in a new regime in a post-Comcast world. You had [NBC entertainment chairman] Bob Greeblatt and [NBCUniversal chief executive] Steve Burke making a commitment to quality. They’re investing in quality and putting content in front of commerce. This is the beginning – and The Voice is a great example — of how NBCUniveral can function and successfully move forward.

THR: Looking ahead to next season, what changes or additions should we expect?

Daly: We’ve been taking notes all along. This first season was a real time-crunch for us. We wanted to catch lightening in a bottle, coming on before The X Factor and at the tail end of Idol and having our coaches with their crazy schedules. So this was 18 hours of TV that we really rushed to get there. We didn’t sacrifice quality but along the way we definitely made some notes about what we wanted to do for season two.

THR: Such as?

Daly: One is expanding, but not too much. With success in network TV, often they overdo it once they’ve got a hit. They tend to just sort of whore it out, if you will. We’re going to have longer blind auditions. We only had 2 episodes of it this season and all of a sudden we were into the battle rounds. I think there will be at least four weeks of our blind auditions so that people can really sink their teeth into that discovery process.

THR: Any other changes?

Daly: We hang our hat on the fact that our coaches are mentoring these artists and not judging them. The relationship between them was something that was really cool. I mean, Blake put Dia and Xenia on his private jet. In season two, you’ll set that relationship much more in depth and with a little more quality time than we got to do it in season one.

THR: There’s been a lot of buzz last night and this morning about whether the coaches are or aren’t coming back. What can you tell us?

Daly: I started the red carpet last night under the assumption from what little knowledge I have as the host of the show that we’re all coming back. By the time I got to the end of the red carpet, with the media asking the most asinine questions, I heard that. They really created these rumors that I can tell you I have never heard before. As far as I know, everybody is coming back.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter