Curry the night before, and a roast dinner for lunch. Not a combination you should aim for unless your plans for Sunday afternoon involve sitting on the toilet. That's not all that happened, it just seems like a large part of it when I look back.

I was actually sat on the sofa doing some writing, (working on a Sunday, I'm a trooper), when Twitter alerted me to the fact that Ant and Dec, or rather PJ and Duncan, were steadily climbing the hit parade with their track 'Let's Get Ready To Rhumble'. They were actually climbing up the itunes chart, but that will probably translate into the 'proper' chart next week, as they were probably too late to have an effect on this week's sales. This was obviously as a result of last night's performance of the track on prime time television, and once again proves my point about what I have been saying about the power of the download.

When the rules changed in 2007, allowing legal downloads to count towards total record sales and with that a place in the official chart, it should have been anarchy. We should have had 'Agadoo' at number one followed by 'Orville's Song' at number two. We should have been concentrating on taking the piss. Top Of The Pops had recently finished so we were too late to have to force these people back into the limelight, but we the public could have used our new found powers to subvert. On the other side of the rule and its advantages, we could have had unsigned bands in the charts. It actually happened on at least one occasion, and Christmas 2007 saw the top 40 dominated by cheesy but loved Christmas hits.

In the blog I've just linked to, I reference Phil Collins. This was around the time of the Cadbury advert with the gorilla drumming to 'In The Air Tonight', and the song was downloaded into the charts.

Phil Collins getting into the charts, along with all the Christmas songs, and of course PJ and Duncan this week, is maybe a sign that downloading songs is a fairly anonymous task. This enables us to listen to music on our ipods (other MP3 players are better available), in guilty secrecy. Would you go into a shop and buy 'Let's Get ready To Rhumble'? Probably not.

The best example of the subversive power of downloads, and perhaps the most famous example, is 'Killing In The Name' by Rage Against The Machine getting to Christmas number one in 2009 as a result of a Facebook pressure group aimed at stopping the inevitable X-Factor winner taking the slot. This spawned a copycat idea for a few years following, but suffered from overkill as nobody knew what song would be for the best. 'Surfin' Bird' by The Trashman was the effort from 2010, (by someone who probably didn't even know the song before that episode of Family Guy) but there were others.

At least the public are finally starting to get the hang of this idea now. When I first attempted in 2007 to get 'Fairytale Of New York' to Christmas number one, downloads were a scary new idea and I had trouble getting people to understand. It's nice to be ahead of my time.

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