Rage Against The XFactor - The result & what it means.

Well, the sales figures have all been counted & the result is now known.

The race to the prestigious UK Christmas Number 1 position, has been won by Rage Against the Machine & their song "Killing In The Name Of". They "won" by 50,000 sales.
Apparently, the Rage Against The Machine song sold 500,000 copies during this week.

So, what does all this mean?
Well, it certainly raises a lot of issues & not just for the world of music either.

For a start, every single copy of "Killing In The Name Of" sold, all 500,000 of them, was a digital download & they were all sold in the UK only. No physical copies of the track were sold.
Just think about that for a moment.
This has just changed the way that music is sold forever. Yes, downloads have been used to help calculate chart positions for a few years now. But, did anyone really think that a song would get to the Number 1 slot on download sales alone & this quickly too? I doubt it.

As i said in my previous blog post about this topic. This means that ANY song, as long as it's available from certain download sites, can now get into the charts & possibly get to Number 1.
Is there now any real need for a physical copy of a single, or even an album for that matter, to be sold? I'm sure that question will be asked in many record company boardrooms tomorrow morning.

The next point is where does this leave the XFactor?
Sure, the program will continue & i have no real problem with that. But, it has now lost it's hold on the charts. It's invincibility has gone.
I have no doubt that a lot of people bought the XFactor single, as a protest against Rage Against The Machine & yet, it still lost out.

What will happen the next time a TV Talent show winner releases a single?
Will there be another Internet campaign to stop it? I bet there will be & who's to say it won't have the same result.
Granted, i thought the choice of protest song, this time around, was perfect & summed up the whole campaign exactly. But, i'm sure the amount of swearing in "Killing In The Name Of" put a lot of people off & probably contributed to the amount of people who did buy the XFactor song.

But, the biggest & possibly most important lesson to be learned from all of this, is the power of the Internet. If we ever needed an example of the power of the Internet & of people power. Then this is surely it.

I'm sure there will be a lot of people & not just in the world of music, taking stock of this result & analysing what it all means.

After all, we have a General Election in the UK in 2010....