'Fans unhappy with song for X Factor winner'
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Your support makes all the difference.X Factor fans are already put off by the winner's single, thinking the song a poor choice, a survey found today.
Joe McElderry is the odds-on bookmakers' favourite to win the ITV talent show and be given the opportunity to release his own cover version of Disney teen sensation Miley Cyrus's ballad The Climb.
But a poll for online bingo site 888ladies.com revealed that 66 per cent are unhappy that the X Factor winner - to be crowned this weekend - will release the song as their first track and it will almost inevitably become the Christmas number one.
McElderry, from South Shields, is the 2/5 favourite, according to William Hill, which predicts that £10 million will be bet on the X Factor this year.
The bookmaker has doubled its staff this weekend and expects to take up to 500 bets a minute at the peak.
The X Factor finalists - McElderry, 18, single mother Stacey Solomon, 20, and 25-year-old Essex boy Olly Murs, recorded five potential songs for the winner's single and recorded the video for the chosen song this week, although it has not yet been officially confirmed that the winner will release The Climb.
McElderry is so popular with fans that he has significantly boosted sales for all the tracks he has covered on the show, according to online retailer Amazon.
In the semi-final last week, he performed Open Arms - previously released by Journey and Mariah Carey - as his second song, which prompted sales of the track at the amazon.co.uk's MP3 store to rise by 5,600%.
Sales of songs performed by McElderry on the show in previous weeks - including No Regrets, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me and Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word - also saw a sharp rise.
Amazon said sales rises for his songs were almost double those of second favourite Solomon.
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