I was recently at a party, reclining on a cushionless sofa in the gutted out shisha shed enjoying myself immensely. For a fair while people came and went innocuously, sharing chitchat, wellwishings and stories about life in the History of Art world before a man came and sat down. A third year music tech student, our discourse quickly turned to music and the state of the industry. With our tastes converging on the left field, music blog hidden gems, we found much to enjoy in one another. The drinks flowed. Inevitably, as with all conversations between discerning music lovers, having plundered the depths of our immaculate suggestion pools, we turned to The X-factor. As a grafting singer-songwriter/home-recorder my new friend was dismayed with the clammy, sterile hold ITV’s flagship shit-fest had over the charts and bemoaned its very existence. Although I did not find myself sharing the viscosity of his bile, he is not alone. From the out and out hater to the part-time guilty watcher, at least half the nation shares a common distain for Simon Cowell’s nest egg; and yet it stands strong. For anyone who has encountered the show’s tortuous formulaity, insincerity and eventual chart fodder, the question of why so much hate is easily answered. Whether it is justified however, is an entirely different matter. Let’s look at the facts.
The X Factor has been running yearly since 2004, airing an increasing number of episodes each week to total 290 so far. Each year droves of hopefuls apply for a shot at the big time with the number of auditionees peaking in Series 6 at 200,000, roughly 1/300th of the country’s population. For the final of the same series, 19.7 million viewers tuned in and 10 million votes were cast. In its 9 year career, The X Factor has produced 72 top ten singles, 33 number one singles and 14 number one albums.
What does this mean? Most obviously, that the show is fucking prolific. The sheer creative output and success of the show is overwhelming and as a purveyor of music it is currently second to none. With multi billion dollar labels like WMG and Universal still on the scene however, any criticism concerning overall size can be levelled elsewhere, albeit most likely legitimately. Where The X Factor differs in terms of musical output from traditional record labels is its cultural dipstick, unrivalled in terms of size and sensitivity. Each week the inner core of producers and researchers are privy to a startlingly in-depth picture of the audiences likes and dislikes, painted through votes and social media reaction. Although the 2007 voting scandal hopefully put fears of centralised contestant control to bed, the production team are still fully in control of the song choices and style of the contestants. The outcome of this is that the audience gets exactly what it wants, week in, week out. Whilst music forms a symbiotic relationship between artist and listener, I tend to think the former sets the tone of progression and the latter consumes. With The X Factor, the relationship is flipped and the audience, who are not foreword thinking artistic trailblazers, get spoon-fed a dollop of easily digestible en vogue froth.
If music had not already keeled over into the mucky pool of pop stagnation, the suffocating bear hug of emotional manipulation that is synonymous with the live show puts a bullet throughs its temple. The audience is drawn into the artist’s backstory before hearing their music, inverting the traditional relationship formula and rendering the art secondary to the artist. Set this on an ingeniously constructed stage of visual and audio manipulation, planned controversy and well used but irresistible narrative arcs (bad boy turned good, underachiever turned over achiever, dreamer turned dream weaver) and the show is near impossible to turn off. The upshot of this gloss is that the charts are determined by television rather than music fans.
But still, does this matter? “Real” music fans have always seen pop as the lowest common denominator, always rivalled it for the money, lack of hard work and abundance of cookie-cutter writers. The X Factor really isn’t doing anything different; its just doing it better. More directly and less ashamedly. Undeniably it is shallow and whimsical in its loyalty to its artists, but so to are record labels. The cut throat nature of the game applies to all who attempt to make a living out of music. The real danger lies in its and our complacency. If the British public keep buying into the shiny X Factor product then we can only blame ourselves for the carbon copy boy band that subsequently dominates the airwaves. One can hope that Newton’s law of motion, that with every action there is an equal reaction, applies to music; the enormous scale of generic musical jetsam causing a similarly massive alternative backlash. But still, trends are there to be followed and the dominant one brings with it the most dollar. I just hope one day it will still be possible to move beyond the christmas ballad.