The results of the much-ballyhooed UK Christmas week singles charts has been revealed and once again the winner of the most recent season of X Factor has taken the prize. Ben Haenow and his single "Something I Need"—a OneRepublic cover—rose to face competition that Billboard had earlier cited would be tougher than usual.
The last episode of X Factor aired on December 14, leaving producers in a hurry to record and release the track in time for the traditional Christmas buying rush. They got the job done and listeners bought up 214,000 downloads of the track. That's the second highest weekly sales number for any song in the UK this year, trailing only Band Aid 30 and its new rendition of "Do You Know They It's Christmas?," which sold 313,000 copies in its first week. Both songs are for charitable causes as the profits from Haenow's single will go to Together for Short Lives.
Just yesterday Billboard had suggested that new metrics might cause a shakeup at the top for this year's singles competition. The Pogues "Fairytale of New York" has always been popular around the holiday season in the UK and not that streaming numbers are considered as part of the qualifications, there was the idea that the punk band might find the top of the charts 25-plus years after the song had been released. It was not to be: "Fairytale" only got to no. 11, with more modern hits such as Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk!" grabbing the no. 2 spot.
Oddly enough, while Haenow was having the year's second-highest singles sales week, Ed Sheeran was having the UK's highest album sales week: His 2014 collection X sold 214,000 copies as well.
