Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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December 11, 2007
Lyrics, X-Factor and Christmas number one
Until recently, people used to complain that the traditional Christmas number one race had been hijacked by novelty records from the likes of Mr Blobby (1993) and Bob the Builder (2000). In fact, novelty records seem to make it about once a decade and have done since the charts began (e.g. “There's No-One Quite Like Grandma" in 1980, Benny Hill in 1971, and Rolf Harris in 1969). The Spice Girls managed three in a row during the 90s, as did the Beatles in the 60s, but apart from those two, Cliff (3 times), and Band Aid (3 times), it has always been a mixed bag.
The more common complaint these days is that the coveted number one spot has been hijacked by reality TV. The victors last year and the year before were also the winners of the X-Factor, and this year’s clear favourite is again the as-yet-unknown X-Factor 2007 champion. The closest competition is from last year’s winner Leona Lewis, but, as the chart below illustrates, traffic to her homepage is well below the level experienced by the X-Factor. She also has the disadvantage that her single has already been out for a few weeks and will therefore be competing with a new release. It’s also interesting to note that the X-Factor has regained the reality TV top spot from Strictly Come Dancing after a week behind.
One potential challenge to X-Factor’s dominance is a favourite from the past making a comeback, something that has been possible since all downloads, rather than just new release singles, became eligible for chart inclusion. There was a campaign last year to take the The Pogues’s “Fairytail of New York” to the top spot, and the alternative favourite (aka The Christmas Song It’s OK To Like) is the highest placed old song this week, at number 12. Using our new fast moving search terms tool we can see that the second and third fastest moving terms sending traffic to the Music category last week were ‘last christmas lyrics’ and ‘fairytale of new york lyrics’, with the former the second highest placed old song on the charts this week.
That both of these searches include the term ‘lyrics’ is not a great surprise. Lyrics sites are extremely popular online, so we created a custom category of the top 10 lyrics sites and charted them over the last 3 years. As you can see, there are seasonal peaks every year around Christmas time. One explanation for this may be the popularity of karaoke at office parties: searches for ‘karaoke’ also peak during the holiday season.
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
Posted to Christmas | Music | Search | TV
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