Apparently there is a race going on between Adele and Lady Gaga regarding who can sell more albums.
Frankly, I think they've both sold loads already. But, given that the artists don't appear content with the ludicrous amounts of success and accolade they have already achieved, even Lady Gaga's fans are now resorting to cheap put-downs about Adele's weight, in the hope that perhaps this will persuade people to buy stuff by the Gaga instead.
This represents an increasingly common trend in pop. Evidently, it is simply not enough just to buy music you like, tell your friends about it, and relentlessly tweet "my wish is that you retweet one of my tweets once you've done that my wish is you follow me and then it's my dream to see you" [real tweet] at the artist in question.
No - there is also a weird sheen of evangelism which runs through pop fandom. You have to persuade other people to buy the right music, to propel this music up the charts.
The famous - and successful - 2009 campaign to get Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to Christmas Number One is very much a case in point.
Sure, it was fun to stick two fingers up at the X Factor, but it would be deluded to believe that this wasn't achieved by a PR campaign every bit as rigorous and cynical as that which supported Joe McElderry.
Granted, it was 'grassroots' rather than corporate, but it was still an act of chart engineering.
And it was also completely reliant on the assumption that people would be willing to buy a piece of music for an arbitrary cause, rather than because they liked the song. (Does anyone actually want to listen to RATM at Christmas? Whatever happened to Shakin' Stevens?)
There were several copycat campaigns last year; in case you've forgotten they were for The Trashmen's Surfin' Bird, which reached Number Three, and a new recording of John Cage's composition 4'33'', which made it to Number 21.
This year, expect to be deluged with requests to download Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, a song so famous you probably either already own it in some form or don't particularly like it.
The thing is, I'd always had the impression that the charts were meant to represent what music people actually wanted to buy and listen to. They've never been a measure of musical quality, I don't think, unless you consider Celine Dion to be better than Frank Sinatra or Kissin, on the basis that she's sold more records. But until recently, it has been possible to distinguish the issue of popular musical taste from that of how successful different releases' marketing campaigns are.
At least people who buy the X Factor single presumably want to listen to the song.
Anyone who downloads the Nirvana song this Christmas will do so either because they are gormless enough to fall victim to the marketing campaign, or because they have some spurious belief that doing so will make Simon Cowell cry.
And specifically choosing to force a song by Nirvana, a band who were made profoundly uncomfortable by mainstream success, up the charts only adds to the utter lunacy of the whole thing.
There's a reason 'alternative' music doesn't often make it to the mainstream. It's 'alternative'. As a protest campaign, demonstrating the huge commercial potential of Nirvana is not really on topic. But perhaps I am being naïve in expecting protests to be focused or coherent.
Anyway - has this become a yearly tradition? As well as the Christmas Number 1, are we also always going to have the Christmas Unfocused Attempt at Subverting the Music Industry?
I'm really not conviced on the merits of this. Yes, it's annoying that the X Factor dominates the charts at Christmas every year. But if the alternative to this demonstrates that expressions of non-conformism and alienation can in fact be made both more popular and more mainstream than nice young men who smile a lot then frankly we are all doomed.
All I want for Christmas is this: I want you to buy one piece of music over the Christmas week, but I want it to be a piece of music that you actually want to own and listen to. If it is by whoever wins X Factor, that's fine; I just probably won't send you a present. But if it's Smells Like Teen Spirit, you don't even get a card.