Thursday, December 03, 2009

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Simon Cowell has ruined Christmas for bookies

Oh, boo hoo - Simon Cowell has ruined Christmas for Fred from BetFred, William Hill and their friends. They're talking about stopping running a book on the Christmas number one because The X factor has taken the guesswork out of it. HMV's gambling-entertainment vizier is on hand to mark the occasion:

And Gennaro Castaldo, of retailer HMV, said: "It's almost impossible to be among the best sellers at Christmas these days without either being a product of the X Factor or going on the show to promote your album.

"It gives you access to a huge family audience and we see an instant impact on sales as soon as an artist goes on. The only challenge to total Simon Cowell domination is coming from the equally potent Twilight New Moon franchise, which is driving book, calendar and T-shirt sales."

You've got to love the odds on a Twilight calendar getting to number one in the singles chart, thought.

Interesting that the worry is that Cowell has ruined the gambling at Christmas, and not that he's TOTALLY RUINED CHRISTMAS MUSIC FOREVER. Which you might have thought was more pressing.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now I hate Simon Cowell as much as everyone else - I still highlight the fact that far too many people are satisfied by filling their Saturday nights with programmes containing this grown man shouting verbal abuse at vulnerable young people (and yet somehow less abusive than Twilight's seemingly pro-domestic abuse stance) - but even I have to say there is something quite wrong when newspapers are publishing articles that are essentially "Successful businessman being good at what he does is bad for the exploitation of gamblers" and not seeing the daftness of their statement.

Songplacements said...

Great Post! I don't know if I would go as far as the last comment with the hating him, but very interesting non the less.

David Hitt
Song Placements

rakeback said...

Simon Cowell has all the leverage against American Idol. They know that he is the biggest reason that people tune into watch the show, and without him the ratings would take a tumble. He might just be using all this as a ploy to get more money from the network.

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.