Rage against 'The Climb'

Up until yesterday there were three certainties in life: death, taxes and that the X Factor winner's Christmas single would sail to No. 1 in the UK charts. No more. Rage Against the Machine beat Joe McElderry's The Climb surprisingly easily to the top spot with a death-metal track that proves the power of audience participation.

The show's PR machine kicked into action straight away. Simon Cowell phoned the organisers of the Facebook campaign, Jon and Tracy Morter, and offered congratulations and jobs, which was magnanimous, and Joe McE tweeted his best wishes, despite earlier reservations about the quality of the song he was up against. It seems the Morters' efforts were motivated more by boredom than antipathy. No one could have anticipated the scale of their success, which ironically matches Susan Boyle's rise to stardom on Britain's Got Talent via a YouTube viral buzz.

Now the route to chart success has been demonstrated, no end of online groups will set up next year in an attempt to unseat the X Factor once more. They probably won't succeed, for two reasons:

• A thousand flowers will bloom, and there will be no consensus about which song stands the best chance, especially as many of the promotions will be stealth campaigns by record companies trying to ride in on fans' enthusiasm.

• Forewarned is forearmed. Simon Cowell will have contingency plans for dealing the 'threat' at Christmas 2010. His generosity of spirit to the Morters may be due in part to their demonstration of how to use social networking media very efficiently. They will have given him ideas.

And Joe McElderry will probably have a No. 1 single before long anyway. I wouldn't put it past the SyCo record label putting out another track before the release of the inevitable album.