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.

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The chart domination of X Factor hasn’t been quite so comprehensive this year as last, perhaps because the decision to sell performances as (chart ineligible) downloads has diverted some of the sales that might otherwise have gone to originals from the back catalogue.  But it’s still a significant force.  Between present contestants, past contestants, judges, and back catalogue material performed in the finals, it accounts for seven of the top 40 singles, with several more tracks having been promoted on the results show.

But this week, it’s that special time of the year when Simon Cowell strives for karmic balance.  Yes, it’s the annual X Factor finalists’ charity single at number 1, and this year they’re once again raising money for the troops with a cover version of “Heroes”.  Never subtle, that Simon Cowell.

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Rihanna lasted two weeks at the top, but we now return to our regularly scheduled X Factor dominance.  The current number one – and it’ll be a one-week affair because the annual X Factor charity single will displace it on Sunday – is “Love You More” by JLS.

JLS were the runners-up in the 2008 series of X Factor.  In an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment, Simon Cowell didn’t take up his option to sign them, only for Epic to sweep in and launch them as a proper R&B-ish boy band.  They’ve been genuinely successful – this is their fifth single and their fourth number one – so despite being technically outside the X Factor fold, they’ve been written back into the show’s success story.  Simon Cowell would certainly much rather people were talking about this bunch than Joe McElderry, I suspect.

“Love You More” is an inoffensive mid-paced ballad.  It’s also the official charity single for the BBC’s annual “Children in Need” telethon, but chances are it would have made number 1 without the help.

It successfully fends off the challenge of Ellie Goulding’s “Your Song” cover from the John Lewis ads, which nonetheless climbed 36 places to land at number 3, and looks like it’ll be around for a while.  I’m still not sure about it, to be honest… it feels a little bit calculated to me, but hey, it’s obviously connecting with an audience.

If you believe the newspapers, of course, the big story of last week was supposed to be the debut on iTunes of the Beatles’ back catalogue.  An idea had taken hold with the more gullible sort of journalist that when the Beatles’ songs were finally made available online, there would be a massive chart invasion.  This was never especially likely.  Anyone who really cares about owning Beatles songs has had forty years to make their purchase; it’s not like they’re hard to get.   Nor are the albums sensibly priced on iTunes.  For example, they’re charging £17.99 for the double albums.  But Amazon are selling them for less than half that, so if you’re buying them on iTunes, well, bad choice.

What could potentially make a difference is the ability to download individual songs.  The Beatles have always been very careful about protecting the way their music is presented.  But yes, you can now buy individual tracks from iTunes.  As it turns out, though, there wasn’t much demand for that either.  You have to query whether the Beatles’ audience is particularly interested in iTunes, and whether the typical iTunes consumer is actually all that bothered about the Beatles.  After all the hype, only one Beatles track made the chart – “Hey Jude”, scraping on at number 40.

Ironically, there might actually be more Beatles songs in the chart this week.  Why?  Because they did a Beatles theme week on X Factor.  The midweeks have “Hey Jude” climbing to 35 and “Let It Be” at number 30 – a slightly bigger impact, but hardly earth-shattering.

Also entering the most recent chart:

• “Like a G6” by the Far East Movement featuring the Cataracs and Dev at number 6.  This is the breakthrough hit for an Asian-American hip-hop group who’ve been around for years without previously attracting much notice, only for this to be a hit in America and around Europe.  It’s minimal, to put it mildly, but it’s a good hook.  A G6, if you’re wondering, is a Gulfstream G650 – it’s a private jet.  The Cataracs are a California alt-rap duo who’ve similarly never attracted any previous notice in Britain, and Dev is a rapper who appears to get a credit because they sampled the “like a G6” bit from the bridge of her single “Booty Bounce” (video features some strobe-effect rapid edits, btw, but bonus points for making a video that features absolutely no bouncing of any description).
• “Safe” by Westlife at number 10.  Self-reviewing single from the turn of the century blandly balladeering boy band who seem to never go away.  The days when they consistently got number 1 hits are behind them and to be honest I’m not quite sure who’s still buying their records.  (Since the single is likely to drop out of the top twenty in its second week, the answer may well be “fans who never broke the habit and nobody else”.)  Nonetheless, their 25th hit, every single one of which made the top 10.
• “What’s My Name” by Rihanna featuring Drake at number 18.  This is going to be the second official single from her new album, and while the record company would probably prefer to keep the focus on “Only Girl In The World” for the moment – still at number 2, by the way – this is getting some spill-over sales as an album track download, presumably because they’re already pushing it in other territories so there’s a video available.  (Another track from the album, “S&M”, is also picking up downloads, and charts at number 55.)  Her 21st UK hit, and the third and biggest for Canadian rapper Drake.
• “Game Over” by Tinchy Stryder featuring Chipmunk at number 22.  Well, that’s how the charts are listing the artist credit.  Stryder’s YouTube channel gives it as “Tinchy Stryder featuring Giggs, Professor Green, Tinie Tempah, Devlin, Example and Chipmunk.”  Stryder gets the leap credit because it’s on his album, as near as I can make out, but it’s basically an all-star jam single.  Not especially commercial – it’s a bit of a dirge, to be honest, and the first verse is almost intolerably dull.  Perhaps a case of crossover grime/pop acts trying to reconnect with their original audience.  Stryder’s seventh hit, Chipmunk’s eighth, and the rest apparently technically don’t count.  Still, a break from the normal single release for virtually everyone involved.
• “Shame” by Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow, re-entering at 31 presumably as a side-effect of the Take That album coming out.  (It sold over half a million in its first week.)  The track made number 2 on its original release in October but dropped out of the charts rather more quickly than it deserved to.
• “Just Drive” by Alistair Griffin at number 38.  This is an oddity.  Alistair Griffin was a contestant in the second series of the BBC’s underperforming talent show Fame Academy back in 2003, when he came second to Alex Parks.  He had two hits in 2004 (including the forgettable double A-side “Bring It On”/”My Lover’s Prayer” which got to number 5) but pretty much hasn’t been heard from since.  This is an official single, but it doesn’t have a video or any real promotion behind it – it was, however, used by the BBC to soundtrack a video package at the end of their coverage of the Formula 1 season and seems to have charted solely on the strength of that, giving Griffin a much-delayed third hit.

To the surprise of a lot of people, this week’s number one is “The Only Girl In The World” by Rihanna, which hangs on for a second week.  So far as the record industry are concerned, this wasn’t really in the script.  The general assumption was that Take That would top the charts with ease.  But it turns out that the British really, really like that Rihanna record.

And so it’s a number 2 placing for “The Flood” by Take That.

For the benefit of the Americans out there, it’s worth recapping the story.  Take That were a five-piece boy band who were hugely popular in Britain, and pretty successful in the rest of Europe, in the first half of the 1990s.  With a core fanbase of teenage girls and a secondary fanbase of gay men (that’s not facetiousness, they started off playing the gay nightclub circuit), they updated the boy band format for a new generation and did it very, very well.  And while the group had been manufactured, they served largely as a vehicle for songs written by one of their members, Gary Barlow.

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