At this time of year, as someone who runs a music website that finds itself at the cutting edge of things, I’m asked “Who’s the next big thing?” by the folks at the Brit Awards’ critics’ choice and BBC’s Sound Of... poll.

And it’s the word “big” that kerjangles with me every time. I mean, how big is big nowadays? Fleetwood Mac and Abba-sized? Or a more meaningful, still important 25 years on PiL and Kate Bush “big”? In music, something that is big in the mainstream is rarely clever, aurally beautiful or particularly exciting (see Dido, Dion, Bublé et al). So, every year — amid my dissipating fury in regard to Christmas lights going up on Oxford Street in October — I feel rubbed the wrong way because I, like most music fans turned journalists, have little inclination to understand what it takes to discover and champion music so bland that 2m people impulse-purchase a copy of an album in Tesco for £4.67.

Meanwhile, the permatanned man who does specialise in predicting this sort of thing, Simon Cowell, is busy on the tellybox creating an advertainment show. Would it therefore be remiss of me not to tip “Jedward” as my ones to watch in 2010? I guess this probably isn’t what the Brits (recent winners: Adele, Florence and the Machine) or the BBC (Little Boots, Adele, Mika) want suggested by the likes of me.

Perhaps these tipping polls, which become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, are asking the wrong question, because the answer they provide, year after year, is that the acts who will be huge in the coming 12 months are those who have major-label funds. It’s a high-risk business breaking bands, and even being on these lists doesn’t assure you a future — for every Franz Ferdinand or Joss Stone, there’s an Air Traffic or a Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong.

Yet labels have found that a strategic and sustained PR and marketing campaign trumps a journalist’s resources to search for and rally support around any particular act. Clearly, the time and money invested in getting artists on these lists is cash well spent, as the lucky few who do make it enter into a perpetual loop of media coverage, brand partnerships and the best festival slots, which beget more media coverage and an even bigger audience.

Like those X Factor auditionees, however, not all acts get the time to hone their craft to make the most of their Warholian 15 minutes of fame, which is why those early Jools Holland performances are often an amateurish letdown — unless, of course, you've changed your moniker à la Kaiser Chiefs (Parva) or my tip for 2010, Free Energy (Hockey Night).

Similarly, there’s something wrong with the X Factor formula: 99.9% of contestants and the bulk of previous winners can be found languishing in obscurity. The quick-fix-for-all prize of “instant fame” — and all the tabloid-hell trappings that come with it — doesn’t really attract the wealth of talent that makes for the “big” and prolonged successes the music industry needs.

Perhaps the music world needs to be inverted: just imagine what the quality of the contestants would be like if the X Factor prize was a month in the studio with Brian Eno and a well-funded release on Rough Trade.

Sean Adams is editor of drownedinsound.com

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