AS MOST of you all know by now, The X Factor auditions are over and the final 12 contestants have been chosen for the final round.
Personally, I thought Cheryl Cole chose poorly in ditching the American lad. Simon did likewise in choosing Olly – and as for Louis, the last thing we want is those two little rocket-heided imps on the cover of GQ.
The only judge who nailed it with her selections, I thought, was Dannii Minogue.
So, from here on in, the next three months of the charts are destined to follow a stock formula.
It’s all wrapped up, there’s nothing left to chance.
Last year’s winner Alexandra Burke will release her debut single from her first album in the weeks to come.
A rather average effort I thought, with the standard American rapper-for-hire Flo-rida adding a “gangsta flava”.
Following that will be the Christmas number one from the winner of the show, perhaps preceded by a group cover song for charity.
I admit The X Factor is good TV – but it’s all to do with TV and nothing to do with music.
You can quite plainly see those contestants who are there just to make up the numbers, with no chance of qualifying for the final let alone walking off with the Christmas number one.
It’s a factory conveyer belt churning out a couple of pop acts who have a wee taste of success, an album, and a tour ... but once the 15 minutes elapse, the curtain falls.
What about the psychological damage done to some contestants? We all watched the Susan Boyle meltdown last year on Simon Cowell’s other show Britain’s Got Talent.
Some folk are just not equipped to cope with such a sudden meteoric rise to fame. And for those clearly talented individuals who get so close, to taste defeat is just soul-destroying rough justice.
Commercial music and films are mostly geared towards kids these days.
No one makes films for adults any more, in my opinion: as long as there are kids infatuated with our celebrity-obsessed society, giving shows like X Factor the following they need, then the times certainly won’t be a-changing.
I was lucky to have enough disposable readies to afford a quarter of kola cubes back in the day and my parents were even less fortunate. Nowadays kids have mobiles and laptops with the tech know-how to sell their old toys on eBay if they need cash.
The music business has changed to such a degree that modern artists will never achieve the status of yesteryear’s stars – the business won’t create another star like Michael Jackson or Elvis.
One of the saddest aspects of the music biz is the fact that there may very well be another Bob Dylan out there with bags of talent, but he’ll never be signed, recorded and released because all the money and interest is directed elsewhere.
I wonder how many years The X Factor has left in it; Big Brother is 10 years old but stayed on the shelf long after its sell-by date.
Will the hit talent show eventually perish as well?
Something tells me it has a lot more staying power and won’t be vanishing from our screens any time soon.