Misanthropy

This time last year, X factor winner Alexandra Burke released a sickly sweet cover of 'Hallalujah' that was expected to follow in the footsteps of previous winners and march straight to number one in the Christmas charts. But this time round, there was opposition: a campaign that gathered momentum through Facebook and other networking sites, urging fans to go out and buy the far superior version of the song as recorded by Jeff Buckley. (Not that it takes a lot to be far superior to X Factor...) The X Factor single was released by Simon Cowell's label SyCo, a joint venture with Sony Music. Buckley's version was released by Columbia, a division of Sony Music. In the end, Burke took the top slot, but the biggest winner was Sony.

This year, there's a new Facebook campaign afoot to stop the X factor winner getting to the top slot by enccouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine's 'Killing in the Name of' instead. Which was released on Epic Records... a division of Sony music. Regardless of who is actually at number one on Christmas day, the outright winner will be Sony.

Anyone else spotting a pattern here?

Of course, when you look at it rationally it's slightly less suspect. With the amount of music owned by the Big Four record companies, I doubt this is exactly the first (or second) time that a race for the Christmas number one has been an in-house affair. Which if you think about it is sort of way more disturbing than any conspiracy theory.

All the same, it would be safest all round if we join together as a country, hunt down Simon Cowell and burn him at the stake. To be fair, I do actually quite watching him being brutally honest at psychotically self-deluded talentless morons in the early rounds. But I have a low attention span, and besides, my fingers are cold. Burn the witch. Burn him now.

In other news, I took this afternoon off to go Christmas shopping. Next time, I need to remember to take pepper spray, spikey boots and a low-orbit tactical nuclear device.