The Christmas Number One Price War sees Rage Against The Machine taking the lead against The X Factor
December 15th, 2009 • 37 Comments
For the most part, the Christmas Number One has been shit. I mean, Rolf Harris beat The Beatles’ in 1969 with ‘Two Little Boys’ to become the last pop topper of The Sixties. Since then, we’ve had Mr Blobby, St Winifred’s School Choir, Bob The Builder and Mull of Kintyre. It’s hardly a glorious time for music. Even Renée and Renato topped the charts back in 1982.
That’s not stopped a Facebook campaign trying to bring back some imagined glory to the festive chart topper. As you will have invariably heard, there’s a push by people to get ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against The Machine to the top of the charts and thus far, it’s going remarkably well.
As such, a price war has broken out. Joe McElderry’s version of The Climb is available from Tesco and Amazon for a mere 29p. Play is currently offering the single for 65p and HMV has it selling for 79p. The X Factor single is not currently available to stream on Spotify, ensuring that the track will get huge first week sales.
Of course, Amazon have got form when it comes to this. Last year, they did the same thing as they attempted to get a foothold in a market largely dominated by Apple’s iTunes.
However, things are seemingly not going to plan. A report from Amazon.co.uk this morning sees Rage Against The Machine just ahead of McElderry. ‘Killing in the Name’ currently accounts for 50.3% of the total sales of the two tracks combined with ‘The Climb’ accounting for 49.7%.
‘The lead continues to change and it looks like it will go down until the very last minute before we know who the winner in this chart battle will be,’ said Julian Monaghan, head of music buying at Amazon.co.uk Ltd. ‘Should Rage Against The Machine take the number one spot, it will be the most unlikely Christmas number one in UK music history. ‘Killing in the Name’ would certainly be an interesting addition on the track lists of the Christmas compilation albums that come out every year.’
Of course, whether this whole thing is a good idea or not is another matter entirely (feel free to debate it in the comments) as both acts are signed to Sony, and thereby, set to make a certain shareholder in the company called Simon Cowell wealthy either way. Not to mention the fact that Rage Against The Machine probably don’t give a hoot about having a Christmas Number One in the UK. What are your thoughts? Will The X Factor lose out in 2009?
“Should Rage Against The Machine take the number one spot, it will be the most unlikely Christmas number one in UK music history. ‘Killing in the Name’ would certainly be an interesting addition on the track lists of the Christmas compilation albums that come out every year.’”
forgotten about Iron Maiden, Bring your daughter to the slaughter then?
The irony of a grass roots campaign based around a song whose chorus is “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” seems too great to go unrecorded
Why does this smell like a conspiracy, sony,cowell will both benefit from this and the cattle that buy either song will be lining there pockets.
The whole concept of Rage Against the Machine is to ‘fight the power’ thats why thats the chosen song. Its people sick of the x factor juggernaught having the monopoly on the Christmas number one.
After all the tag line for the campaign is ‘fuck you i wont buy what you sell me’ taking after killing in the name ofs famous line ‘fuck you i wont do what you tell me’
I’m happy to buy the RAGE single, Zach De La Rocha probably needs the money.
It’s all going in Sony’s pocket, nice little bit of viral sales technique there.
I’ve bought RAGE, for 65p, just to try to make a point against X Factor – I don’t care if Sony publish both records, its not Sony I’m going against, plus my wife wanted Olly to win so I’ve been ordered to buy multiple Rage copies out of spite lol
@Chris Hill – Daughter/Slaughter wasn’t a Christmas number one – it was the first week in January.
Receieved an email from Amazon this morning saying that I’d been given credit for £1 worth of MP3s as I’d “spent more than £5″ on MP3s with them in the past. Despite never spending anything on MP3s with Amazon (they must be referencing when I downloaded MP3s from them when they had that glitch last year) I went and downloaded RATM.
Despite Sony winning either way, I’d much rather a genuine band went to number 1 to make a point that the generic X-factor pop rubbish is just that – rubbish!
I’ve never followed the X-factor but did see the final this year round. When the result was announced and Dermot O’Leary whipped out that pre-manufactured single for the cameras pretty much summed up X-factor and other ‘talent’ shows in a split second.
Do the downloads still count if they are sold for 29p?
@Andy, I stand corrected. I did google it before I posted, seems its a popular misconception.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2228594104
look on the official page for instructions of what do and do not count
I’m buying Aphex Twin instead as he’s not signed to Sony.
@Chris Hill. Following a childhood spent obsessing over the pop charts, I regularly enjoy losing myself in http://www.chartstats.com/
Cowell, otherwise known as Musical Satan, must be rubbing his hands together in hiptop’d hair glee.
Although RATM are on the Epic label, and Joe is on Syco/Sony (sicko or Phsyco?), i’m sure its driving sales for the Geordie warbler as the 19million loosers that watched the final hope to win the day for the little shit.
Honestly how much is Simon Cowell going to get out of a 29p purchase of Killing in the Name from Amazon?
I’m guessing f*** all.
Those of you that are planning to vote with your wallets, please remember that it has to cost more than 40p to count towards the chart.
PaganWolf stop talking rubbish. The FB group have confirmed Amazon’s offer still counts on the charts.
@Andy Dawson. If you’ve misspent your entire childhood following the charts, then surely you’d know that Chris Hill is really the Bionic Santa in disguise.
Like Wolfy here, I am 99% sure that any sales sub 40p won’t count in the chart, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Cowell is in some way responsible for it being sold at that price to con people into buying it but not counting in the charts.
That would probably knock 50-100 thousand sales off the total which might be crucial, assuming of course that Simon doesn’t just cough up the money from his own pocket to assure that his “coca cola” advert single gets to number 1.
Amazon have confirmed that sale sbelow 40p do still count toward the total.
Source: http://www.amazon.co.uk/tag/mp3/forum/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx28IXQIV6LBRU4&cdMsgNo=24&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx3U7MN4WDHUQUA&cdMsgID=Mx1V43X5O8FDTWD#Mx1V43X5O8FDTWD
@Quietus…. ’nuff said
It is a laff reading all this stuff and how people are taking it sooooo seriously…
Lie back and enjoy the banter – not everyone or there’ll be no banter
it’s not about whose pocket the money goes into, its about having a kick ass song as christmas number one, instead of the xfactor winners, which it has been for the past FOUR years!!
i think everyone should come together and buy the rage single just to make history, it would make my christmas!
You’re all individuals.
@givenup Amazon have said it counts in a statement, but there is still confusion. I think Amazon may be selling it as a loss leader and that it does count.
REMEMBER GUYS – NO CLICKING ON AFFILATE LINKS LIKE HOTUKDEALS TO BUY THE SONG – it will mean you have been led to the site by an affilate, who benefits from you doing this, so then your purchase does not count towards the chart. THE LINKS IN THE FACEBOOK GROUP ARE FINE, as they are just product links, not affilate links, they are not benefitting.
Alse the group have raised over £20,000 for charity which is amazing – http://www.ragegroup.co.uk is the shortcut, which will always link to the Facebook group, or the backup group when the page falls from time to time
Apparently, the “dealer” price has to be above 40p – and as Amazon have said their singles do count towards the chart (as have the offical charts company), they must be losing at least 11p for every download.
RATM: Raging Against The X Factor
I reckon that the powers that be probably saw what happened last year with the Jeff Buckley and Alexandra Burke and probably planted the idea of creating this RATM campaign.
I reckon that most people who would think RATM would be an awesome xmas No 1, probably are not in the normal demographic who buy singles (at anytime not just Christmas). This battle ultimately makes money for the record company that normally they wouldn’t get. All this can be done without risking x factor achieving that no 1 spot because 1) X factor/ joe fans are obsessive (just look at how many votes he got) and 2) the CD is available to buy as a easy and cheap stocking filler for the X factor fan.
Krispie, you’re just wrong. I know the Morters – it’s just a bit of fun that caught the public imagination and went viral. Proabably due to the work Fuck.
that would be “word” fuck.
The point of Christmas number 1 is that it was, by and large, WONDERFULLY shit! It was a battle between the bizarre and the just plain bad, and it was FUN! X Factor sucked all the fun out of the Christmas chart by making it predictable. Even if this campaign doesn’t succeed, at least we’ve had a proper race to the Christmas number 1 for once.
Also your assertation that RATM don’t give a crap about all this is incorrect – Tom Morello has praised it publicly: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8415750.stm (and even better, promised to give some of the royalties to charity).
Either way Cowell’s going to make some money. I would prefer Rage to be Xmas number 1 ‘The Climb’ is such a weak song. Article here http://bit.ly/63MEbi worth reading and there’s a list of websites you can get the Rage song and prices. I think Amazon is the cheapest though.
I would just like to voice my disgust at the including Mull Of Kintyre,(I presume slightly jokingly but sill),in that pile of shit at the top. A peaceful song about a truly beautiful place written by one of the world’s greatest ever musical geniuses and the first popular music track t use the Scottish national instrument in it’s recording. It was very party like and very Christmassy and should in no way be related to Bob the fucking builder! I’m a big Beatles fan but as such am not one of the delusional ones who pretend that McCartney broke up the Beatles or that he got shit after they ended. It simply isn’t true. He lost his similarly genius song partner who helped create the classics of the days of Beatlemania but Mull Of Kintyre is indeed a classic Christmas number one and shall be remembered as such.
RATM FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE PPL!
)
We’re all individuals!
I’m not.
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