Tired of Simon Cowells pet karaoke project stealing the christmas number one?

[TooNice]

2000 - Bob the Builder....

I must admit, that year I did kidn of hope for Eminem to pull a 2nd week number 1 with 'Stan'. Yeah, part had to do with the fact that it's not a 'typical' Christmas entry, but it was also my favourite 'current' song at the time. It was the last time I cared about Christmas no1, and possibly no1s full stop.

[IBM]

spell the proceeding word correctly

*cough* preceding *cough*

[Stoo]

It looks like Joe will have his no.1 anyway looking at the sales charts this week, so no harm done really.

The "battle" last week didn't really net Sony that much extra income (I had to giggle when people mentioned shares.. 1 weeks sales on one single, in one country.. is not really going to do anything for the shareprice.. lol) £250,000 in revenue total, so profit would likely be a lot less.

Oddly, individual sales figures are considered to be confidential..

Due to a confidentiality agreement with the record companies, The Official UK Charts Company is unable to supply sensitive sales information to members of the public - even for academic study.

Interestingly enough, to get a "Platinum" record you'd have to sell over a million copies, not any more:
Singles: Platinum - 600,000 copies / Gold 400,000 copies / Silver 200,000 copies.
Albums: Platinum - 300,000 copies / Gold 100,000 copies / Silver 60,000 copies.

As for Joe?

I guess it'll go something like this:

2 Albums, 6-8 singles, perhaps a UK tour, and the obligatory book or two - the "My life so far" one seems inevitable..

Perhaps, if he's lucky and someone (Cheryl?) guides him, he might slip the chains a la Will Young and go off and do his own thing (Musical theatre?) after making the most of his publicity. Otherwise he'll sink without trace like most of the others.

Hopefully he won't end up like TLC did working flat out for years, and ending up bankrupt at the end of it due to the way the industry is rigged.. (Basically owing the record company all the money..)

Hopefully as people get more confident in buying digitally, more and more artists will go independent and direct, which is partly what the industry is afraid of - cutting out all the middlemen..

[Mike Fishcake]

Look, it takes me over a week to rebuild my irony detector, will you all please stop it?

[directhex]

It looks like Joe will have his no.1 anyway looking at the sales charts this week, so no harm done really.

The "battle" last week didn't really net Sony that much extra income (I had to giggle when people mentioned shares.. 1 weeks sales on one single, in one country.. is not really going to do anything for the shareprice.. lol) £250,000 in revenue total, so profit would likely be a lot less.

Oddly, individual sales figures are considered to be confidential..



Interestingly enough, to get a "Platinum" record you'd have to sell over a million copies, not any more:
Singles: Platinum - 600,000 copies / Gold 400,000 copies / Silver 200,000 copies.
Albums: Platinum - 300,000 copies / Gold 100,000 copies / Silver 60,000 copies.

As for Joe?

I guess it'll go something like this:

2 Albums, 6-8 singles, perhaps a UK tour, and the obligatory book or two - the "My life so far" one seems inevitable..

Perhaps, if he's lucky and someone (Cheryl?) guides him, he might slip the chains a la Will Young and go off and do his own thing (Musical theatre?) after making the most of his publicity. Otherwise he'll sink without trace like most of the others.

Hopefully he won't end up like TLC did working flat out for years, and ending up bankrupt at the end of it due to the way the industry is rigged.. (Basically owing the record company all the money..)

Hopefully as people get more confident in buying digitally, more and more artists will go independent and direct, which is partly what the industry is afraid of - cutting out all the middlemen..

Let's try some of those fag-packet sums.

Firstly, we assume that of the 40p per track wholesale, 11p went to the artists, and 29p to the record label. This number is a bit made up, but based on the old "$0.11 from $0.99 of itunes tracks goes to the artist" number. So that's £130k to SyCo, £145k to Epic Records, £50k to Joe, and £55k to RATM. The percentage of SyCo/Epic's revenue which moves upwards to SME is unknown at this point, but let's remember that people like Cowell will be paid at this level - so SME will have received less revenue than the £275k "raw" number you could reach above.

HOWEVER, and this is where Joe would have been better off without X-Factor, when a band signs to a label, the value of the deal (e.g. the "£1m record deal") is in fact the debt, on paper, of the artist to the label - cost of promotion, recording kit, pressing discs, and so on. And that debt is repaid from the ARTIST portion of a sale, not the label portion. So Joe owed SyCo £1m for winning X-Factor, and by giving every penny of royalties from the Xmas #2 to Cowell, he's still £950,000 in debt to the label.

RATM have done enough live work over the years (the only way to turn a profit in music) not to have any outstanding debt to their label, but the thing about popbitches like Joe is they don't HAVE a live act, because they're entirely the product of committees and studio engineering.

tl;dr: No matter what happens, Joe will die penniless in a ditch

[jim]

My girlfriend pointed out this morning that you'd do a lot better by signing up for Who Wants to be a Millionaire than X Factor... sums it all up fairly aptly in my view.

[manwithnoname]

It always grated with me that "free" 2 month (or however long) advertisement campaign on TV should guarantee you the Christmas number 1, so I'm happy to see anthing else in it's place.
I'm also impressed the ratm campaign evolved into a fund raiser for shelter, currently over £91,000 has been via http://www.justgiving.com/ratm4xmas

[santa claus]

There's better metal though...like this for example.