Simon Cowell’s annual karmic balancing exercise  – “Heroes” by the X-Factor Finalists 2010 – remains at number one for a second week.  This actually comes as something of a surprise, since it was dropping off pretty quickly on iTunes.  But then, high profile charity singles are special.  They sell to people who don’t normally buy singles, and to some extent they sell to impulse buyers in supermarkets.  So the iTunes figures can turn out to be unrepresentative.

But only up to a point.  The midweeks show the track dropping to number 5 on Sunday.

The best-selling “regular” single of the week is Ellie Goulding’s cover of “Your Song” at number 2, and that leaves the highest new entry to take the number 3 slot – “Poison” by Nicole Scherzinger.

Scherzinger is a sort of honorary citizen of the X Factor empire, having subbed as a judge during the auditions rounds, and she was given a high-profile slot on the results show to plug this single – which presumably played a major part in getting it up to number 3.  To be honest, it sounded like a bit of a mess on that show.  It’s better on record – it’s a RedOne production, and while the chorus sounds terribly familiar to me, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of it being a sample or interpolation, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s just one of those songs that you feel like you already know.  It’s a bit generic, but it’s okay.  The midweeks show it dropping to 10, so it looks like there’s limited crossover appeal beyond the first-week audience.

Nicole Scherzinger is best known as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, who’ve had ten UK hits since their debut in 2005, including (right at the outset) two number 1s, “Dont’Cha” and “Stickwitu” (yes, really, that’s how you’re meant to spell the title).  She’s also credited as a featured guest on three other singles (actually, she’s credited as a featured guest on two Pussycat Dolls singles as well, which shows how desperate they’ve been to launch her as a solo act).

Curiously, she’s telling people that “Poison” is her debut solo single.  That’s not the case.  She reached number 14 in 2007 with “Baby Love”, the lead single from a projected solo album “Her Name Is Nicole” that was eventually shelved.  It seems they’re trying to airbrush that part of her career out of history, which is odd, since the single wasn’t that bad.  It’s actually got quite a good hook, albeit married to a rather wimpy production.  This sort of thing isn’t unprecedented, but it’s fairly rare.  I remember Shampoo claiming that their major label debut “Trouble” was their first single, disavowing the indie release “Bouffant Headbutt”.

Number 9 is “Who’s That Chick” by David Guetta featuring Rihanna. Apparently there’s two versions of the video – one shot at day, one at night, both showing the same thing.  This is the bonus track from the re-release of Guetta’s album “One Love”, and to be fair, it’s a bit of a break from his usual formula – it sounds more like a Rihanna single.  It’s Guetta’s tenth hit as a credited artist (and the fifth this year), and Rihanna’s 22nd.

In an odd quirk, Rihanna’s previous single “The Only Girl In The World” is at number 7, and her current solo single “What’s My Name” is at 8, giving her three consecutive slots in the top 10.  This hasn’t happened since 1981, shortly after the death of John Lennon – though to be fair, the tendency of record companies to delete older singles in the pre-download era more or less prevented it.

Number 18 is “Christmas Lights” by Coldplay. The days when high-profile acts regularly released Christmas singles are long gone, so this is a bit of an anomaly.  It’s not an album track, so presumably this partly a matter of keeping the band in the public eye – they haven’t released any singles since February 2009 – and partly a matter of them just wanting to stick out a Christmas single, and having the money to spend on a video that will surely never make them any money.  I can’t quite see this becoming a perennial classic – it’s not very festive on a musical level – but to be fair, it’s also a break from Coldplay’s usual formula.  The midweeks have it climbing to 12.  It’s Coldplay’s 13th hit single.

Oh, and since it’s the first week of December, we also have the now-obligatory annual re-entries for “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey at number 22 (best thing she ever recorded, actually), and “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl at number 26.  Completing the back-catalogue re-entries for the week, rather less predictably, is “Creep” by Radiohead at number 39, because novelty contestant Wagner sang it on X Factor the weekend before.

Number 23 is “Girls” by N-Dubz, one of their smaller hits.  It features the dazzling insights into sexual politics that we’ve come to expect from the ever-thoughtful bards, and it’s going down in the midweeks.  Their eleventh hit.

“Take Over Control” by Afrojack featuring Eva Simons is at 24.  It’s a Dutch pop-dance single, and it’s got a quirky enough arrangement to make it more interesting at the cost of being perhaps less catchy.  Afrojack is a producer, Eva Simons is a singer who was part of the winning girl band in the 2004 Dutch version of Popstars: The Rivals, and it’s the first hit for both.

Number 26 is curious – “Turn My Swag On” by Alexa Goddard.  The original is a Soulja Boy song which went nowhere in Britain, but the Greg Street/Keri Hilson version made number 17 earlier in the year after Cher Lloyd sang it on X Factor.  Now, we have a cover version from a woman who’s been using YouTube to try and launch a singing career – and may actually have succeeded, because the midweeks show this climbing into the top 20.  The full version isn’t on YouTube (ironically), but this excerpt appears to be, genuinely, the official video.

This makes two micro-budget YouTube singles in the current top 40 – the other being “Gillian McKeith” by Brett Domino, still on the chart at number 34.  Interesting, not least because these acts are self-releasing their singles rather than going through even minor indie labels – they’re just signing up with online distributors like DittoMusic and cutting out the record label altogether.

Rounding off the week’s new entries at number 29, “Lose My Mind” by the Wanted, the boy band who haven’t quite crossed over to the mainstream pop audience.  It’s dropping next week, so the less said about this one, the better.