Interesting; none of his "acts" make the year's Top 30 so far!

Kelly Clarkson is No25, if you can call her Simon's.

The biggest home grown Syco hit is Little Mix hanging over from last Christmas at No 40.

JK2006 wrote:
Interesting; none of his "acts" make the year's Top 30 so far!

Kelly Clarkson is No25, if you can call her Simon's.

The biggest home grown Syco hit is Little Mix hanging over from last Christmas at No 40.What chart are you talking about JK? Your record of the year or another?

Sales of singles in the UK so far this year; mainly downloads from iTunes.

JK2006 wrote:
Sales of singles in the UK so far this year; mainly downloads from iTunes.Can't find it JK. So is Labrinth in there anywhere? "Beneath Your Beautiful" with Emeli Sandé is pretty big (#1 anyway) although I guess that's too recent to show up yet....

Ah, K, not officially published - we have our sources (many at the majors) to keep us up to speed!

Next To Me is 9th with just under 600,000 sales.

For the Record of the Year, we try to look at sales for the entire calendar year; this year the top sellers are hold overs from 2011 - like Gotye (1.300,000) and Carly Rae (1,000,000).

Which was why I mentioned Simon; X Factor and so on boosted instant promotion sales but since the tracks were crap with little crossover appeal, they drop off very fast and Little Mix only did a few thousand in 2012 after they broke big last Christmas.

Syco tends not to make great records.

Having said that, Leona was a real hit; ditto Boyle and One Direction's Beautiful was very strong, I thought. Labyrinth is doing well too. But more 2 than 1 at the moment.

JK2006 wrote:
Syco tends not to make great records.Music is just the vehicle, surely the music sales aren't that important to these acts? Have a look at the estimated wealth for some of the acts:

Cher Lloyd £500k
Olly Murs £1.3m
Jedward £4.5m
Alexandra Burke £5m
Leona Lewis £11m
One Direction £26.3m

How much of that was made with actual sales of music? Has Jedward actually made ANY money this way? How about Cher Lloyd? Leona Lewis' output has been tiny since she won X-Factor (6 years ago), I can't see her takings from sales being £11m.

So do Syco actually care whether they're knocking out great records or not? Sad I know and destructive to the industry as a whole, but when the cold truth is that the money is no longer in music, can you blame them?

No; I agree K and I've always said - there should be room for all kinds of music in our industry and we shouldn't blame Simon; we should blame the other so-called executives who are failing to make similar sums and to break/make different kinds of music.

But I do worry that Simon has wasted a great opportunity to make, break and find really great music.

When he produced Robson and Jerome I told him off for not sending them for one session to Nashville - getting 3 or 4 US country based hits to add to the album, and selling 6 million instead of just 500,000 UK collections.

He agreed and improved the global appeal of his acts with Five.

It appears to me that Simon kicked himself for giving Fuller the TV side of Pop Idol and made amends by launching the X-Factor where he would profit from the music, TV and everything else (notably also the theme tune after witnessing Cathy Dennis coining it in).

Therefore I find it hard to believe that Simon is in it for the music, although you know him so you may be able to correct me on that.