Before you all go out and buy the Malcolm Middleton Christmas single - woah there, and read this.

I got my monthly artist update from Last Fm recently but as part of the blurb there was this -

“The race for the UK Christmas Number 1 used to be fun and unpredictable. Now, thanks to X Factor, it’s a done deal before it’s even started. We think this is boring. We don’t want some rubbish one hit wonder hijacking a great British institution every year. So we decided to do something about it.

Introducing the first Last.fm Christmas Chart Attack. We searched the site and found three up-and-coming bands we know are a million times better than anything Simon Cowell will inflict on us. We want you to decide which one we take into the Christmas Charts this year.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I fail to get excited about this type of competition. It stinks. The current system which tips up-and-coming-bands, is the same system which has the power/money to put advertising in NME and get them interviews on the telly, and is the same system which pats itself on the back every year because they got it right *again*. It’s the equivalent of the fashion industry saying “brown will be the ‘in’ colour this season” and then only selling brown clothes. Wow! You said that everyone would be wearing brown… and they all are wearing brown. What foresight. Have some bucks.

(I’m well out of my field of ‘excited music fan’ here, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the fashion analogy holds true as well.)

Anyhoo, with a sigh I clicked the link to see who ‘our’ challengers to Simon Cowell would be.

Lucky Soul!

I bloody love Lucky Soul! Although they seem to have caught the up-and-coming conveyor belt, like The Pipettes before them (who also clambered on board that conveyor belt with the same 60’s girl group references which were not generally allowed to look at the conveyor belt, let alone get on it) I’m really happy about this one. It’s a style of music which has been left alone for too long.

So if you like them too, pop along to the Last FM Christmas Chart Attack page, vote for them/buy the single/whatever it asks.

You could do much worse than to go out and buy the Malcolm Middleton Christmas single too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.