I notice that the bookies are offering odds of 17-to-one on a Beatles track being the Christmas Number One single.
I might well have a flutter on that, so I might!
When Apple first announced the arrival of The Beatles on iTunes I, like most other folks, said "So what? --’the kids’ today dinnae even know who The Beatles are and the people who know who The Beatles are already have all their music anyway!"
But it seems we were all wrong and Apple have once again tapped into a goldmine that no-one else suspected even existed; Someone out there is buying Beatles tracks by the bucketload.
EMI has sold more than 450,000 Beatles albums via Apple’s iTunes store in the seven days since the band’s entire back catalogue was made available to download digitally.
The music company said 2 million Beatles singles have also been downloaded.
Mind you. I suspect that I’m indulging in a bit of wishful thinking here. I’d like to believe that The Beatles could grab the Christmas Number One slot and at least pay lip-service to the idea that the music charts have anything whatsoever to do with music, creativity and talent anymore. But in reality we know that they’re little more than a storefront for the conveyor belt of offensively inoffensive “Music Flavoured Audio Product”, spewing unceasingly, these days, from what are called, without a trace of irony, ‘Talent Shows’.
These shows are the most cynical and manipulative way that big business has found of relieving the terminally gullible and idiotic British public of their money, since the supermarkets decided that Easter, Hallowe’en and Mother’s Day should join _Christmas in the panoply of annual ‘Fleece the Nation’ festivals.
The sad reality is that the Christmas Number One is almost certainly going to be whatever the marketing men behind X-Craptor or Britain’s Got Dross decided it was going to be, back at the beginning of the summer, when the Christmas TV schedules were being worked out.
And as planned, all up and down the land the anointed one’s CDs and DVDs will fly off the shelves and into Christmas stockings, to be played once or twice over the festive period, before being banished to the depths of a cupboard with a nagging feeling in the back of the mind that you’ve been ‘swindled’ in some way…
…at least until the next round of ‘talentless shows’ are vomited onto our screens in the new year, and the mass hypnosis begins all over again.
The whirring and plopping sounds you can hear are the bodies of John Lennon and _George Harrison spinning in their graves, whilst the music industry shits on them.