James Arthur is on course to become the 1st X-Factor contestant to reach 1 million followers while still in the competition.

Averaging a whopping 9.5k followers a day, tripling on X-Factor live show days, James Arthur has amassed a huge twitter following.

There are at any given time an estimated 4 tweets per second mentioning James Arthur, he has double the twitter followers as fellow finalist Jahmene Douglas, and 8 times that of the peoples choice Christopher Maloney.

You can follow James Arthur here https://twitter.com/JamesArthur23

You wait and see what percentage of those followers are prepared to buy his album. History tells us that sales will constitute only a fraction of the number of twitter followers. Matt Cardle had an army of followers on twitter and facebook and the busiest appreciation thread of all time but sold 285k for his first album. That year's runner-up, Rebecca Ferguson was virtually invisible in social media terms and yet, and with a fraction of the promotion, managed to sell 600k (double platinum).

There are many factors to such matters.
But this isn't about Matt Cardle that was a few years ago, Twitter in particular is a lot more populated & active today than it was then.

It reflects a younger fanbase. The X Factor's voting history shows that the significance of teen-appeal in terms of voting is minimal and tends to be wildly overestimated yearly. That's not to say that James can't win. I think he may but to win he will need a large proportion of the crucial 30+ vote and relatively few of those will be following their favourite acts on twitter.

Well if you say 45+ maybe i can agree. But 30+ there are millions of people in this age bracket on twitter.

James fan but hate twitter so wont be helping get the million.

Rebecca is heavily supported by Radio 2....and it is the biggest station in terms of audience shares in the UK.

She's getting the biggest promo anyone could hope for on adult contemporary stations...and to an audience of traditional album buyers. She also performed on XF and BGT....not sure how you can claim she's had the fraction of the promo. Airplay is the best and most valuable promo an artist can hope for....she has that.

You're right that twitter means nothing in terms of record sales....it's radio that you need on side, if they spin every record you release...you'll sell albums. Out of the three...James has the most potential to be embraced by radio.

This news would be better off here...

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1724630

You know how people are sick of hearing about Christopher on this forum, well I am saying the same for James.

This seems incredibly unlikely.

Don't read the thread then.

plus he's already being embraced by other artists

Oh for the love of jesus..do you not know what a forum is?